In Florida Groves, Cheap Labor Means Machines.
Facing increased competition, alarmed Florida orange growers have been turning to labor-saving technology.
By Eduardo Porter.
[New York Times: Business] March 22, 2004
IMMOKALEE, Fla. — Chugging down a row of trees, the pair of canopy shakers in Paul Meador's orange grove here seem like a cross between a bulldozer and a hairbrush, their hungry steel bristles working through the tree crowns as if untangling colossal heads of hair.
In under 15 minutes, the machines shake loose 36,000 pounds of oranges from 100 trees, catch the fruit and drop it into a large storage car. "This would have taken four pickers all day long," Mr. Meador said.
Canopy shakers are still an unusual sight in Florida's orange groves. Most of the crop is harvested by hand, mainly by illegal Mexican immigrants. Nylon sacks slung across their backs, perched atop 16-foot ladders, they pluck oranges at a rate of 70 to 90 cents per 90-pound box, or less than $75 a day.
But as globalization creeps into the groves, it is threatening to displace the workers. Facing increased competition from Brazil and a glut of oranges on world markets, alarmed growers here have been turning to labor-saving technology as their best hope for survival.
"The Florida industry has to reduce costs to stay in business," said Everett Loukonen, agribusiness manager for the Barron Collier Company, which uses shakers to harvest about half of the 40.5 million pounds of oranges reaped annually from its 10,000 acres in southwestern Florida. "Mechanical harvesting is the only available way to do that today."
Global competition is pressing American farmers on many fronts. American raisins are facing competition from Chile and Turkey. For fresh tomatoes, the challenge comes from Mexico. China, whose Fuji apples have displaced Washington's Golden Delicious from most Asian markets — and whose apple juice has swamped the United States — is cutting into American farmers' markets for garlic, broccoli and a host of other crops.
So even while President Bush advances a plan to invite legal guest workers into American fields, farmers for the first time in a generation are working to replace hand laborers with machines.
"The rest of the world hand-picks everything, but their wage rates are a fraction of ours," said Galen Brown, who led the mechanical harvesting program at the Florida Department of Citrus until his retirement last year. Lee Simpson, a raisin grape grower in California's San Joaquin Valley, is more blunt. "The cheap labor," he said, "isn't cheap enough."
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