October 7, 2006

Organics Increase Demand for "Mano de Obra"

By Liz Fox
Special to the Neighborhood Newswire

One morning in 1979 Phil Coturri needed an extra hand at his fledgling vineyard management company. He did the usual, and hired a worker's uncle who’d recently crossed the U.S.-Mexico border.   "It was just meeting a day laborer at a Seven-Eleven," Coturri said. "And the Santoyos have been with me ever since."  The new worker was Tiburcio Santoyo.  Soon after, Tiburcio’s brothers Arcadio and Victor and sons Miguel and Alberto came to work for Coturri.

The straight-shooting employer admits he's part of the immigration problem: most of his 20 full-time and 25 seasonal workers first crossed the border illegally. Many have since become U.S. citizens, but hiring illegal farm workers is the norm in California.  Researchers estimate that 75 percent of the state’s farmhands live and work in California illegally.

Because Coturri’s operation is organic, he needs more workers than a conventional farm manager.  Without chemicals, Coturri and his employees pit bug against vine-destructive bug, low-growing clovers against thorny weeds, and mechanically remove biological invaders. In the end, organics translate into more “mano de obra,” or hand labor, by California’s farm workers, 99 percent of whom come from Mexico.

With such a dependence on foreign labor, California agricultural employers and workers alike could feel the pinch if and when the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate finally reconcile two versions of immigration reform bills, both of which would limit who could work in the state’s fields.

That makes Coturri worry. “We can’t survive without (immigrants),” he said. The general public and politicians “are going to have to come to grips with this.”  Coturri credits Mexican farm workers with helping him shun chemical pesticides, herbicides and fungicides – save for an organic-approved sulfur.

Workers like Tiburcio’s son Miguel, who first picked grapes 1981 when he was 17 years-old, displayed an agility with vines and meticulous attention to detail that Coturri said he can’t find in white workers.  Most importantly, "you have to have a passion for growing things, and for the most part these (Mexican) people do," said Coturri, who started working in his father's conventional vineyard when he was 14 years-old.

Miguel Santoyo, now foreman, oversees the jobs he used to do:  grafting, weeding, tilling, spading, planting cover crops that return nitrogen to the soil, mowing, spreading compost, pruning, training and tying vines to trellises, and landscaping to manage drainage and erosion.  Every day he carefully tracks who did what on each square inch of land to fulfill California Certified Organic Farmers' requirements.

"I couldn't exist without him," Coturri said.

Across Sonoma County, which Coturri dubs "ground zero” of the organic movement, the number of new farmhand jobs mirrors the industry’s growth.
From 2001 to 2005 the County’s farm worker employment jumped by 64 percent, from 1,180 to 1,840 jobs, according to federal labor data. Likewise, the number of registered organic vineyards increased by 63 percent during the past seven years, from 16 in 1999 to 26 today, according to County agriculture data.  
 
"Common sense would tell me that there probably is a connection there," said Stefan Parnay, Sonoma County Chief Deputy Agriculture Commissioner.  In general, the number of organically-farmed acres he regulates grew by more than 50 percent between 2001 and 2004.

When new workers arrive, most from conventional avocado farms in Michoacan, Mexico, "they don't know the difference between organic and non-organic," Santoyo said. "What they want is to work."

But they welcome the cleaner working environment, as did Santoyo himself, he said. Santoyo doesn't worry that employees will misread pesticide labels or expose their families to their chemical-laden clothes, he said.

 For Coturri, it's a no-brainer. "My guys, we're touching these plants constantly," he said, sinking into cumulus cloud-like mounds of freshly spaded soil between rows of trellis-woven vines. "Who wants to (touch) something that's chemically treated?"

But the cleaner environment for workers costs more because of their extra labor, which accounts for an annual $670 per acre - or 37.5 percent – cost increase over conventional wine-grape production, according to a UC Berkeley study.

Coturri turns a profit, though, by maintaining an expansive clientele that pays a premium for the organic label, and by spreading his fixed costs over 400 acres.

But a few miles away on a one-acre plot, Julie Belott's wine grapes simply wouldn't exist without the aid of granular fertilizer, the herbicide Roundup and fungicide she applies while wearing a protective moon suit. A real estate consultant by day, she alone spends an hour and a half each evening tending her 500-plant vineyard.

Even at $28 dollars a bottle, her yearly 5,000 cases of wine usually don’t turn a profit, she said.   And in 2005, she nearly lost her entire crop to mold. "Because I've had such a problem," she said, standing gingerly so as not to touch the recently applied fungicide that smelled of an old-school photography darkroom, "I couldn't chance not having a harvest this year."

She's tried organic solutions, but nothing proved as reliable as conventional techniques, she said.  The organic fungicide she used last year caused her grapes to harden, and she lost yield at harvest.   Turkey-manure fertilizer was too much work to spread, and too expensive to outsource.  Belott also found mowing and managing a cover crop too laborious, and tilling the rocky soil unimaginable.  "From a time-management (perspective), it made more sense to spray it and be done with it," she said.

As it is, even with chemicals, "working with the suckers, tying, checking plants - by the time I go through the vineyard, it's time to spray again," she said. "(Grape farming is) just a lot of work."