Mackensy Lunsford

mlunsford@citizen-times.com

DANA - Between a fungal disease that sounds like a Disney villain and farmers having their labor pool looted, apple growing isn't quite the idyllic pursuit it seems at first blush.

"It's kind of a cutthroat business," said Don Ward, owner of T&D Orchards, bouncing down the mountain to Polk County in a truck full of apples.

Those apples were picked in Dana, a quiet Western North Carolina town, with a small post office, a few larger churches, and a Mexican mercado to supply the day laborers. It's the heart of apple country, filled with picturesque and rolling orchards, Sugarloaf Mountain rising in the distance.

It's a peaceful scene that belies the worry the men who own these fields feel. Growers like Ward have numerous challenges: disease, weather and pests. But no challenge seems more dire than the labor shortage, with not enough workers and a crop that's ripening at least a week or two ahead of schedule this year.

Ward and his cousin Tony Hill have enough labor to go around — about 45 pickers between them, the majority from Mexico. Most are paid about $15-16 per bin, or between $8-10 an hour when they’re spot-picking apples.

But other farmers are coming up short when it comes to finding help.

"It's definitely a panic situation," Ward said. "It just gets worse every year."

The reasons are many and include a crackdown on illegal immigration, one Ward figures is tied to the H-2A visa program, a government effort to provide labor-strapped farmers with legal foreign workers.

“The U.S. does what they need to do,” he said. “Most of the Hispanics I know try to do it proper.”

But about 2-3 years ago, he said, “The law enforcement agents with the ICE agency were cracking down on illegals. If I had to make a wild guess I’d say it was related to H-2A.”

While Ward and the growers he works directly with vet their crews, not all farmers do. But using illegal workers isn’t an act of defiance, he said.

"Unfortunately, it's either use them or lose their crop," he said. "They're between a rock and a hard place."

Luring workers away

Recent findings by the Center for Migration Studies Demographer Robert Warren also say the population of undocumented immigrants is declining and at its lowest in a decade.

And, since 1980, the legal Mexican-born portion of the U.S. population has grown faster than the population of undocumented Mexican immigrants.

Add to that a trend away from the backbreaking work of farm labor, and farmers are finding that demand for produce is outpacing their ability to bring it to market.

Fewer domestic workers are interested in hard labor these days, Marvin Owings, Jr., county extension director for the Henderson County Center Office, said. A farmer looking for laborers might find some who figure picking apples might be fun. Those are always the first to quit.

"It's not only physically demanding, but you need to have trained pickers," he said. "It's not easy to pick fruit so that it's not bruised."

But the ability to do so is crucial. Bruised apples can turn an $18 bushel of fruit into a $4 bushel of juice fruit.

"You can grow your fruit all year long and put all of this time, energy and money into growing quality fruit, and then have it ruined in a matter of minutes by pickers that will bruise your fruit," Owings said.

Ward has year-round work, and a year-round crew. But he knows two or three farmers with no more than five pickers and fruit broiling to overripe in the late-August sun — 70 acres of it just going to waste. That's if they can even find help.

The best pickers almost always follow the money. Crew leaders are quick to offer a few extra dollars a bin to lure workers away from competing farms. "You get them trained, and they'll jump ship," Ward said. "You'll have 20 one day and then next Monday you'll have 11. Then you have to go recruit."

That means picking crew leaders might call cousins down in Florida, where the growing season is largely over. "Every one of them is kin someway, it seems like," he said, laughing.

But a smaller farmer without year-round help isn’t laughing this year, Ward said. "He's going out to find help, and there's no help to be found.”

Ward and his partners have seven houses between them, where they put up the transient documented workers who follow the harvest from Texas to Florida. After they depart WNC, they'll head to New England.

Some of Ward’s houses are family-oriented, others have a “dorm-type atmosphere,” he said. All are safe and secure, he said. “And that’s the only way you can keep good help.”

Some farmers have a similar set-up, while others have housing like army barracks. “And others don’t have housing at all,” he said.

Many hands make light work

On Tuesday morning, Ward strolled his mentor Wayne Pace's Honeycrisp trees in Dana, shouting a morning greeting to two men — "Amigo!" — their feet visible on spindly ladders, their torsos obscured by trembling branches.

This is Carlos's crew, he noted. "They work hard," he said. "They're steady. And they're careful."

Ward plucked a blush-colored Honeycrisp apple from a nearby tree, twisted it in half with strong hands and bit into the crisp, juicy flesh.

"Agriculture cannot survive without migrant forces coming in to help us," he said, holding up an apple half. "What we're eating now would never make it to the market if we had to go back and rely on Americans to pick them like we did 30 or 40 years ago."

A fourth-generation farmer, Ward said conditions for pickers have historically been awful, with migrant housing like prison camps.

By contrast, he said, the H-2A visa program, a temporary work permit that allows foreign agricultural workers temporary access to the U.S. for seasonal work, creates conditions "like summer camp."

Others might beg to differ. The Coalition of Immokalee Workers, a worker-based human rights organization out of Florida, said in a 2010 piece that the opportunities for abuse of workers under the program were numerous. According to the piece, one U.S. company lured Thai workers with the program, holding them in what amounted to “forced servitude."

But the H-2A program's purpose is to help supply labor to farmers feeling the seasonal pinch, Ward said. "The labor shortage is so bad right now that the government has stepped in and tried to help.”

H-2A employers are responsible for visa and transportation costs, housing and meals, among other expenses. "If it starts raining, you have to furnish them with rain jackets," Ward said. "You furnish them with towels and soap and, if they get sick, you've got to take them to the doctor. They don't do anything for themselves, because they are under your direct supervision."

Accordingly, the costs of H-2A provisions are often prohibitive, especially for smaller growers. "They don't realize it'll break the farmer," Ward said. "An ordinary farmer cannot afford H-2A its present way."

According to Ward, H-2A raises the farmer's cost per apple bin, or approximately 20 bushels, significantly. A bin of pristine Red Delicious apples, for example, can fetch somewhere in the vicinity of $100-$125 on the market. That bin costs $20 to produce but, add H-2A to the mix, and it could cost up to $35.

The problem is that there’s no set system in place for a farmer to know how much the program will cost them. “For right now, the government has so many regulations, most can’t afford to do it and haven’t got the time to do it, anyway,” he said. “To a farmer, time is money.”

A grim picture for growers

With skilled labor, a farmer can pull about 600 bushels of apples from an acre of land, about 150 more using a new method out of Cornell called splintered spindle growing, which trellises trees and ups production. Splintered spindle could go a long way to solving apple growers' money woes, but it's costly to implement — to the tune of about $20,000 an acre, Ward estimated.

That puts it out of the reach of many farmers, especially those who might need the increased production the most.

The picture's particularly grim this year, with a late frost that zapped apple blossoms, followed by drought, high heat and then an overabundance of rain that had tractors stuck fast in the fields. Ward didn't get hit by much hail this year, which can bruise apples and break branches. In Edneyville, it's a different story. Farmers there are stripping the branches of bruised fruit and selling them as cut-rate juice apples.

The weather also opened the door to more disease pressure, including threats from a relatively new fungal pathogen called Glomerella.

"A lot of the times, even the smallest spot on the fruit, only once it's in storage is when the rot begins to show," said Sara Villani, an apple and ornamental plant pathologist for N.C. State who’s based in Mills River.

Glomerella epidemics occur during prolonged warm, wet weather, causing extensive fruit loss in mere weeks. No one's quite sure whether Glomerella can spread to other apples if infected picked fruit is piled in bins. But the plant pathogen causes apples to rot, and money-pinched farmers know all too well what one bad apple can do to a bunch.

Villani, speaking via cell phone from a damp field where she and Owings were taking apple fruit and leaf samples, said with a laugh that the growers all call her "Damn Yankee." But this year, she said Glomerella is the real nemesis for Southern farmers. “It’s not a good one. This one has me stumped.”

“It’s been a disaster,” Ward said. “And we’re also getting a lot of bad root stock from nurseries.”

Diseases, taxes, labor costs, costs of materials, they're all eating farmers alive. "Right now the small farmer is nonexistent," Ward said.

Nodding to his cousin Tony Hill's apple packing plant on the edge of Pace's fruit, Ward said there were 34 such facilities when he was a kid. Now there are maybe five, and houses growing where farms used to be. That's especially the case over the past decade, with land more valuable as real estate than farmland and younger farmers growing apples in their spare time while holding down jobs in the city.

"Apples are important to a lot of people," he said. "Agriculture in Henderson County, it's one of the main incomes to the county."

Henderson County ranks seventh in production among U.S. counties, growing 65 percent of all the apples grown in North Carolina. And unlike many other cash crops like nuts or cherries, apples won't stand up to automated picking. They require a steady, human hand.

"It will be a disaster if something was to happen to our labor force," Ward said. "If we couldn't have our Hispanic friends coming in and working with us, apples would dry up, because you couldn't find no help to pick them."