Who Picks Our Apples?
 

Who Picks our Apples?

An Introduction to an Ongoing Series of the Stories of Local, Immigrant Farm Workers and Their Advocates

By Mary Ann

 

      For those of you who know Harvest Local Foods, you have read many of our "farmer stories" in the weekly e-newsletter. Those stories originate in our commitment to visit all of the farmers who supply our business; we want to learn about their histories and growing practices. Pam, HLF staff and I have made many visits over the past six years and these have been, or will be chronicled, but, we had never asked our farmers about who helps them with the farm work. From what we could see, all these small Pennsylvania farms (100 acres or less) employed family members or friends to help them. With my first visit to a 300 acre New Jersey farm from which we were buying produce through a new Philadelphia-based local foods distributor, I got a mind-opening shock.

       It was November of 2010 when I visited four large farms in NJ. On the first three farms, production had almost halted for the season and I didn't see any workers in the fields. On the fourth farm, with dusk falling, the farmer drove me around for a tour (on the PA farms, we get walking tours). I saw scores of Latino workers harvesting leeks with short, machete-type tools. We stopped at one of the fields. The farmer yelled in Spanish to one of the workers who ran over to the truck with a bunch of leeks that he had hastily cut and tied up, at the farmer's demand. The farmer accepted the leeks without any acknowledgement of the farm worker. As I witnessed this exchange, something collapsed in my heart. Pam and I have worked for six years to build a sustainable business, but if we were selling these leeks, cut by farm workers who toil long hours without respect from their bosses, I wondered if we, in good conscience, could call Harvest Local Foods sustainable.

      In the ensuing months, Pam and I discussed these concerns and what actions we could take to address them. We believe that you, our customers, are also becoming increasingly educated about the whole food system and its injustices, so it's only natural that we consider the situation of "our" farm workers. After all, would our business even be possible without the skillful work of the harvesters? It's a well-documented fact that Americans do not have the skills, desire, patience, perseverance, nor the physical stamina to do the rigorous, back-breaking work of harvesting fruits and vegetables. So how would we get those crisp, mouth-watering apples that sweeten the dark winter months if no one was willing to climb up a slippery ladder on a cold November day to pluck them, one-by-one from the branches? And how could we call our business sustainable if the folks doing these jobs do so for unfair pay and with disrespecting bosses or supervisors?

      In the late summer of 2011, almost a year after that "awakening day," Harvest Local Foods hosted a meeting of most of the major local foods buyers in the Philadelphia area, to begin a conversation about farm workers and our "sustainable" businesses. The group agreed that this is a critical issue for us and we need to start by educating ourselves about issues and challenges that both farm workers and farmers face. Our goal is to be able to assure our customers that the products we sell are grown and harvested by people who are treated with dignity and whose full rights are respected. It is a long-term vision that we can only address step by step. We invite you to look in future e-newsletters for continuing stories of our esteemed farmers and, for the first time, farm worker stories; for invitations to educational events, a possible customer survey and updates on our progress.

 

 

 

 
13 September 2012 at 8:05pm   |  Share
 
 
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