Today, broccoli, strawberries, and lettuce have replaced them. Finally, while 61,000 acres of the county’s farmland devoted to field crops in 1960 has diminished to 20,000, fruit and vegetable acreage expanded from 40,000 to nearly 90,000 acres. Although an array of 75 different commodities occupy the valley’s fruit and vegetable acreage, only a handful are actually responsible for the transformation of local agriculture. These crops are broccoli, strawberry, lettuce, cauliflower, wine grapes, and celery. In 1992 they yielded 79 percent of the county’s fruit and vegetable value and 54 percent of the county’s total farm value. Together they occupy 62,763 acresó56 percentó of the county’s cropland and engage nearly 80 percent of all the farm labor employed in the county . These six principal fruit and vegetable crops, consequently, determine and define the valley’s farm labor market. Among other things, their acreage and production requirements establish the number of workers that will be needed at any given moment and clearly demarcate when and for how long farm workers will be employed. Following, we describe each of these crops in an effort to assess the employment patterns and peculiarities of the valley. Occupying 24,757 acres of the valley’s prime farmland and yielding a gross value of $68,588,744, broccoli became Santa Barbara’s number one value crop in 1992 , deposing strawberries which had enjoyed the top ranking since at least 1987. Although broccoli is produced for both fresh produce and frozen vegetable markets, raspberry plant pot local growers strive to supply the former which offers a premium price for premium products.

The green vegetable has thrived because of changing dietary practices of the American consumer; acreage, in fact, has doubled since 1975. Varietal and farming improvements, moreover, have boosted yields from 4,300 pounds per acre in 1979 to nearly 15,000 in 1989 . A result of both acreage expansion and improved yields is that broccoli labor requirements have increased considerably. Experts report that broccoli farming consumes some 80 man-hours per acre , one-half of them for harvest activities alone. Because it is possible to farm broccoli year-round in the Santa Maria Valley and because plantings are strategically staggered, harvest is almost continuous. Specialized broccoli harvesters, consequently, enjoy a reliable but intermittent source of employment. Although machines typically accompany harvesters in the field, the reaping of the crop continues to be done by hand. This is essential to maintain a high-quality product. The purpose of the machines is actually to enable field packing rather than to ease or replace harvest labor. We estimate that currently Santa Maria broccoli acreage requires nearly 2 million man hours to sow, till, harvest and pack; occupying, in varying degrees, some 2,000 individual workers in the course of the year. This labor requirement is approximately 25 percent greater than in 1990, when broccoli acreage was smaller. Based on field observations, we also estimate that, at most, one-fifth of these workers enjoy regular year-round employment, while three-fifths enjoy regular but intermittent employment. The remaining one-fifth are employed only occasionally to perform odd, seasonal and sporadic part-time jobs such as hoeing and weeding. Given its production and employment characteristics, broccoli relies heavily on a local, stabilized, and skilled labor force which has settled permanently in the area.

Even the sporadic, odd, part-time jobs are filled by locals, usually by family of regular employees. In effect, a recent review of Santa Maria broccoli crews did not reveal a single nonresident seasonal migrant. From 1985 to 1991 strawberries were the uncontested top-value farm commodity of Santa Barbara County. Its current spread of 5,280 acres is located entirely in the Santa Maria Valley. In both 1989 and 1991 strawberry value surpassed the $80 million mark, accounting for nearly 18 percent of the county’s total farm value extracted from only 4 percent of the farmland. Although strawberry acreage increased in 1992, crop value fell precipitously from $82.3 to $56.7 million owing to a dreadful combination of low market prices and poor climatic conditions which affected both crop quality and yields . Much of the acreage currently devoted to strawberries is converted irrigated pasture which not long ago supplied a now-defunct dairy industry. County records indicate that strawberry acreage never exceeded 1000 acres before 1982. Since then, it has become the county’s boom crop and the county’s principal agricultural employer. Farming and varietal improvements have increased crop yields from under 10 to over 30 tons per acre. Moreover, the introduction of day-neutral varieties, such as Selva, are extending the fruit-bearing season from 5 to 9 months of the year. And to top it all, the recent development of genetically altered varieties promises to offer a frost-resistant strawberry plant capable of producing fruit year-round. Although cutting-edge science and technology have in a short time transformed strawberry farming, the delicate fruit continues to be harvested by hand, consuming an inordinate amount of labor. Wilkie and Mamer report 1,612 man-hours/acre used by Ventura County farms to produce strawberries . Given the proximity of the two locations, it is safe to assume that Santa Maria strawberry farms have similar labor needs. Nonetheless, calculations based on field observations conducted in Santa Maria reveal that as many as 2,150 man hours/acre may be necessary . Local growers, in effect, judge they need 1.5 to 2 full time workers per strawberry acre throughout the five-month peak harvest season. This calculation elicits a range of 1,200-1,600 man-hours/acre for harvest activities alone. Using the more conservative figure proposed by Wilkie and Mamer, we estimate that Santa Maria strawberry farms annually consume some 8.5 million man-hours; that’s more than all Santa Maria vegetable acreage combined. Considering that most strawberry acreage is relatively recent, most of the employment it has occasioned in the Santa Maria Valley represents a myriad of new farm jobs.

Strawberries are hand planted from late October to early December, after a meticulous and costly soil preparation, and hand-harvested from as early as February to as late as October. The peak harvest, however, occurs from March/April through July/August. Most of the spring-to-early summer yield supplies domestic and foreign fresh-produce markets but, as the summer sets in, a larger proportion of the harvest is destined to local processing plants. Employment is, therefore, highly seasonal. The 8.5 million man-hours devoured by local strawberries would represent nearly 4,000 full-time jobs if employment were distributed evenly throughout the year. In actuality Santa Maria strawberry farms employ as many as 10,000 individual workers, many of them intermittently, during a four-to-five month period and some during even shorter periods of time. Based on field observations, blueberry production we estimate that about one-tenth of the work force enjoys nearly year-round employment while the remaining nine-tenths are seasonal employees. A local fifty-eight acre strawberry farm, for example, maintains a permanent skeleton crew of some ten full-time workers, keeps on standby a similar number of regular employees who enjoy year-round occasional jobs, and hires as many as one hundred seasonal harvesters in agood production year. The hiring of seasonal harvesters builds up quickly following the opening of the season, peaks in June, and gradually tapers soon afterwards . The pronounced fluctuation of the county’s 1990 farm employment curve is, in great measure, accentuated by strawberry’s seasonality. Considering their production and employment circumstances, Santa Maria strawberry farms rely heavily on non-resident migrant workers who settle in the valley only while harvest activities are underway. Many expert pickers, moreover, only stay during the peak, high yielding periods when good earnings can be obtained through piece-rate wages, but quickly move on to other berry-producing locations in California and Oregon when yields begin to fall. Strawberry crew surveys conducted in Aprilójust when the 1993 harvest season was beginning to unfold in the aforementioned fifty-eight acre farmórevealed that only 19 of 78 employees, 24 percent, were local permanent residents; while the remaining 76 percent were migrants, most of them with a permanent home base deep in the interior of rural Mexico. Further scrutiny of the 59 migrants, moreover, revealed that 26 of them, 44 percent, were regular return migrants who had been employed by Santa Maria berry farms during the past three seasons; while the remaining 56 percent where there for the first time. Despite strawberry farming’s unquestionable dependance upon migrant, sojourn labor, the remarkable proliferation of strawberry plantations also favored, in some measure, the settlement of former migrant farm workers. For instance, some one thousand regular, stable jobs have been created for those who work the strawberry harvest as well as the winter planting activities. Other settled strawberry pickers obtain local off-season jobs in other crops, a common practice being, for example, to become employed in the wine grape harvest during the autumn and tending vineyards in the winter. Another circumstance contributing to the settlement of strawberry workers in the Santa Maria Valley was the establishment of special sharecropping arrangements with local growers. This practice was subsequently banned by a State Supreme Court ruling in 1989 but only after a considerable number of immigrant families had settled in the area. All in all, assuming that our 1993 harvest crew samples are accurate, nearly one-fourth of the valley’s 10,000-strong strawberry labor force has settled permanently in the Santa Maria Valley. Generating $45 million in 1992, head and leaf lettuce is Santa Barbara County’s third value crop .

After experiencing an impressive bonanza in the 1960s, acreage has remained relatively stable since the mid 1970s , at least until recently when it rebounded by adding 34 percent more acreage between 1989 and 1992. Although head lettuce accounts for most of the lettuce acreage and value, the leaf variety seems to be making significant headway. Like broccoli, lettuce enjoys a vigorous consumer demand as a staple for salads stocked by fresh produce markets and as an indispensable garnish used by most fast-food outlets. Lettuce requires 143.8 man-hours per acre to produce, 96 of them just to harvest . Like other important vegetable crops, farming and varietal improvements have increased lettuce yields significantly while labor use has remained largely unchanged . Lettuce is, therefore, another heavy consumer of labor. Based on available man-hour/acre estimates, Santa Maria lettuce growers require 1.7 million man-hours to plant, cultivate, harvest and field pack, two-thirds of which is used to execute the last two tasks alone. Lettuce, like other vegetable crops, has an extended but well-defined harvest season. In the Santa Maria Valley plantings are staggered from January through the summer and, as a result, lettuce is harvested continuously from early spring to late autumn. Harvest activities, in effect, begin in March, build up to a peak in May through September, and subsequently slow down to close in November. Planting, thinning, and weeding crews are regularly but intermittently employed from January to August, while specialized lettuce harvest crews are employed from March through November. A defining property of the lettuce industry in California is that it has come to be almost entirely monopolized by a handful of large corporations such as, for example, Bruce Church and Dole . These corporations own and/or manage lettuce production sites throughout California and Arizona with the specific purpose of supplying nationwide markets year-round. Coastal sites, like Santa Maria, are designed to supply summer demand while interior sites, like Imperial Valley, are designed to satisfy winter markets. Lettuce companies have also established a highly specialized harvest labor force, lechugueros, that moves about the extended lettuce geography reaping and packing the vegetable. Although some lechugueros have settled permanently in the Santa Maria Valley, most maintain a home base in the United States-Mexico border area , near winter employment sites and in communities where the cost of living, especially housing, is comparatively more affordable. Overall, Santa Maria lettuce farms employ some 1,500 workers during a large part of the year. About one-third are locals who belong to planting-thinning-weeding crews, as well as machine operators and irrigators. The remaining workers, about one thousand, are lechuguero migrants from the border area who remain in the valley only while the lettuce harvest is underway but who enjoy near year-round employment by moving from one company production site to another. Lettuce harvest crew surveys conducted in 1993 confirmed that few local residents were included in them and that most of the lechuguero migrants, 90 percent, had been employed by the same employer during, at least, the past three years.