3 Farms Drop Out of State Program : Oxnard: The decision to withdraw from a $2-million crop-picking training effort affects nearly three-fourths of 800 targeted workers.

Three Oxnard vegetable farms that were scheduled to train nearly 600 workers to pick crops under a controversial $2-million state contract have dropped out of the program, prompting a review by the state, officials said this week.

The trainees at Rio Farms, San Miguel Produce and Deardorff-Jackson Co. represented about three-fourths of the 800 laborers the Ventura County Agricultural Assn. had promised to train under a contract approved in August amid criticism that it is a subsidy for farmers.

Withdrawal of the three farms “casts a light on the whole project,” said James Bratt, executive director of the state Employment Training Panel. “It raises questions about whether they needed trainees in the first place. Do they still have trainees who can be trained?”

Bratt said the Ventura contract, though approved by the state employment panel two months ago, has not yet been cleared by the panel’s attorney and signed by the board chairman. Nor is final approval expected today at the panel’s monthly meeting, he said, because of technical changes that still need to be made in the agreement.

A spokesman for the Ventura agricultural association said the three dropouts will not kill the training program. “We’re going to bring in some additional companies,” said Robert Roy, president of the 110-member group.

Training is already under way at Underwood Ranches in Somis and Do Right’s Plant Growers in Camarillo, where together 65 laborers are expected to participate over the next 18 months, Roy said.

The Ventura farm association contract pledges to “cross-train” 800 farm workers--principally field hands--so they can harvest or tend a variety of crops, enabling them to work year-round.

But one critic, the migrant labor specialist for the state Employment Development Department, has described the contract as a form of “farmer welfare” that allows growers to charge the state for 60 hours of training per crop when it actually takes only a few minutes or hours to learn each skill.

In leaving the program, officials at San Miguel Produce and Deardorff-Jackson were not critical of it in concept. But they said they could train only a fraction of the workers promised in the contract.

Rio Farms also recently told state inspectors that it did not have enough workers to train, and therefore could not meet contract requirements, state officials said. Rio Farms officials could not be reached for comment.

The state contract calls for San Miguel Produce to train 237 workers over 18 months, more than any of the seven companies that originally agreed to participate. But company Vice President Bob Brooks said San Miguel employs fewer than 100 workers.

“We wouldn’t have that many people to put through the program, or anything close to it,” Brooks said. “There was a time thing, so we went ahead and signed up. . . . But when we started to put the numbers to it, it just didn’t pan out.”

Also, Brooks said he had trouble finding workers who wanted to participate in the training. Most workers are paid at a so-called piece rate, where their income increases with their productivity. During training, they would make far less money because they would be harvesting a new crop and working slower than usual, he said.

Brooks said another problem was that workers can make much more money harvesting certain crops and don’t want to be trained to pick a crop that results in a smaller paycheck.

“With our own company, celery crews might make a higher piece rate than crews that harvest broccoli. It’s pretty hard to cross-train those two crews,” he said.

Similar problems seemed likely to crop up at Deardorff-Jackson, which also primarily grows vegetables harvested during the winter and spring, Personnel Director Maria Bello said.

Since there is little work at the farm during the summer off-season, workers would not be able to shift from a winter crop to a summer one for year-round employment, she said. The number of workers at the farm drops from about 300 during peak months to about 50 in summer, she said.

The state training contracts sounded good, Bello said, but “when we go down to the nitty-gritty, we couldn’t really place full-time employees and make it work.”

Roy, the agricultural association president, said the withdrawal of three vegetable producers might not hurt because it will allow his association to replace growers who mostly raise winter crops with employers who offer a better chance of stable income.

For example, a small plant nursery has been recruited to accept some of the trainees that would have gone to the vegetable farms, he said. “When you’re dealing with row-crop operations, you may have very high turnover,” Roy said.

Of the remaining companies, only Bob Jones Ranch, a strawberry grower, and Underwood Ranches, which grows miniature vegetables and has low employee turnover, are traditional row-crop farmers, Roy said.

One participant, Egg City in Moorpark, has a 12-month staff and is not subject to seasonal production peaks, he said.

Under the original contract, state training funds were to be distributed this way: San Miguel Produce, $394,485 to train 237 workers to harvest, thin and transplant vegetables; Rio Farms, $217,000 to train 181 workers to pick, weed and transplant vegetables and to operate equipment; and Deardorff-Jackson, $219,950 to train 167 workers to harvest and transplant cauliflower and strawberries and to operate equipment.

Funding to farmers still in the program is: Egg City, $105,600 to train 75 workers in several egg-processing skills; Underwood Ranches, $104,550 to train 45 workers to harvest and thin vegetables; Bob Jones Ranch, $75,990 to train 75 workers to irrigate, weed and transplant strawberries and operate equipment; Do Right’s Plant Growers, $61,200 to train 20 nursery workers.

More than one-fourth of the contract--about $600,000--is to pay for 80 hours of English instruction for all 800 trainees, according to the contract. Another $207,825 will be paid to administer the contract: $69,175 to the agricultural association and $138,650 to consultant Steve Myers and Associates of Oxnard.

BACKGROUND

Created in 1983 to train or retrain workers displaced by technological change, the part-time state Employment Training Panel is funded by company unemployment contributions. It has awarded $545 million in contracts over the past six years and is expected to approve another $160 million this year. The $2-million contract to the Ventura County Agricultural Assn. in August is the panel’s second for local training of farm workers in 14 months. Camarillo-based Boskovich Farms received a $2.7-million contract to train laborers in July, 1989.