Farm Worker to Farmer

The bills are piling up. State regulators are bearing down. And the bottom is falling out of the strawberry market, as prices are gutted by a glut of the berries.

It’s times like these that make Oxnard strawberry grower Humberto Candelario wonder why he ever emptied his bank account and maxed out his credit cards to go into business for himself.

But he wouldn’t have it any other way.

The 46-year-old former farm worker is among a growing number of Latinos who are changing the face of American farming.

Even as family farms nationwide have been taken over by giant conglomerates, Latinos by the thousands are rising out of the fields to run their own operations.

Latino farm operators in the United States number nearly 30,000, a 58% increase over a 10-year period.

The trend is the same in rural communities throughout California, where record numbers of field hands are trading the backache of stoop labor for the headaches of farm management. Latinos now make up the fastest-growing segment of the nation’s farming population.

Many are like Candelario, a Mexican immigrant who learned the business from the ground up. He worked the lettuce fields of the Salinas Valley and picked grapes outside Fresno for 10 years, while putting off buying new cars or visiting family in Mexico. He saved $80,000.

With his first child on the way, he leased 35 acres of prime Ventura County farmland in 1990 and hoped for the best.

“I was a little bit nervous about it because in farming you can end up losing everything,” Candelario said.

First-season expenses, for everything from irrigation to fumigation, totaled about $5,000 an acre, a good portion of which he charged on credit cards or borrowed from family members and his former boss.

Revenue was only slightly ahead of that, Candelario recalls; in fact, just enough to put a second crop of strawberries in the ground and hope the market price picked up.

Eventually it did. Now a father of two, Candelario owns a home, drives a new pickup, and has assembled a fleet of machinery to farm 200 acres, half of which he is buying.

“Ever since I started working in the fields, I had an idea that I could go out on my own,” he said. “Farming is one of those things where if you don’t believe in yourself, you’re not going to make it.”

California agriculture has been built by waves of immigrant laborers--Italians and Armenians and Japanese, to name a few--who have risen from the work force to become owners and operators.

From that vantage point, the emergence of this new tide of Latino farmers should come as no surprise.

“It is the logical next step,” said Heather Flower, spokeswoman for the Irvine-based Western Growers Assn., a trade group that has seen its membership rolls swell in recent years with farmers of Mexican descent. “These people have worked the fields from planting to harvesting, and now they want an opportunity to make it on their own.”

What makes this trend different, however, is that it is occurring amid a decades-long decline in the number of farming operations.

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the number of farmers nationwide fell 15% from 1987 to 1997, the most recent statistics available.

The number of Latino growers jumped by more than half during that same period, although they still make up only a fraction of the nation’s 1.9 million operators.

The majority can be found in the Southwest and Sun Belt states: Texas, New Mexico and Florida. However, just as the 2000 Census documented a growing Latino presence in many regions of the country, there have been corresponding increases in Latino-run farms in states such as Arkansas, Georgia, Kansas and Nebraska.

Of the nationwide total, one in six Latino farmers is working the soil in California, where the numbers have shot up 30% over the past decade. Fresno County has the most, with 574. The largest Latino-operated farms are in Kern County, where growers have 220,000 acres in production.

In the lush Salinas Valley, where more than 150 Latino farmers do business, a nonprofit center provides training and business know-how to immigrants interested in making the transition from farm worker to farmer.

The trend is driven in part by a critical mass of immigrants who have gained experience working as farm supervisors and are ready to strike out on their own. It also is pushed by corporate growers who want to support smaller operators to boost the volume of some specialty crops, such as strawberries.

But mostly it is propelled by an up-by-the-bootstraps desire on the part of Latino laborers to work the land, but work it for themselves.

“A lot of the guys I talk to say they may not be making more money, but at least they can set their own hours,” said Daniel Mountjoy, a cultural ecologist with the USDA in Salinas who has studied the emergence of these new family farms. “Those hours may be dawn to dusk, but at least it’s in pursuit of the American dream.”

So it was for Mexican immigrant Francisco Gonsalez. At age 14, he started picking lemons and strawberries near Oxnard. Twenty years later, he had saved enough money--only about $2,000--to try his hand at farming, planting a 6-acre cilantro field on leased land in Ventura County’s Santa Clara Valley.

His first crop in 1991 was small, but few farmers were growing cilantro back then, and profits went through the roof. He poured the money back into the operation, leased more land and waited for the market to work its magic.

Within three years, cilantro sales shot to more than $1 million.

“It’s like when you buy a ticket and hit the Lotto for the first time,” said Gonsalez, 45.

Today, he farms more than 1,000 acres in Ventura County and an additional 2,500 acres in Mexico, harvesting green onions, radishes and dozens of other row crops on both sides of the border.

He also employs about 900 people, including 245 in Ventura County.

Walking through knee-high cilantro in a field outside Santa Paula, Gonsalez explained that his best pickers can earn $20 an hour, and that even the lowest-paid laborers make at least $8.

He said it’s important to him, as a former stoop laborer, to pay workers well and treat them with respect. On cold nights, he’s been known to deliver hot coffee and doughnuts to his irrigators. He said he enjoys walking through the fields, talking to workers in their native Spanish about how the day is going.

Several Latino growers say it’s not that they necessarily treat workers better, but that they are better able to relate to them.

“It’s easier to understand them because I’ve been there before,” Gonsalez said. “I treat them exactly how I would have wanted to be treated.”

On this crew of cilantro cutters, the sentiment favors Gonsalez’s view.

“I think it’s better when the farmers are Mexican because they know how hard the work is,” said 24-year-old Fidel Juarez, trudging through the field with a sharp blade in his back pocket and a stack of boxes.

Gonsalez said that in many ways, his business is just taking off. Most recently, he has started farming blue agave plants in Mexico to be used in manufacturing his own line of Tequila, called Tierra Del Sol.

He’s building a distillery in his home state of Jalisco, and the self-made businessman has gotten his distributor’s license so he can market the liquor himself in the United States.

“I just think if you are a good worker and a good businessman,” he said, “you’re going to do OK.”

That’s not to say that Latino farmers have stumbled upon some kind of agrarian utopia.

Mountjoy, of the USDA, said he found in a recent survey that Latino farmers on average make only half as much money as white farmers because they often lack business experience, technical skills and financial backing.

Latino farmers also are less likely than growers as a whole to own the land they work. Across the state, nearly 60% of the land farmed by Latinos is leased, compared with 47% for growers overall, due in part to continued control of productive fields by pioneer families.

In fact, Latinos historically have scratched out a foothold by working some of the most marginal land, from the slopes of the Santa Maria Valley to the hillsides around Salinas and Watsonville.

Francisco Zaragosa got his start leasing a 150-acre slice of Salinas flatland. He broke ground on 20 acres nearly two decades ago, growing one crop so he could earn money to plant another and expand.

Today he’s still leasing, but farms the entire 150 acres in a variety of row crops. About half the parcel is covered in strawberries. However, the price he can get for them is so low it makes more sense to plow the whole thing under and start on something new.

Zaragosa, a father of three, says he has lost count of the number of times he has had to plow under perfectly healthy produce because the market had bottomed out.

“I haven’t had a good night’s sleep since I was working for somebody else,” Zaragosa said. “But I’m like everyone else--I keep rolling the dice, hoping that the next year is going to be better.”

Unlike huge grain farmers in the Midwest, most small California growers do not have federal subsidies to help them through the tough times.

In fact, more than 150 Latino farmers have joined a lawsuit filed last year accusing the USDA of delaying or denying assistance to Latino ranchers, and contending that it has failed to appropriately investigate discrimination complaints filed by those growers.

Washington, D.C., attorney Phillip Fraas, lead counsel in the case, said hundreds of Latino farmers have faced foreclosure because they have had trouble getting access to credit. The lawsuit seeks $20 billion in damages.

USDA officials declined to comment on the litigation.

The lawsuit is nearly identical to one filed in 1997 against the USDA by 15,000 African American farmers, which the federal government settled in 1999 for a payout that could reach $1 billion.

A similar lawsuit filed on behalf of Native American farmers is pending in U.S. District Court.

The swirl of legal action comes at a time of widespread demographic change within the farming industry.

The number of Native American farmers increased 24%, to 10,638, from 1992 to 1997. Asians and Pacific Islanders boosted their numbers nearly 8%, to 8,731, during that same period. Of the minority groups, only black farmers have seen their numbers decrease, dropping 2%, to 18,451.

It is Latino farmers who have made the greatest gains, especially those who work the vast swaths of strawberry acreage that stretch from the central part of the state to Southern California.

Agricultural experts estimate that as many as 60% of the strawberry growers around Santa Maria are Latino, as are at least half the growers in the Watsonville-Salinas area--the world’s largest strawberry producer.

Out on the Oxnard Plain, the state’s fastest-growing strawberry producing region, several Latino growers have been able to take advantage of new opportunities that have opened up as a result of record plantings and production over the past last decade.

“I think one of the things you’ve seen through the late ‘80s and early ‘90s is that the rapid expansion of the strawberry industry has also meant a lot of expansion for Latino farmers,” California Strawberry Commission President David Riggs said. “They are definitely working their way up through the system.”

Count Oxnard strawberry grower George Macias among them.

The son of a Santa Maria sharecropper, the 39-year-old father of two was raised on the harvest. He started working in 1985 for Driscoll Strawberry Associates, one of the state’s largest berry growers, doing quality assurance inspections and breeding new plant varieties.

A Driscoll associate, Reiter Bros. Inc., asked if he wanted to go out on his own as part of a push to boost production in the Oxnard area.

Macias jumped at the chance.

“What I saw was opportunity,” said Macias, whose M & N Farms in Oxnard is a tribute to his daughters, Monique and Nicole. “I saw it as a way to put it all on the line and give my daughters the opportunity to go to college.”

Starting with 20 acres and 16-hour days, he has built a year-round operation that employs more than 80 people. He is a homeowner now, and in a good year can pull down a six-figure income.

“For a young man with only a high school education, I would say that I can hang in there with the guys who have come out of a fine university,” he said.

Oxnard farmer Candelario got his start the same way. He too worked for Driscoll and was bankrolled by the company in 1990 to launch his operation, Emerald Mist Berry Farms.

He worked day and night, losing 10 pounds and a lot of sleep the first year. But he did better than if he was picking someone else’s crops.

So even with the bills piling up and commodity prices tumbling, he never dwells too long on the question of why he farms for a living.

“I just felt like it was a great opportunity, and it was,” he said. “I just know if I work hard, I can make things happen.”