Alabama immigration law: Farmers get new help for harvest (with slideshow)
Published: Friday, October 07, 2011, 5:30 AM
By Hannah Wolfson -- The Birmingham News The Birmingham News
Ellen Jenkins had 50 acres of produce and no one to pick it, after Alabama's tough new immigration law sent her field hands packing.
But on Thursday, about 20 workers, mostly inexperienced, arrived at her Chandler Mountain farm to help, by midafternoon picking 125 cartons of tomatoes just in time to keep the harvest from being a total loss.
"Me and my kids were going to just pick what we could and I didn't even think we were going to get any help," Jenkins said.
The fill-in workers were brought to the farm near Steele by Grow Alabama, a Birmingham-based network that works with farmers from around the state to market locally-grown produce. Just a few days after launching the temporary assistance program, it's been overwhelmed, Grow Alabama head Jerry Spencer said Thursday.
Spencer is talking with the state agriculture department about finding funding for transportation. And Agriculture Commissioner John McMillan said Thursday that he's trying to make arrangements to use people from the Department of Corrections' work-release program as field hands, and to pull unemployed workers off the state rolls, as well. McMillan said the details weren't finalized, but there could be something up and running next week.
"This is a short-term thing, just to get the crops out of the field right now," McMillan said. As for Grow Alabama, he said, "We're very interested in seeing what we might be able to do with that, if it's a viable option."
Spencer said he put a call out on Facebook for unskilled workers on Saturday after hearing that some of his farmers wouldn't have produce for him to sell this week. Jenkins, for example, usually has as many as 35 immigrant workers during the harvest season, but she was down to just herself and her two sons after a judge decided last week to let most of the law go into effect.
"It's a sad state of affairs and it is an emergency for Alabama farmers right now," Spencer said. "Many farmers are threatening to not plant next year."
A job for the jobless
But, he figured, there are people in the inner city who need the work and farmers who just don't have the bodies necessary to finish off the fall harvest. Workers get paid just as the migrants did, earning about $2 a box packed, he said.
Early this week, he took the first volunteers to a sweet potato farm in Cullman just to see how it worked. On Wednesday, a team of five tackled a tomato farm. And on Thursday, about 20 people showed up and sales and marketing manager Malinda St. James, who was answering the phone in the office, said she had pages of names. Participants included recent college students and others who were unemployed.
"The real goal is getting her help in February when the new crops are planted and for the new harvest," said Lisa Hicks of Homewood, who helped sort tomatoes at Jenkins' farm Thursday. "Who's going to be here next year?"
The hard part, Spencer said, has been providing transportation. Grow Alabama rented a van Thursday to transport people and is hoping a church group with transportation might step in to volunteer. He's also looking for organizers to expand the program beyond Birmingham, including to Mobile, Dothan, Montgomery, Tuscaloosa, Gadsden and Huntsville, where he said he's been in talks with the Salvation Army.
He'll likely have requests for help from other farmers, such as Jeff Smith, who also grows tomatoes on Chandler Mountain. He said his farm usually has about 47 people picking tomatoes at peak times, but the workforce dropped about 30 percent when the law was passed and another 30 percent when the court ruling came through.
"It's a huge problem. We're just picking up who we can and getting them in the field," he said. "Next year, if something's not put in place, we'll probably go out of business."
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