Strawberry fields: politics, class, and work in California agriculture

April 3, 2018 | Author: Anonymous | Category: Social Science, Sociology, Globalization
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Strawberry fields: politics, class, and work in California agriculture, by Miriam Wells, Ithaca, N.Y., Cornell University Press, 1996, xxv + 340 pp., ISBN 0-8014-8279-8

When I was approached by the editors of JPS to write a retrospective review of a ‘modern classic’ in agrarian studies, Strawberry Fields was the obvious choice. Few books were as influential on my earlier work on organics or as relevant for my current research as this one. I write this review enmeshed in a large research project about how new regulatory restrictions on the use of soil fumigants, aimed at environmental health, are affecting California’s strawberry industry. In conducting this research, I have traveled and interviewed strawberry growers and others in the very region that is the focus of Miriam Wells’ study: the central coast. So I re-read the book with a quite tangible familiarity and an instrumental desire to pay close attention to the empirical details, to assess what has changed and what has stayed the same in the industry. Yet, I write this review equally motivated to encourage others less ensconced in the region and the industry to take up this book. It is a model commodity study, rich in empirical detail, and explicit in its theoretical arguments. The degree to which some of its insights now seem indisputable owes in part to Wells who, through this book, put some old and weak ideas about agrarian change to rest. At the same time, the book also germinated ideas that are far from closed, and arguably served as a precursor to scholarship on socio-natural assemblages. Those who are interested in how non-human objects shape human activity would do well to return to Wells and her discussion of the characteristics of the strawberry and their effects on work processes. To situate the book, Strawberry Fields is first and foremost a finely grained ethnography of California’s strawberry industry in a fairly circumscribed geography. The central coast strawberry producing region, as delimited by Wells, exists in an area that is no more than 30

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miles long and never veers more than 3 miles from the Pacific Ocean. The size of the region under study belies its significance for understanding agrarian dynamics. As of 2014, strawberries were the 5th highest grossing crop in California – itself one of the highest value agricultural regions in the world. They were the top agricultural commodities in two of the counties under study, surpassing the ‘green gold’ (Friedland et al., 1981) of lettuce in Monterey County, the ‘salad bowl of the nation.’ Wells’ research spanned a period that began in 1976 and ended in the early 1990s, and thus took place at a time when the industry was gaining the prominence it enjoys today. Productivity rates were climbing significantly and, given technical changes in such areas as varietal development, strawberries were coming to be the cheap yet quasi-luxurious specialty crop that consumers could expect to see in the supermarket year round. For Wells, though, the significance of the crop lies with the centrality of labor in its production. Here it is important to understand that strawberries are a high revenue crop because they produce a great deal of fruit per acre, especially in the central coast where the harvest season takes place over nine months of the year. Of course, revenues also have to cover the inordinately high costs of producing strawberries. When Wells conducted her research, strawberry production required outlays of $18,000 to $25,000 per acre. These days, by all accounts, such outlays are well over $50,000 an acre, surpassed only by raspberries whose production costs exceed $70,000 an acre, so I am told. As Wells’ details, some of these high costs are related to land preparation, including fumigation. Yet, what most has driven the costs of producing strawberries is the cost of harvest labor – labor that cannot be mechanized because of the delicateness of the berry. Indeed, the need for harvest labor has risen in direct relation to the reduction of labor costs in other areas of the production process, owing in large part to the use of a range of agro-chemicals that have contributed to overall productivity. Because many of these

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other costs are relatively fixed, controlling the cost of harvest labor is the fulcrum of profitability, according to Wells. At the same time, strawberry picking requires great care and knowledge about which berries to toss because they are bruised, moldy, or undersized and how to place them in a basket to be attractive to consumers at the grocery story. Wells thus gave great emphases to the processes by which growers keep their harvest costs down while ensuring the necessary care. These have included paying workers largely on piece rates (which workers themselves prefer), close supervision of the actual harvest, and forms of labor recruitment that make use of interpersonal relations among workers and between workers and employers. The key disciplinary mechanism, however, has been a politically constructed farm labor market that has created a constant labor surplus of undocumented workers whose vulnerability to imminent firing or deportation has kept them relatively docile and cooperative. Still, one of Wells’ aims was to demonstrate the variations in labor control, related to the particularities of place. The central coast region is dominated by two river valleys, the Pajaro and Salinas, both of which drain into the Monterey Bay, about 75 miles south of San Francisco. These two large valleys, along with an in-between area of small valleys and hamlets that she dubbed the Monterey Hills, constituted three micro-regions that Wells found worthy of juxtaposition. She shows how each has had distinct clusters of grower ethnicity, farm size, access to capital and knowledge, work organization, management style, histories of resistance, and so forth. For instance, the more industrial and large scale Salinas Valley micro-region, where white growers have dominated, has been more influenced by farmworker organizing and thus has seen higher wages, albeit more contentious labor relations, while the more marginal and small scale Monterey Hills micro-region, where Mexican-origin growers have dominated, has been typified by lower wages and paternalistic labor relations. Meanwhile, the Pajaro Valley

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region has been dominated by Japanese-origin growers, farming on mid-size ranches, who have been most attuned to the technical details of farming and their own capital investments, and thus have offered more accommodating labor relations. Wells also gave significant attention to industry structure. In terms of farm structure, Wells noted that berry farms were relatively small, even in the Salinas area where they rarely exceeded 100 acres. According to her, strawberry production has no particular economies of scale, as growers need to constantly test new techniques and varietals and monitor their fields and plants for any problems. Plus, high per acre profits make large farms unnecessary. She also wrote of an array of marketing arrangements. These ranged from large buyer-shippers, some of which financed and advised their growers, to grower marketing cooperatives (two major ones at the time), to a number of independent shippers. As she noted, most of these buyers purchased their berries by the box, reluctant to enter into arrangements where they take crop risk, but at the same time they imposed significant quality controls on growers. Yet even these relationships were differentiated by region, with the white growers working with the large grower shippers, the Japanese growers working with the cooperatives, and the Mexican growers working with the independent shippers that would accept inferior quality fruit. Since Strawberry Fields was published, many of the empirical conditions of the industry have changed, and changed in ways that bear on some of Wells’ arguments. First and foremost, there has been a good deal of consolidation across the industry. Although ranch sizes are still delimited by available acreage, many growers now operate on multiple ranches, in multiple regions, and a significant number farm more than 500 acres per year, a huge capital undertaking given the per acre cost of over $50,000. As for buyers, the industry is currently dominated by five large corporate buyers (one a former cooperative), and the remaining cooperative and

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independent grower-shippers are on the decline. At the same time there has been a substantial uptick in direct marketing, driven by the organic and farmers’ market booms. As one consequence of all of this consolidation, the distinctions between Wells’ micro-regions are far less clear. In addition, Latinos have become a more dominant grower group throughout the region, particularly as many Japanese-origin growers have retired and have borne children who have chosen other professions. Once marginal Mexican-origin growers now work closely with the main grower-shippers, or have discovered new opportunities in direct marketing, making farms of 4-6 acres quite viable and even profitable. The flipside of this consolidation has been much more volatility in the industry. Wells wrote at a time in which, as she put it, profits were exceptionally stable in the central coast strawberry industry, despite wider instabilities in agricultural production and even the economy writ large. She told that few established growers ever went bankrupt. Today, growers are on much less solid ground, and many suggest that the industry is in a state of crisis given the challenges it currently faces. Besides drought and high land values – note that strawberries compete with suburbs for the natural air conditioning of the Pacific Ocean – growers also face a major labor shortage and increasing regulation of soil fumigants. These two challenges are particularly significant, the first for how it flips on its head one of Wells’ key contentions and the other for its virtual omission from Strawberry Fields. While Wells turned much of her argument on labor surpluses, today central coast growers most lament severe labor shortages. These labor shortages stem from the relatively recent militarization of the US-Mexico border, making it more costly and dangerous for people to cross, which has curtailed the constant influx of young bodies to which the strawberry industry has become accustomed. Of course, like surplus, this shortage has been shaped politically by the

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institutions and ideologies that have made strawberry-picking suitable for Mexicans and not whites and kept the ‘prevailing wage’ out of sync with labor demand (Mitchell, 2012). Still, many growers complain of worker disloyalty (in an industry which as Wells noted has depended on patronage and familial relations) and tell stories of prospective workers driving through their fields to assess the yield of the plants and the overall working conditions. They also report on years in which they have not harvested 10 to 50 acres for the lack of workers. Few growers even bother with harvesting berries for the processing market since the return is not worth the labor costs. As such, many growers have been pushed to the brink of bankruptcy, and each year dozens of growers leave strawberries altogether. Of those that remain, many make planting decisions and create field conditions that make it easy for workers to move quickly through the fields to earn high piece rates. Some even justify the use of fumigants, which are otherwise harmful to workers who toil in nearby fields, because the fumigants help produce robust plants that allow harvest workers to earn more money. On that note, since Strawberry Fields was published, soil fumigant regulation has become the albatross of the industry. The industry’s favored fumigant, methyl bromide, is reaching the final moments of its phase out as an ozone-depleting chemical, methyl iodide, designed to replace it, met enormous public resistance and has since been withdrawn from the market, and the remaining fumigants face tighter restrictions in the form of buffer zones and other expensive application protocols (see Guthman and Brown in press, 2015 on-line first). Oddly, though, Wells gave scant attention to the industry’s critical dependence on soil fumigants and extremely high use of other pesticides, other than noting that soil fumigation is an important element of land preparation and the basis of the huge increase in productivity the industry has experienced. One could argue that this topic was epiphenomenal to Wells’ object of study. Yet, in my read,

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fumigation is in many ways inseparable from the labor question, first because fumigants have received increased scrutiny precisely because they are toxic to workers, as well as nearby residents, and second, and less obviously, because fumigation regimes are intertwined with labor practices. For instance, growers decide how to fumigate their fields in part in consideration of when workers will be available for harvest. And again, they defend the continued use of fumigants because these chemicals ensure the hearty, high-yielding plants that are a factor in attracting workers during a labor shortage. That Strawberry Fields provides such empirical fodder is one of its great strengths. Still, Wells set out to write this book not only to be the great empirical endeavor that it is. She wrote the book at a critical scholarly juncture, one that involved the widespread abandonment of orthodox Marxism, the re-emergence of peasant studies, and a burgeoning scholarly interest in the restructuring of agro-food systems. Indeed the late 1980s through mid-1990s saw a wellspring of new books in agro-food studies that debated questions on the industrialization and globalization of agro-food systems, shaped by new considerations of the role of nature in agricultural exceptionalism. Evidently, she wanted to weigh in on a number of theoretical developments that were preoccupying scholars during this period, developments with which I am quite familiar since these were the stuff of my graduate school training. One was to contest notions of linearity and inevitability in trajectories of capitalist development, especially as they relate to agriculture. Here rediscoveries of Kautsky’s (1988) agrarian question figured large in hers and other books: industrialization was not proceeding apace in agriculture, defying Marxian historical teleology, and many were seeking to understand or show this. For Wells, the defining moment was the strawberry industry’s return to sharecropping in the late 1960s through the 70s, after it had largely gone away. By sharecropping

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she meant a system in which strawberry growers subdivided their land into 3-5 acre plots and leased them out to croppers rather than employing workers directly. The embrace of this ‘feudal’-like organization of production made no sense in theories of development that predicted the inexorable withering away of such ‘pre-capitalist’ modes of development. Working through several possible explanations of this return, she concluded that sharecropping reemerged as a response to changes in the labor market, precipitated by, among other things, the expansion of labor-protective laws and the growing presence of the United Farm Workers’ union. Sharecropping conferred specific advantages for owners while still allowing them to keep control over the production process and ensure quality. These advantages included increased motivation for labor performance, delayed payment for labor, and reduced labor costs because sharecroppers would exploit unpaid family labor. Her broader point here was that on-the-ground politics could alter capitalist trajectories. A second theoretical contribution was to build on Burawoy’s (1985) observations that class politics can often take place in realms outside the shop floor. Here she specifically wanted to emphasize the legal realm as a site where class categories, as well as exploitation more generally, would be contested. Her specific example was legal contestation over sharecropping arrangements. While some of the croppers liked them, for others it became clear that the ownergrowers were exerting far too much control over production practices and sharecroppers were not really independent farms after all, but more akin to wage laborers. A lawsuit against one of the most prominent grower-shippers brought this to light and forced a reworking and often an abandonment of this practice. Interestingly, sharecropping did not entirely go away, but assumed a different form less likely to be challenged. Namely, some grower-shippers and other intermediaries began to go into ‘partnerships’ with low-resource growers (many former

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farmworkers or ranch managers, virtually all Latino) by providing financing and market access, but, as Wells saw happening, rarely informing these new growers of the risks involved. With the current volatility of the strawberry industry, these are the growers who are most likely to go out of business, often saddled with a great deal of debt, but, unfortunately, they are easily replaced by others who imagine better futures for themselves in managing their own businesses. A third theoretical contribution was to weigh in on salutary claims of the day about industrial divides and a move to flexible specialization in organizing production. Regime theory was in its heyday, and some scholars, using contract farming as an example, were suggesting that agricultural work, like industry, had become ‘post-Fordist,’ more flexible and less Taylorist, and hence less alienating. Like others writing at the time, notably Goodman and Watts (1994), Wells rejected this characterization, loath to treat sharecropping or contracting arrangements as any less exploitative. Looking back at Wells’ contributions to these debates, I must admit that I find some of her claims rather obvious, even tired. At the same time, I recognize that this book helped put them to rest, and that alone is to be commended. Nevertheless, to me her more enduring theoretical contribution has been to show how the characteristics of the commodity – here the strawberry – has shaped work itself. While some of these characteristics have been bred by humans into the berry, including the ability to produce fruit over a long season, Wells nevertheless effectively showed how non-human nature strongly shaped the strawberry industry. Given how the mode of production that ensued from both technological innovation and a favorable climate – miles of mono-cropped production – also made the strawberry plant more vulnerable to soil pathogens, to which fumigants are a fix, today we might deepen her analysis, and treat central coast strawberry production as a complex socio-natural assemblage. Yet we

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would need to recognize that Wells laid the groundwork for such an analysis. For those readers interested in learning a great deal about strawberry production on the central coast, there is no greater resource. For those who want to teach undergraduate students about California farm labor issues, I hold that this book still provides the best short overview currently available of the changing political context for agricultural workers, although it is in need of updating. For those who want to show their graduate students how research should be done, the research in this book is phenomenal, unrivaled in its attention to detail, and includes several appendices describing her methods and sources of data. And for those who are interested in all things food related, as many people are these days, this book is an exemplar of a commodity study, shorn of feel-good fluff and attendant to the real life politics of how food is produced. It is indeed a classic.

References

Burawoy, M. 1985. The politics of production. London: Verso Press. Friedland, W. H., A. E. Barton and R. J. Thomas 1981. Manufacturing green gold. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goodman, D. and M. Watts. 1994. Reconfiguring the rural or fording the divide. Journal of Peasant Studies 221 (1): 1-49. Guthman, J. and S. Brown. 2015 on line first. Midas’ not-so-golden touch: on the demise of methyl iodide as a soil fumigant in California. Journal of Environmental Policy and Planning. doi: 10.1080/1523908X.2015.1077441. Guthman, J. and S. Brown. in press.Whose life counts: biopolitics and the ‘bright line’ of

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chloropicrin mitigation in California’s strawberry industry. Science, Technology and Human Values. Kautsky, K. 1988. The agrarian question. London: Zwan Press. Mitchell, D. 2012. ‘They saved the crops: Labor, landscape, and the struggle over industrial farming in bracero-era california. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press.

Julie Guthman Division of Social Sciences, University of California, Santa Cruz [email protected] © 2015 Julie Guthman

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