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Impatient With Congress, Blueberry Producers Are Replacing Migrant Workers With Machines

By Esther Yu-Hsi Lee on August 11, 2013 at 1:15 pm

Maine’s agricultural growers are not waiting around for an immigration bill to find workers to harvest the 91 million pound blueberry harvest, the Bangor Daily News reported on Saturday. Instead, farm owners are turning to tractors to replace seasonal farm workers as a way to bypass the difficulty of finding future documented seasonal farm laborers and American workers.

Throughout Maine, blueberry farms are asking themselves whether it would make sense to let the harvest rot while they wait for an immigration reform overhaul that would make it easier to hire migrant workers. Even with pay at $20 an hour, which is almost triple Maine’s $7.50 minimum wage, many blueberry farmers are finding that few Americans were willing to work the fields. That’s despite an unemployment rate in Washington County, Maine — home to many of the blueberry farms — of ten percent for Americans.

Ed Flanagan, president of the second largest blueberry grower, Jasper Wyman & Son Inc., had hoped that running employers through the E-Verify system, which verifies a worker’s employment authorization documents, would help sort out fraudulent applicants. But after E-Verify worked to its intended effect in the state, there was a paucity of American workers at his farm. Cherryfield Foods Inc., Maine’s largest blueberry grower, has turned to relying on machines to harvest blueberries. Smaller farms like Whitney Blueberries has also turned to mechanizing its harvest.