Hungry for workers, harvest crews look to the other side of the globe

One of the best views into the world of agriculture today can be had by climbing aboard a giant green combine in the middle of a Fergus Falls cornfield.

The combine is a shockingly high-tech, quarter-million-dollar mechanical beast with a computer screen and sensors that locate the corn rows all by themselves.

A lot of farmers can't afford a combine this fancy, which is why they hire custom harvest crews like the one working here.

And what exactly is the crew doing?

"Ons stroop mielies," the foreman says in Afrikaans, the first language of many white South Africans. Then he translates. "We're combining corn."

More and more white South Africans are working on American farms. Last year, about 1,000 got temporary visas for agricultural work.

And this foreman, Brynmor Vanschoor, is one of them. He now heads a crew of 13 South Africans who were brought here by a custom harvester based in Fergus Falls.

A trade group for custom harvesters says there are about 1,200 member businesses doing this kind of work, and about half the workers at those businesses hail from abroad.

South Africans account for the biggest portion. Some say that's because work is hard to find in their native country. Brynmor Vanschoor loves coming to the U.S. for seven to eight months at a time to do harvest work. But he admits that wasn't true when he first started the gig more than a decade ago.

"Halfway through my first year, I said I'm never coming back. I wasn't used to all the hours we worked. But you can't just leave. You just keep going. It's what keeps you alive I guess," he ruminates.

The owner of this custom harvest company, David Stock, admires the endurance of his South African workers. Stock's been running both a farm and a custom harvest company for decades. And he's doing pretty well. Right now, his own farm almost seems like a United Nations Compound. While the South Africans are out plying his fields, Mexican construction workers build new corn silos.

We reached a point in the mid-80s where we were really floundering with labor and wondering what our future was in farming because we just couldn't find a good quality supply of labor

Stock says there was a time when he didn't think his business would ever get this far.

"We reached a point in the mid-80s where we were really floundering with labor and wondering what our future was in farming because we just couldn't find a good quality supply of labor," Stock laments.

The farm labor shortage is enough of a concern that the U.S. House Agriculture Committee, chaired by 7th District Minnesota Congressman Collin Peterson, held a hearing about it Thursday.

For David Stock, the eventual solution showed up at his doorstep about about 15 years ago, when some South Africans came looking for work. He's been hiring foreign workers ever since.

It's not a simple arrangement. To get visas for the workers Stock needs approval from a litany of state and federal agencies. He has to pay for the workers' flights to and from South Africa and furnish them with lodging. And just feeding the crews costs as much as $40,000 a year.

"Granted it isn't any cheaper than what we could find locally, but we can't find that resource locally. It's economical in the sense of dependability. They come here ready to work, they come with a great attitude," Stock says.

Stock does have to prove that he tried to find local workers. He runs ads in newspapers and on the radio, and posts a notice to the Minnesota Job Bank. Those "help wanted" ads direct inquiries to the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development.

When asked whether she gets many phone calls regarding these ads, DEED's Frances Regan says, "No, not at all."

Regan is in charge of policing the visa program to make sure that foreign workers aren't taking jobs from Americans. She says there's no evidence that's a problem.

"People are not looking for agricultural jobs. That's just a fact of life," she says.

So why not boost wages to attract American workers?

Farm pay has historically lagged other industries. Austin Perez of the American Farm Bureau Federation says in the past ten years, wages have about doubled. But he says even attempts to pay workers $50 an hour to do things like pick lettuce have failed. And, Perez argues, large scale wage hikes can only go so far.

"What we've found is if we had to bid up our wages from an average of $10 to $11 an hour, you would see, in all the sectors, including grains, about a $1 billion loss in farm income. If we had to bid up our wages from $10 to $14 an hour, we're looking at a $5 billion loss in farm income," he notes.

And Perez says farm industry profits are too erratic to absorb those losses easily.

That could mean demand for foreign workers will remain high. And for the foreign workers who answer the call for help, there can be a big pay-off. A crew foreman in Minnesota can make about $7,000 a month.

But some worry that as the value of the dollar falls, even those eager South Africans won't be so enticed to come here to work.

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