As a young woman in the late 1980s, María Inés Catalán joined a gushing stream of laborers from Mexico chasing seasonal crops in California, following the footsteps of her mother and thousands of other itinerant farm workers desperate for jobs.
Now, like an increasing number of other former migrant workers, she’s put down roots as sturdy as the tomatoes in her fields. Manager of the 55-acre, family-owned organic Catalán Farm in Hollister, Catalán is embedded in the community, living on the farm, shopping nearby and hiring local residents.
Julio Cesar Catalan operates a tractor on a 55-acre land leased for her mother Maria Catalan, founder of the organic Catalan Family Farms in Hollister, Calif., on Tuesday, June 19, 2024. (Ray Chavez/Bay Area News Group)
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Her children will never know the uncertainty of finding work, the unrelenting demands of a foreman, the fatigue of constant movement or the pressure to harvest a box of broccoli every minute. What they know now is this: On their own ranch, they make their own decisions.
“They have learned to be independent,” Catalán said. “That’s the only way of life that they know.”
For more than a century, California agriculture has depended on transient labor, with migrants moving from the winter lettuce fields of the south to the autumnal walnut orchards of the north.
But that long and dusty tradition, immortalized in John Steinbeck’s “Grapes of Wrath” and the photos of Dorothea Lange, is fading. New research reveals a profound change in the nature of the nation’s agricultural workforce.
Since the late 1990s, the share of agricultural workers who migrate within the United States to follow the seasonal shift of crops has fallen by nearly 75%, according to an analysis of the U.S. Department of Labor’s National Agricultural Workers Survey data by the Bay Area News Group.
This trend is also reflected in a 2023 study by professor Philip Martin of the UC-Davis Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics. There is less seasonality in agricultural work, he found. While crops still require the most labor during the summer months, employment is rising during the winter and …read more
Source:: The Mercury News – Entertainment
