It doesn’t matter how many vegetables Jose Reyes can grow if he can’t harvest them.
A Mexico native who became a U.S. citizen this year, Reyes is the owner of Reyes Farms in Colonial Beach.
He enjoys the work.
The farmer just wishes he had the workers he needed to make it profitable.
“When we don’t have enough help, we’ll lose 35%,” Reyes said. “Last year, we lost a lot of tomatoes. It changed when a lot of our help started leaving back to Mexico. That’s when we started noticing less and less people wanting to work.”
The reality is that farms need farm workers.
“In Nelson County, we have a lot of small family farms,” said Vanessa Hale, founder of the Central Virginia Farm Workers Initiative. “We’re not talking about mega-industrial agriculture. These are generations of farmers who have worked the land and are proud of the crops they produce. It’s just that they can’t do without the farm workers.”
That work usually comes in the former of immigrants with temporary work visas.
“An H-2A visa is a non-immigrant work visa to do work in agriculture,” Hale said. “In Central Virginia – in Nelson and Amherst County – almost all of the workers that come seasonally are H-2A workers. Primarily, the workers on this visa are from Mexico. They’re also exclusively men between the ages of 18 and 65.”
Dependence on migrant workers isn’t just true for Nelson County. Other localities around the state are equally reliant.
“You could find people picking apples in the Shenandoah Valley, picking tobacco in the southside,” said Manuel Gago, Worker Justice Program at Legal Justice Aid Center in Charlottesville. “In the Eastern Shore, they get thousands of workers in the tomato fields.”
Reliance on migrant workers isn’t a new development.
“By the ‘60s, the U.S. economy more or less become used to the idea that we’re going to get 400,000 Mexicans into the economy every year,” said Dr. Daniel Morales, assistant professor at Virginia Commonwealth University. “In the 1970s, there started to be more and more Latino migration into the Shenandoah Valley. A lot of that was following apple orchards.”
The relationships between the American farmers and seasonal workers brings up a myriad of issues.
It’s a hot button issue politically.
“Farmers, businessmen, they’re conservative but they’re pro-immigrant conservatives, because they see the value that immigrants bring to the local economies,” Morales said. “Welcoming strangers is the Christian thing to do, and what’s sad is that used to be way more common language all over America decades ago. That’s not the case anymore.”
Not all migrant works want to relocate to the United States.
“There’s always been this question of rather or not Latino – or in this case Mexican communities – are coming here to stay – or not to stay,” Morales said. “Most people don’t want to leave the community they’re born in. They want to succeed in that community. They have ties there.”
There’s also the issue of quality of care for the seasonal workers.
“Most of the small farms treat well the workers,” Gago said. “They know the value of somebody who knows how to do the work. The big corporations that make billions and billions of dollars profit, they are the ones pushing back.”
Because the money can be life altering for the workers, however, they are hesitant to speak about issues.
“There is a shyness about talking to the media, because they want to work,” Hale said.
“They appreciate being able to work here. There are challenges, but work is the number one priority. They get paid a federally adjusted minimum wage, which right now is about 15 dollars per hour. The men can take that money home and build a house and start a business. They can buy a school uniform for their kids. They can really strengthen their lives back in Mexico.”
For the workers, primarily men, it also means leaving behind families for long periods at a time.
“They are away from their families for up to 10 months out of the year,” Hale said. “It’s an extremely isolated life.”
The separation comes at a cost.
“They’re warriors. They sacrifice a lot to be able to work,” said Jasmin Lopez, a community health assistant with Central Virginia Farm Workers Initiative. “Everyone has their reasons.”
Leaving family behind takes a toll. “To be apart from the family, that was the hardest,” Luis Manuel Cervantes said. “My dream was to bring them here, but unfortunately, due to the distance, I lost them. Yes, I lost my family.”
The migrants often work long days with little time for leisure. They provide an essential service but are often looked down upon. Best-case scenario, their work is unappreciated. In more sinister cases, the workers are vilified.
“People think of it as, ‘If these people get a bigger share of the pie, I am getting less,’” Morales said. “What’s actually going on is the pie gets bigger. It’s not a coincidence that the biggest wins for workers happened when they were not divided by race. This has always been a theme in American history.”
This article is based on the Migrant Workers episode from VPM’s Life in the Heart Land Season 2 docuseries. The series gets to the heart of those creating unique solutions to rural Virginia’s toughest challenges.
Watch Mondays at 9:00 p.m. and 9:30 p.m. on VPM PBS — or anytime on the PBS App.
Visit vpm.org/heartland to learn more.