Harvest

I'm on vacation in the Sonoma Valley and did some wine tasting and vineyard touring yesterday. One of the interesting things we learned from the guide was that, depending on rain levels, an entire crop of grapes may have to be harvested in just one or two nights (yes, nights- for reasons having to do with keeping the grapes from getting crushed in the baskets, they're harvested at night when they're colder and firmer). And this wouldn't just be at one vineyard either, if it's early November and rain is on the forecast, the whole region needs to harvest at once. Also, the better wineries (basically anything that comes in a bottle as opposed to a box or jug) harvests by hand, which is really labor intensive.

I lay all this out to point out that this work would be impossible without migrant labor. Although growing grapes and making wine takes manpower, the workforce in Naps or Sonoma needs to grow exponentially at harvest time, which means that those workers need to have other work at other times of the year in other places, because you wouldn't want people justsitting around on unemployment for the whole non-harvest season. As American citizens have not shown much interest in itinerant agricultural labor, this job is being done by immigrants, mostly undocumented because the US doesn't give out nearly enough agricultural labor visas to bring in legal workers, and because migrant workers often move between the US and Mexico depending on the growing season. If people who want to conduct mass exportations were taken seriously we would it would destroy the wine industry (and probably most of our vegetable farming as well) in the US and basically put mistaken of the US citizens who live in central California out of work. Since nobody is going to let that happen, its best to remember that people advocating full deportation are not in fact to be taken seriously, and that we should look to some kind of real solution for regularizing the status of undocumented workers.

Published with Blogger-droid v1.5.2