The farmers in California’s Central Valley like to say they feed the world, and it is not hyperbole.
The valley stretches for 450 fertile miles from Bakersfield in the south to Redding in the north, yields an estimated 40 percent of the fruit, vegetables and tree nuts grown in the United States, and exports half of that bounty overseas. California agriculture overall is a $60 billion annual business.
It is also one that President Trump has thrown into turmoil. Only in recent weeks has he offered vague glimmers of hope.
When agents from the Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement turned up last month at farms and packing houses in Ventura County, well south of the Central Valley, there was panic in the valley’s fields, where an estimated 80 percent of farmworkers are undocumented. Farmers here, most of whom voted for Mr. Trump and had expected him to protect them, were in a rage.
“I would love to just call a general strike,” said one fuming grower, Vernon, who stood among his acres of plum trees near the town of Kingsburg on a recent sweltering morning. “Let’s just quit feeding America for one week!” Vernon asked that only his first name be used because of the undocumented workers he employs.
There have been no raids so far this month in the Central Valley, but Manuel Cunha Jr., the president of the Nisei Farmers League, which represents 500 farmers and more than 75,000 farmworkers, mostly in the region, is on edge. “If we get one Border Patrol raid, we’re screwed,” he said in an interview in his Fresno office. “Because no one is going to go to work in any field or packing house.”
That is what happened on Jan. 7, the day after Mr. Trump’s election victory was certified, when there were raids in the farm area around Bakersfield. Customs and Border Protection said at the time, which was in the final days of the Biden administration, that the effort amounted to “targeted enforcement arrests of individuals involved in smuggling.” Farmworkers stayed at home.
What is worse now, Mr. Cunha said, are the mixed messages out of the Trump administration at the height of this summer’s harvest, when farmers fear that they won’t have the workers to get the plums, peaches, nectarines and apricots off the trees before they rot. “The farmers will be destroyed,” he said.
To try to calm fears, Mr. Cunha’s organization has put out notices advising workers how to avoid encounters with immigration authorities, who are not allowed on farms without warrants. But the Border Patrol and ICE are able to stop laborers on the roads.
Workers are advised to take off their hats and bandannas, which would give them away as farmworkers, once they leave the fields. They are told to keep their license plates up to date, change their routes to and from work, and not ride with anyone they don’t know.
In the meantime Mr. Cunha and his team pore over every word from Mr. Trump.
A day after the Ventura raids in June, Mr. Trump said that “our farmers are being hurt badly” and promised help, but four days later the Department of Homeland Security said the raids would continue. Four days after that Mr. Trump again said he didn’t want to hurt farmers (“I love them”), and in a two-minute statement made on a tarmac in New Jersey floated a vague effort to “let the farmers take responsibility” for their workers. Mr. Cunha and his team were baffled.
“We listened to it, I want to say, for about three or four hours,” Mr. Cunha said. He had planned to send the president’s statement to the farmers and farmworkers in the region. “We decided not to,” he said. “The words are not clear.”
Mr. Cunha was more upbeat after hearing the president promise in Florida last week that his administration was working on a system of “signing up” farmworkers so “they can be here legally, they can pay taxes and everything.” The farmworkers, the president added, were “not getting citizenship, but they get other things and the farmers need them to do the work. Without those people you’re not going to be able to run your farm.”
“I pray that he moves forward with this,” Mr. Cunha said, “and nobody can convince him to go another route.”
But the whipsawing continued this week when Brooke Rollins, the agriculture secretary, said that there would be “no amnesty” for undocumented farmworkers and that mass deportations would continue, but in a “strategic and intentional way.”
Mr. Cunha said he did not know what she meant.
On Wednesday, a White House spokeswoman, Abigail Jackson, said that “President Trump is a tireless advocate for American farmers” and that he is “committed to ensuring they have the work force they need to remain successful.”
Picking Plums at $44 an Hour
Vernon’s family has been farming since 1893 near Kingsburg, in the San Joaquin Valley, which makes up the southern half of the Central Valley. (The Sacramento Valley is the northern half.) Vernon has 350 acres, a modest farm for the area, and sells organic peaches, plums and nectarines to Whole Foods. During an interview in his fields, while workers picked fruit nearby, Vernon pulled a black amber plum off a tree and handed it over.
“It eats OK,” he said. “It ships good.”
Vernon employs 65 field workers, and on this morning was paying 30 of them as much as $44 an hour for piece work, based on pounds of plums picked that day. The workers stood on ladders reaching up into branches of trees bursting with fruit and filled plastic crates — suspended on their chests by straps crisscrossed over their backs — with some 25 pounds each of plums.
“It’s a physical job,” Vernon said. On days when there is less demanding work, like pruning and thinning, the workers make $5 per tree, or around $22 an hour. About 70 percent are undocumented, he said.
Vernon, a Republican who voted for Mr. Trump, said he would like to hire American citizens but has found it impossible to find people willing to do the work.
“They haven’t applied, and I don’t think this is a low-wage job,” he said. “If this is a low-wage job, then what is McDonald’s? There’s a lot lower wages paid than what we’re paying.”
He has a fruit packing shed that employs an additional 70 people year-round. “And that’s maybe 45 percent legal,” he said. “That pays about 10 percent less, but we have a higher percentage of legal people because it’s socially acceptable to work in a factory.”
Vernon acknowledged that many laborers were willing to make less money in a factory simply to avoid the scorching weather and demands of field work. But, he said, “if your children were out picking plums, even if they were making twice what they would at McDonald’s, you’d be embarrassed to say they were picking plums.”
During an acute farm labor shortage in the San Joaquin Valley in the late 1990s, Mr. Cunha was part of a program that tried and failed to get American citizens — California welfare recipients and the unemployed — to work in the fields. There were myriad problems. Potential workers did not want seasonal jobs in 100-degree heat, had no transportation to the fields, often needed child care and got little to no training.
“It was a total disaster,” Mr. Cunha said. The program reached out to prisoners but, according to Mr. Cunha, the prisoners’ union said there needed to be two guards in the fields per 20 prisoners, as well as three meals provided per day. The idea was abandoned.
Tree fruit farmers depend heavily on manual labor since plums, peaches, nectarines and apricots need to be picked carefully to avoid bruising. “The most sensitive fruit of all is an apricot,” Mr. Cunha said. “If you look at an apricot, it’ll turn brown on you.”
In contrast, tree nuts — walnuts, almonds and pistachios — are picked largely by machine. Their production has boomed in the Central Valley in recent years because of increased worldwide demand and the growing popularity of almond milk domestically. One positive factor for growers is that there is less need for labor from California’s pool of largely undocumented farmworkers.
“It’s just less worry every year,” said Daniel A. Sumner, a longtime professor of agricultural economics at the University of California, Davis. Dr. Sumner, a former assistant secretary for economics at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, calculated the statistics in this article about the amount of fruit, vegetables and tree nuts grown in and exported from the Central Valley.
‘You Get Used to It’
Jorge is a labor contractor with 900 field workers, about 70 percent of them undocumented. He supplies workers for seven table-grape farmers in the San Joaquin Valley, but after the raids in Ventura County, many were too scared to come to the fields, couples especially.
“If they were husband and wife, the wife wouldn’t come because they didn’t want both of them to be taken,” said Jorge, who spoke in the shade of a grape arbor and asked that only his first name be used because of his undocumented work force. “If something happened, at least one was home with the kids.”
Jorge was born in the United States but his parents were farmworkers, and he grew up picking grapes, pears, peaches and strawberries. It was hard when he first started, he said, “but you know, your body gets used to it. You get fit for it.” He turned it all into a business later in life.
The American citizens who work for him, he said, are mostly the children of undocumented parents. “I asked some of them who are young, 22, 23, ‘Why are you here? You were born here. You went to school here.’ Their answer is, ‘We can’t get a job in town.’”
One of Jorge’s workers, a crew boss in charge of 32 laborers, has been in the United States since 1998 and is undocumented, as is her husband. Together they have five children, all born in the United States. Their eldest, a daughter, is now at the University of California, Los Angeles, planning to be a doctor. Their youngest is a 3-year-old boy.
The crew boss, who was with Jorge in the grape arbor, said she worried constantly about raids, so she and her husband were careful not to work together in the fields. “Sometimes I think, What’s going to happen to us?’’ she said. “There’s nothing, no hope.”
Mr. Cunha’s organization has also distributed thousands of small red cards to farmworkers, in English and Spanish, that can be handed to immigration authorities. “I do not wish to speak with you, answer your questions, or sign or hand you any documents based on my Fifth Amendment rights under the United States Constitution,” the card begins.
The harvest season for table grapes is set to begin this week. As always, it is hard work. “It’s 105 degrees, and you’re pulling a wheelbarrow with four tubs of grapes, which is about 80 pounds,” Jorge said. He needs all his workers, and he hopes things stay calm.
“We’ve got three heavy months left of fruit to harvest of all types,” Mr. Cunha said. “That’s 90-plus days, every day not knowing what the heck is going to happen.”
Elisabeth Bumiller is a writer-at-large for The Times. She was most recently Washington bureau chief. Previously she covered the Pentagon, the White House, the 2008 McCain campaign and City Hall for The Times.
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