Coming Monday: Labor shortages hurt farmers

WILLARD - Manuel Gaytan wishes Utahns realized how their cherries, melons and onions get to their tables.

They shop at trendy farmers markets, local fruit stands and grocery stores, but Gaytan doubts Utahns realize that much of their produce mostly is handpicked by undocumented immigrants.

If they did know, he says, some might not whisper "wetback" or "illegal alien" thinking he doesn't understand English. Others wouldn't stare at him in disgust when he's dressed in dirty work clothes.

"They think we are nobodies or something," says Gaytan, a U.S. citizen. "If they see you dressed all torn up, they think less of you."

Gaytan is one of more than 20,000 farmworkers in Utah, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. But while farmworkers are crucial to agriculture, many in Utah say they are not valued and often are overlooked, earning some of Utah's lowest wages with no health care or retirement benefits.

Even this weekend as the country observes Labor Day on Monday, Gaytan, his relatives and other farmworkers are scheduled to head to the fields. "There's no holidays for us," says Maria Gaytan, Manuel's wife of 29 years.

No one really knows how many farmworkers have proper documentation to work here. Federal and state government officials say they don't keep track of farmworker demographics. A Utah farmworker advocate estimates up to 95 percent of the state's farmworkers are undocumented immigrants. And some farmworkers say more than half of their peers are undocumented.

Farmworkers are "an invisible population" because they rarely gripe to anyone - bosses, immigrant groups or government agencies - about their poor, dangerous working conditions, says Corrie Jensen, a Utah Farmworker Program manager. Jensen runs a statewide program called "Futures Through Training" that provides only documented farmworkers with job training off the fields and helps them with emergency assistance.

"It's not a population that says, 'Hey, pay attention to us.' So it's easy to ignore them," says Jensen, who has worked with farmworkers for more than six years. "They're not complaining about their rights - they're just trying to survive."

Picking for a living: Most mornings, Manuel Gaytan gets the coffee pot started by 5:30 while his wife, Maria, is waking up. The couple and their 8-year-old daughter, Sarahi, share a tiny, two-bedroom brick house with their grown daughter, son-in-law and baby granddaughter. The brown-and-white run-down house, surrounded by dirt and gravel, sits between the peach trees and fields where the family works. It is hidden behind a big, two-story house with a spacious groomed yard with a fountain - the home of the farmer's mother.

Manuel, 52, started working for the Willard farmer when he moved from Texas to Utah 12 years ago after the Lord called him to the Beehive State to start a church, he said. He ended up in Willard, a farming town of about 1,600 people in Box Elder County, about an hour-long drive from Salt Lake City. Manuel says he took the job because he doesn't have to pay rent or work Sundays. (The farmer declined to be interviewed for this article.)

Manuel and Maria, usually dressed in jeans and worn-out hiking shoes, wait for their relatives most mornings before the whole family - including Sarahi and her 7-year-old niece, Annahi - heads to work the fields about 6:30 a.m. For breakfast, they enjoy sweetbread; for lunch, they bring potato and egg and bean burritos.

It takes Manuel and about seven relatives to nurture and harvest the farm's apple and peach trees, watermelons, pumpkin, jalapeños, green peppers and other produce. He jokes that he's never even tasted some of the produce he plants, such as eggplant and butternut squash.

"I only know how to pick them, I don't know how to cook them," he says with a tender chuckle.

Low wages, no benefits: For most of the year, Manuel works six days a week, from four to 12 hours a day. He saves throughout the year for his mandatory two-month vacation in November and December when there is no work.

Today, after a dozen years with the same farmer, he makes $7.75 an hour - occasionally he makes up to $18 when picking peaches by the basket. No health insurance. No vision or dental insurance. No retirement plan.

The families depend on free rice, ham, beans and canned veggies from a local food pantry to make ends meet. Maria makes wedding and birthday cakes for extra money, but she makes them at her daughter's house because her kitchen is too small.

Still, Manuel says, the family sometimes splurges on $5 pizzas, but he can't remember the last time they went out and paid for dinner.

"For me, luxury is Golden Corral because it's a buffet and you get to eat what you want," he says, referring to the home-style restaurant. "But, it's expensive - it's $10 each."

Sarahi and Annahi, the younger farmworkers, say they're saving their money from picking peaches for a trip to Disneyland and college. They both want to be teachers.

"I asked my mom for permission if I could go to college when I get bigger," Annahi says. "She said, 'Yes.' ''

Lack of health care: If farmworkers get sick, there's usually only one place they say they feel comfortable going to: Centro de Buena Salud (Good Health Center) in Brigham City. A family of four must make less than $1,667 a month to qualify for care, with more than 50 percent of their income from farming. No one asks about a person's citizenship status.

Dexter Pearce, deputy director of Community Health Centers, oversees the 10-year-old migrant health center that serves farmworkers statewide. The clinic's operating funds come from federal grants that provide for two bilingual doctors and a dentist. In 2005, the center served some 2,400 clients for diabetes, annual exams, prenatal care and depression.

Maria, 45, says the clinic helps, but it's only good for minor medical problems. She says she was worried when she had to have gallstone surgery a few months ago and didn't have the money for it. She later got a hospital charity program to help pay for it.

"It's not enough," Maria says of the clinic.

Farmers strained: Only 2 percent of the state's nearly 15,000 farms have a full-coverage workers' compensation plan to pay for loss of wages and unlimited medical bills. By law, only those farms that have a payroll of more than $50,000 are required to have a full-coverage compensation plan for employees and report it to the Utah Labor Commission, says Joyce Sewell, the commission's industrial accidents director.

Farms with a payroll of $8,000 or less don't have to provide any coverage; and those with payrolls from $8,000 to $50,000 are required to have full coverage or $300,000 liability insurance and $5,000 for medical care, Sewell says.

"Five-thousand dollars doesn't go very far if you have a serious injury," she says.

But better pay, benefits and retirement packages are big expenses for struggling farmers, says A.J. Ferguson, director of farm safety for the Utah Farm Bureau Federation.

"This is a touchy subject for the farmers," says Ferguson, whose group represents some 6,500 farmers statewide.

Many don't even have a retirement plan for their own families, Ferguson says. It also would be very difficult for farmers to pay better wages and provide benefits, Ferguson says.

"They don't have any way to provide it," he says. "A lot of them are just making enough to keep the farm."

No documentation: Trinidad Mondragon started picking watermelons when he moved from Mexico to Texas as an undocumented immigrant some 10 years ago. Mondragon, 30, is now a U.S. resident but says he can't forget about his fellow Mexican farmworkers who do not have proper U.S. documentation.

"They can't visit their families. They can't go to the stores without worrying. They can't do anything," he says.

Mondragon and Jensen say they've heard complaints from farmworkers who are never paid or have been run them off by farmers threatening to call U.S. immigration agents.

According to state law, Utah Labor Commissioner Sherrie Hayashi says, there's nothing the commission can do when farmers don't pay their employees. Farmers and farmworkers are exempt from a state law that mandates employers to pay employees. The only option is for farmworkers to take the farmer to small claims court. But, if a farmer fires a farmworker, then the employer is required to pay the employee, she says.

No more farming: Manuel Gaytan says he knows he doesn't have money. Some people would call him poor. But, he says he has done farming all these years because it's what he knows best, and it's where the Lord called him.

When he moved to Willard, Manuel started preaching by passing out pamphlets about Christianity to the farmworkers in the fields.

"That's where God wanted me," he says.

He later started a Bible study at his home. About 18 months ago, he started Iglesia Rios de Agua Viva, or the Rivers of Living Water Church - a group of about 30 adults and children who meet Sunday afternoons in the basement of the American Legion in Ogden.

Here, his hands take a rest from picking peaches and are used to pray for his church members.

Manuel has spent most of his life in the fields, but he says he wants more for his children and grandchildren. He dreams that they will own their own houses and get jobs outside of the fields. Farming no longer has a future because farmers are slowly selling out to developers that are turning fields into cookie-cutter homes, he says.

"I want them to have all that I don't have," Manuel says. "I know that the land we farm will one day stop."

jsanchez@sltrib.com