Collecting cherries in the garden. The boxes are freshly picked red cherries. Industrial cherry orchard. Buckets of collected sweet cherries. Close up view of green grass and full boxes. (Photo credit: Olesya Myzzz / Shutterstock)
Cherry growers say they're seeing a severe labor shortage amid President Donald Trump's nationwide immigration crackdown, leading to a massive shortage of berries.
A grower in the Mattawa, Washington, area lost about 300 bins — each weighing at least 350 pounds, horticulturist Erik Zavala told area told The Spokesman-Review in a report published this week.
“People watch the news,” Zavala said, referring to masked federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents detaining people as part of Trump's ramped-up immigration effort. “It’s definitely having an impact."
Zavala said he doesn't care "about that stuff," but knows "this is affecting the growers directly whether they are Democrat or Republican or whatever."
"These growers will lose a lot of money and are risking losing their farms because of a lack of labor," Zavala warned.
The workers who pick cherries in the area are typically migrants who came to the area from Mexico in search of better wages, according to the report.
But Zavala estimated that orchards that typically have 100 or 120 workers picking cherries have found they only have 20 or 30 who come to work. Many said they'd heard ICE agents had set up checkpoints near the Oregon border, which "discouraged a lot of pickers from taking the risk," he said.
Ben Tindall, executive director of Save Family Farming, said farms are facing a "full-blown crisis."
"Farmworkers and the farms that rely on them need immediate solutions – not more delays and confusion,” he said, according to the report. “We need decisive action. Without it, Washington’s family farms – and the food they grow – will vanish.”
As of late May, the Trump administration had deported approximately 200,000 people over a four-month period, according to Trump's "border czar," Tom Homan. The White House has also established a quota of 3,000 immigration-related arrests per day, triple its previous goal of 1,000.