california’s farm labor market the case of raisin grapes.pdfVIP

California’s Farm Labor Market: The Case of Raisin Grapes Philip Martin, UC-Davis and Bert Mason, CSUF May 8, 2009 Summary Raisin grapes are a commodity in which rising labor costs, uncertainty about the future availability of hand harvesters, and increasing competition from lower- cost production in Turkey are encouraging labor-saving mechanization. Grape varieties that mature earlier, allowing the canes on which bunches of grapes grow to be cut so that the grapes to dry into raisins while still on the vine, the dried on the vine or DOV method of production, facilitate the use of wine grape harvesters that use rotating fingers to knock the raisins from the vines and convey them to continuous paper trays for further drying or, if they are sufficiently dry, into bins for storage. DOV methods of production, which shift peak labor demands from September harvesting to winter pruning, were used for half of CA raisin crop in 2008. Introduction Raisins, mentioned in the Bible in the era of King David about 1,000 BC, are dried grapes. Green grapes normally have 22 to 26 percent sugar; drying reduces the amount of water so that raisins have 60 percent sugar by weight. The US was the largest producer of raisins until 2005, when Turkey’s production surpassed that of the US. Turkey and the US combine to produce about 80 percent of the world’s raisins. Almost all US raisins are produced in California’s San Joaquin Valley, where commercial raisin production began in the 1870s with the arrival of immigrants from present-day Armenia and Turkey. In 1909, CA produced 280,000 tons of green grapes that were dried into raisins (4 to 4.5 pounds of green grapes dry into a pound of raisins). In recent years, abut two million tons of green raisin- type grapes have been harvested, and 70 percent have been dried into raisins. About 95 percent of California rais