The cherries are rotting on the trees in Ian Chandler’s orchards. Branch after branch hang heavy with fruit the Oregon farmer calls “mummified” — dark, shriveled and unappetizing.
They should have been picked a couple of weeks ago to tempt shoppers at markets and stores, or processed to garnish Shirley Temple mocktails, shiny and fat, promising bursts of sweetness.
The lost harvest has hit almost a quarter of Chandler’s 125 acres of cherry trees — not because of bad weather, disease or blight, just because there was no one to pick the fruit.
“What you’re going to see is a bunch of fat, happy raccoons this winter,” Chandler said ruefully, standing amid his still burdened trees. “Unfortunately, we weren’t able to harvest these.”
He said he’s built up a loyal seasonal workforce for his Wasco County operation called CE Farm Management, about 90 minutes from Portland, with the same people coming year after year and staying in touch with birth announcements and Christmas cards in between. But this year half of them did not arrive, and many of his neighbors were scrambling for pickers too. All told, Chandler said he will lose $250,000-$300,000 of revenue, left to rot on the trees.
“It’s lost revenue for the operation, which is one thing, but it’s also lost revenue for the workers that would have been able to pick them had they been here,” he said.
“The beginning of the season, it coincided, unfortunately, with a lot of really strong immigration enforcement down in southern California, where our workforce comes from, and that had a chilling effect on people wanting to move.”
Chandler’s pickers are mostly Latinos who follow the harvests in the west and northwest. But with raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement on cities and workplaces and detentions and even deportations ensnaring many with no criminal records, he has seen a dramatic drop-off in labor this year.
Chandler said his workforce has been coming to his farm every year but many are now afraid to travel.
Unpicked cherries on one of Chandler’s trees. The farmer estimates he will lose upwards of $250,000 in revenue.
It’s a situation that’s being repeated across the nation as crops ripen for harvest. The US Department of Agriculture estimates 42% of hired crop farmworkers are undocumented immigrants, with no authorization to work.
Another 26% are immigrants who have become citizens or permanent residents.
Since April, 1.4 million people have dropped out of the US labor force — 802,000 of whom were foreign-born, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Farmworkers are not tracked in the official monthly jobs reports, but analysts agree immigration policy is having an impact generally across the nation.
The issue has come to the attention of President Donald Trump, who promised help for the agricultural sector in a Tuesday morning phone interview with CNBC. “I take care of the farmers. I love the farmers. They’re a very important part of this country, and we don’t want to do anything to hurt the farmers,” he said.
Vice President JD Vance has said his preferred solution is automation. But Chandler’s farm won’t be mechanized — he believes cherries are best harvested by hand, preferably an experienced one to not rip off next year’s crop that’s already showing as buds. He does hire locally, but he says Oregonians, whether they are students on summer break or adults looking for full-time employment, only last in non-picking positions, like scanning buckets of produce or driving a tractor.
“I worked in high school in the cherry industry back in the 90s and then got back into this industry back in 2011 until current. You do not find people who are normally born here in the United States, unless they’re children of immigrants who are already doing this work, who want to work in this kind of industry,” he said. “It just doesn’t exist.”
Nevertheless, everyone hired by Chandler provides identification and work authorization so he does not know who may be in the country illegally.
“We’ve had relationships with these workers for years,” he said. “You talk to a family, you get a good relationship with them, they recommend more family members, and that’s how you build up your workforce. You could have all the children born in the United States, but if mom’s still trying to work through the immigration system, and has an issue, the whole family might say, ‘Look, we’re not going to risk it, because we don’t want mom to get picked up, so we’re going to stay down in California.’ So, then we lose our workforce.”
Many farmers provide accommodation to their seasonal workers. But cabins like this one have been vacant this year.
Staying home ‘to be safe’
One of those absent from Oregon farms this year is a woman who told us to call her Lisa. She has permission to work through the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, but asked her actual name not be used for fear it might hamper her DACA renewal. Her three young children are all US citizens, but she worries about her mother and stepfather who have lived in the US for decades as undocumented workers and so she stayed in California.
“My parents are agriculture workers and seasonal workers, so every summer they will migrate to the state of Oregon to work the cherry season,” she said, adding that she and the children would often join them. “But this year, we decided to stay home just to be safe.”
While Chandler pointed out the financial loss he and his workers will suffer this season, Lisa highlighted the impact on small farmers like Chandler. And both said the federal government will also lose out.
“There is no shady under-the-table stuff. It’s all above board,” Chandler said, noting the deductions he made from each worker’s check to pay federal and local taxes and make contributions to Medicare and Social Security.
“There seems to be a big disconnect when (opponents say,) ‘There’s this shadow economy of undocumented people being paid in certain ways.’ No, everything is above board. Everybody shows documentation to work.”
Lisa said about $150 was automatically deducted from her paycheck of some $900, and she thought the same was true for her parents even though they cannot file for a tax refund or use Medicare or Social Security, both of which they pay into.
The tax argument was raised by Trump too in his CNBC interview. “We’re going to be coming out with rules and regulations. I mean, you’ll see a farmer with the same person working for him for 20 years. The person’s even paying taxes and other things,” Trump said, drawing a distinction between hard-working undocumented immigrants who work on farms and those who commit violent crimes.
Lisa said she is concerned about her mother and stepfather who have brought in harvests on American farms for years.
Lisa said she is concerned about her mother and stepfather who have brought in harvests on American farms for years. Evelio Contreras/CNN
The word “criminal” is a trigger for Lisa, who choked up as she stressed her mother had not committed any crimes. And she highlighted the role her parents played in keeping food on American tables during the Covid-19 outbreak.
“I remember back in 2020 when the whole pandemic happened, my parents were being considered essential workers,” she said. “My parents were working, exposing themselves, to bring food to the table for other people.” Agricultural workers were given special permission to travel and work when much of the nation stayed at home in 2020. Lisa, then an EMT, was also busy, she said.
“That year, that summer, my parents took my kids to Oregon just so I could work in the front line and transport patients to the hospital so they could get the treatment that they needed. My parents were keeping my kids safe during that time so I could be out there in the front line.”
‘Who’s going to do the jobs if we quit?’
In the fields of Oregon, farmers and managers are trying to keep up morale. Chandler leans into his six years of service as an Army infantry officer, trying to buoy his workers as he once buoyed his troops in Iraq.
“You have to have the intestinal fortitude to keep on going, because all of your workers depend on you, and … you got to show the positive face.”
At a nearby berry farm, crew supervisor Manuel Nava said his teams of pickers of course wanted the money each container of fruit would earn them — about $5 for each bucket of blueberries picked — but they also felt they deserved respect.
“When they hear all those comments on the news and the TV, they don’t like it,” he said. “They say, ‘look how hard we’re working under the sun when it’s 80, 85 … who’s going to do the jobs if we quit or we leave?’ It’s a big conversation. It’s hard work.”
Nava says there are wider implications of these crackdowns, warning they will spread beyond agriculture. Many of his workers rotate to different industries after the season is over, including making Christmas wreaths.
“If the immigration (officials) keep playing the way they are, they’re pretty hard with people, it will not only impact farms, it will impact … construction, landscaping,” he said.
Nava said another key part of his work this year is tamping down any unnecessary fears and countering misinformation posted on social media and spread amongst farm workers in WhatsApp groups. His farm has even taken steps to reassure their workers, posting signs that require all visitors, including government agents, to stop and get permission before they can come onto the property.
“I think (our employees) like to know that we support them and that we know that they’re part of our community and we want to look out for them,” said Oregon farmer Katie Bolton. “They come out here and do hard work every day for us. Without them, we don’t have crops that go out to the fields, so we respect what they do for us on a daily basis.”
While keeping out of sight in central California, Lisa said she and other workers closely follow which farmers are publicly backing their workers.
“It’s really important,” she stressed. “I wish there were more people like them supporting people like us.”
It’s why cherry farmer Ian Chandler is continuing to press the issue, despite normally trying to avoid politics and focus on his crops.
“We work with normal people, good, hard-working people that have a good work ethic,” he said. “That’s exactly what the United States needs and wants. And hopefully, there’s a way forward on comprehensive immigration reform. As an industry, we need it. As a country, we need it. This is a workforce that’s vital for continuing the economic prosperity of the United States.”
“And it’s not just our industry,” he added. “It’s all of the interconnected industries that rely on the base of agriculture in our community to make everything work. If the base of agriculture struggles, everything else is going to struggle as well.”
As she sits in her mother’s kitchen chopping vegetables for ceviche, Lisa said her family is trying to stay indoors to avoid detection and, she admits, they are often bored. Her youngest son flips a frisbee with the words “Life is good” on it as her middle child squishes Play-Doh. Both would benefit from outdoor activity — one to strengthen asthmatic lungs and the other to counter a vitamin D deficiency, Lisa said — but for now they’re inside, shades drawn to keep out some of the summer heat and away from any prying eyes.
For her and her mixed-status three-generation family, cherry picking meant more than money. “It’s almost like a tradition, every single summer we will go up there, we will pick cherries, and then after work we will get to know more places in Oregon,” she said. Still, even this year a little bit of Oregon has made it to central California.
Across the kitchen, there’s a cardboard box brought by a relative. It’s full of cherries, picked from an Oregon farm. Unlike the ones now rotting on Ian Chandler’s farm, these had a chance to be harvested by hand and are in their prime — plump and juicy and ready to eat.
CNN
