Olathe – The two-story, winged and wheeled contraption sways down the field over the sun-tipped corn stalks like a crazily configured houseboat chugging across a lake.
On board and in the stalks below, a crew of 41 workers hustles in the syncopated chores of assembling plastic boxes, snapping ears of corn off stalks, packing them into boxes and loading the corn onto a truck – about 40,000 ears every hour.
The sweet-corn harvest taking place on 3,000 acres in Montrose and Mesa counties is fast-paced and noisy. But the really frantic work behind this year’s crop started before the seed was even in the ground. Growers had to scramble like never before to get enough workers to plant and pick a crop that is eagerly awaited by corn connoisseurs across Colorado and much of the country.
An increasingly complex snarl of visa regulations and competition with resorts and other nonagricultural industries left growers with a lack of workers even as the ears were ripening.
The task of finding workers was complicated by the fact that most of the 250 or so migrant pickers on this year’s crop can’t stay in the local migrant-worker housing complex. The federal government has deemed it off-limits to some legal guest workers.
“We got plenty scared,” said Miguel Ramirez, who has harvested corn and helped to manage workers for the Olathe-based Tuxedo Corn company for 14 years.
Tuxedo Corn owner John Harold began the phone calls and applications to secure workers last winter knowing that many workers with permanent green-card visas no longer want to do the hard labor of farm work. The 66,000 visas made available nationally for temporary H-2B guest workers are also being snapped up by resorts and other nonagricultural industries.
Another class of guest workers with H2A visas targeted specifically for farm work was available, but the process of getting those visas requires months and mountains of paperwork, interviews and calls.
And even though the 72-bed migrant-housing complex near Olathe is sitting nearly empty, workers couldn’t stay there because the voluminous regulations covering H2A workers specify that such workers cannot be housed in federally funded housing.
“It’s a very sad situation. Frankly, it’s making me ill,” said Tim Heavers, director of the Montrose County Housing Authority, the agency that manages the housing unit.
“It’s one of those things that nobody understands,” said Harold, who with the backing of 20 other growers lobbied legislators and federal housing officials for months trying to change the regulations – a chore it now appears will literally require an act of Congress.
Many of the workers have ended up cramming into the homes, apartments and trailers of family and friends who live full time in this agricultural area. A few local workers were hired, but most have not lasted.
“This is kind of hard work. It’s too tough for some of the locals,” Ramirez said as he watched over the pickers veiled in bright bandannas against the heat of the sun and the slash of corn stalks. “But we make money doing this. We can make more than $100 a day.”
Harold, who first planted the popular Olathe Sweet corn in the late 1970s, is not crowing about how much money he will make this year.
Colorado’s sweet-corn crop last year brought in more than $16 million, but high fuel costs are cutting into profits.
Harold said two years ago it cost about $600 to ship a load of corn to Phoenix. This year, it costs $1,600.
The problems of producing sweet corn are hinted at in a sign on a window at the Olathe Sweet processing plant reading, “Bang head here.”
But Harold said he has no plans to stop growing corn.
“I’m like (President) Bush. I started a corn company with no exit strategy,” Harold said.
Staff writer Nancy Lofholm can be reached at 970-256-1957 or nlofholm@denverpost.com.
