Eric Hanagan has one basic expectation for the farm near Swink, where he plants 150 acres of vegetables and melons every year: Each acre should yield at least one truckload of marketable produce.
Semis filled with tomatoes. Cucumbers. Squash. Melons. Onions. Perfect pumpkins. Red beets. Sweet corn. Okra. And chiles. Lots of chiles.
At Hanagan Farms, none of these crops are planted, cultivated, irrigated, harvested or packed by machines.
It’s a truth repeated for more than a century on Arkansas Valley farms covering about 10,000 acres of Colorado’s most fertile land. There are the coveted Rocky Ford melons, of course, but much of the ground is planted with the highly profitable and labor-intensive onions, tomatoes and chiles.
What’s different now is that the men who do this work – often migrant workers from Mexico – are at the white-hot center of the debate about illegal immigration.
The debate will rage on this winter among lawmakers in Denver and Washington, D.C. But in October, in Swink, as the first frost loomed, the harvest had to go on.
“We need that kind of labor,” says Mike Bartolo, manager of Colorado State University’s farm research station in Rocky Ford. “And believe me, nobody is going to be wanting to do it.”
At Hanagan Farms, a four-man crew of year-round employees swells by seven or eight in late spring. The group grows to 15 in early summer, when the crops need more attention.
Men, most on temporary work visas, hoe the long rows of vegetables and tend to irrigation systems.
As the temperatures rise, the workers begin the harvest, picking as much as they can, for as long as the day allows.
“They pick like madmen to get it all in,” says Hanagan’s older brother, Chuck, 43, the county executive director for Otero-Crowley County Farm Service Agency. “It’s backbreaking work.”
They fill boxes with tomatoes. They dig and top onions and bend low to pluck cucumbers for slicing and pickling.
They haul 5-gallon buckets brimming with produce, sling bushel bags over their shoulders and toss melons to fill trucks headed to Kroger, Safeway and Wal-Mart distribution centers.
The family never minds selling at farmers markets or their own stand, but “sometimes we have to pick ourselves, and it’s awful,” says Chuck Hanagan’s youngest daughter, Caitlin, a senior at Swink High School.
Some of the crew have been coming to Swink from Mexico for 35 years. They start at $8.60 an hour and receive housing and utilities, plus a bus ticket from home and back.
Eric Hanagan tries to hire locally, but even in a community where 450 jobs have been lost in the past two years, that rarely works out.
Three years ago – the first year the Hanagans used the H2A agricultural visa program, which allows farms to hire workers from other countries legally – he applied for 12 men. The local job service office said he’d never be allowed that many visas, but promised there were 18 local candidates for the work.
Hanagan invited them all for interviews the next day. Seven showed up. He hired them all, but only five reported for work. Of them, one stayed only an hour. One lasted two weeks.
And still the harvest had to come out of the field.
The Hanagans are reluctant to give up farming lucrative vegetables, but each year Eric reassesses, sometimes putting more acres in machine-managed crops, such as feed corn, wheat and alfalfa.
“I’d say fewer than half the farmers in the area grow produce,” he says. “It may be as low as a third because of the risk and the labor problems and other headaches that come along with vegetable production.”
Margins are thin, so business mistakes are painful. Eric bottom-lines it in a box of cantaloupes. It costs $7.50- $8 to produce a 40-pound box of melons. About $4 of the production cost is in the packing. The other $4 covers seed, water, cultivation, hoeing and picking.
The miracle of geography allows him sell his melons for about $10 a box. “We’ve got a reputation,” he says. “If they’re Rocky Ford melons, Kroger and Safeway pay a dollar more per box. The marketability is so much better.”
But reputation alone isn’t enough to move the vegetables to the produce department. “You’ve got to remember all that went into getting the food there,” says CSU’s Bartolo. “And part of the reason our food is coming in from other sources is the cost of labor.”
Dana Coffield: 303-954-1954 or dcoffield@denverpost.com
