Farm Workers Get Help To Be Their Own Boss

July 31, 2013 by Daniela Leave a comment

Kirk Siegler featured a piece on ALBA Organics on Morning Edition at NPR. You can go here for the broadcast. Although ALBA concedes that not everyone will make it, this still gives migrant farm workers an opportunity to become their own boss. Here’s an excerpt from the story:

Northern California’s Salinas Valley is often dubbed America’s salad bowl. Large growers there have long relied on thousands of seasonal workers from rural Mexico to pick lettuce, spinach and celery from sunrise to sunset. Many of these workers seem destined for a life in the fields. But a program that helps field workers, like Raul Murillo, start their own farms and businesses is starting to yield a few success stories.

Murillo leases a 3-acre strawberry farm from a cooperative called ALBA Organics. It trains longtime workers in organic farm management and helps with things like fertilizer and irrigation tools.

Murillo can sell his berries back to ALBA’s cooperative, which does a brisk business with grocery stores in the nearby Bay Area.

If God permits, he says, he’ll continue turning a modest profit so he can hire more people who need the work. Under ALBA’s rules, Murillo can lease this land at a subsidized rate only for a few years; after that he’s on his own. But it’s a risk he’s willing to take even though he’d leave behind the steady paycheck he gets still working for big growers.

It’s about being your own boss, instead of working for a foreman, he says. And at 45, he wants to try going out on his own before he gets too old.

Murillo’s story is not unlike many of the 50 or so other farmers-in-training here at ALBA. Many have spent their entire lives in the fields, moving from one harvest to the next, from California down to Mexico, then back.

Farmers at ALBA learn about production, marketing, management and organic farming in order to start their own farming businesses.

“So it gives them a chance to take a bit of control of their lives,and not have to work for somebody else,” says Nathan Harkleroad, who is in charge of ALBA’s training programs, which are run out of an airy, converted farm house.

“You know, is everyone going to make

Author: Daniela

I will forever be grateful that I was introduced to the utility and beauty of hand crafted products early in life - from the symbolic motifs sewn into the coarse linen fabric of Croatian traditional wear to the colorful Kilim carpets that decorated the parquet floors in my grandmother's living room. I treasure the memories of my grandfather teaching me how to protect myself against the "evil eye," the smell of the flower stalls in the open air market where my grandmother bought produce early every morning for the day’s meals and the summers spent at my great grandmother's where the village wags would come to gossip over thick, black Turkish coffee in her cool stone kitchen. Someone noted that "For all of us that want to move forward, there are a very few that want to keep the old methods of production, traditions and crafts alive." I am a fellow traveler with those who value the old traditions and folk wisdom. I believe the knowledge they possess can contribute significantly to our efforts to build a more sustainable world - one that values the individual over the corporation, conservation over growth and happiness over wealth.