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Apple growers grapple with unsustainable labor costs

An apple grower says while this year’s harvest has been fantastic, the labor cost environment overshadows most optimism.  

Adam Brauer is the farm manager at Schwallier’s Country Basket in Sparta, Michigan.

“As far as the future of apples, if we don’t have some type of change or some type of assistance or creative legislative solution to what we need, the industry as we know it will start to die out and families and smaller growing operations will start to phase away,” he shares.

USApples economist Chris Gerlach tells Brownfield that’s a trend already happening.

“A lot of farms are looking at equity solutions,” he says. “They’re taking on partners, that’s leading to a lot of mergers and acquisitions. We see some data from the U.S. Census Bureau that shows us that the small and medium are becoming large and the large and extra large are becoming super large.”

Brauer says only 10 percent of his production is sold directly to the consumer but it’s what’s keeping the family farm in business.

Plans for the farm to transition to his generation are on hold until mandated cost increases for using the H-2A guest worker program become more sustainable.

Brownfield interviewed Brauer following a farmer roundtable focused on labor and marketing issues Tuesday at his farm.