By Sherry Robinson
My local purveyor of roasted green chile has crowds of people waiting for their coveted yearly sack.
Just as predictable as the crowds are the doomsday predictions. This year it was “The chile crisis: Declining production amid labor, water challenges” from the Albuquerque Journal. Every year we hear about issues for growers, about threats to the state’s legacy as the nation’s largest chile producer.
One towering factor is trying to find workers. Here’s a job description posted on the U.S. Department of Labor website: “Hand pick quality (mature) green chile from plants into buckets (10 gallon). Worker will carry full bucket and chile and walk to trailer to dump into trailer and back. Must be able to lift up to 60 pounds. Worker must be able to work in diverse weather conditions (hot, dry, cold, wet, windy, and dew moisture). Able to bend, stoop, kneel, reach, walk across fields carrying 60 pound buckets and other related activities.”
For $15 an hour. Who wouldn’t jump at the chance, right? Who can resist “bend, stoop, kneel”? Americans have been resisting in droves.
Jhett Kendall Browne, a blogger, chef, and fourth generation chile roaster at Farmers Chile Market in Albuquerque, writes: “An open secret among the chile community is that many chile pickers are illegal immigrants. The fact is, picking chile is a grueling job requiring someone to hunch over a 2 foot chile plant in the summer sun with no shade all day. There are few ways to really improve this. It is just an incredibly difficult job with fewer and fewer people wanting to do it.”
He is grateful for the hard-working chile pickers.
Chile is labor intensive because many thousands of tons of green chile must be handpicked. Red chile can be mechanically harvested, but it’s only about 10% of the harvest.
Science is riding to the rescue, again. Over the years, plant scientists at New Mexico State University have given growers more disease-resistant plants, more productive plants, and even bigger, meatier chiles. Now they’re focused on the components of mechanical harvesting.
Mechanical chile harvesters have been around for years, but we’re talking about a delicate fruit that’s sold fresh and must be as flawless as tomatoes entered in the county fair. To date, mechanical pickers have bruised the merchandise. So machines had to improve, and scientists had to come up with a resilient fruit that was still tasty as well as a single-stemmed plant at the right height with fruit up high. They understood that some of the chiles would be damaged and compensated with productivity and a higher density of plants in the field. This is according to a study published in Hort Technology last spring.
“So one machine will take the place of what basically 60 people… do in a day,” grower Darren Gillis told KRWG. “So we’re not really trying to eliminate jobs. We’re just trying to fill jobs for people that aren’t there anymore. And cost-wise, we can do it for probably half price of what it takes to do it by hand.”
Travis Day, executive director of the New Mexico Chile Association, called mechanized harvest “a big industry game changer” that wouldn’t “fully replace the hand picking of chile” but would help “farmers that really need that help to get their crop out of the field.
“You know, they’re still not able to find American workers to pick their chile,” he said.
So, yes, acreage and production are dropping, workers and water are both scarce, Mexico has become a big competitor, and other producers falsely label their chile as Hatch chile.
But this is a good season, there’s plenty of chile, and we’re still number one. For that we rejoice.
