Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
man?” (fi gure 4.8), Spreckels framed hand labor as an outmoded and dis-
pensable practice of the past, denigrating the intellect of growers who still
used hand thinning and harvesting. Unlike the critics who questioned the
rationality of labor relations in California agriculture, Spreckels had to be
careful to avoid portraying labor use as a social problem with unfortunate
“social consequences.” Instead, the company needed to balance its rhetoric
and frame labor as a threat to rational farming practices without unduly
offending growers or sabotaging its own efforts to continually renew the
Bracero Program. By adopting mechanized production, Spreckels promised,
beet growers could ally themselves with all right-thinking and industrious
growers and thereby solve the farm labor problem.
Spreckels did fi nally achieve its goal of fully mechanized sugar beet pro-
duction. By 1965 most growers in California and other beet-producing
areas of the country were using machine thinning and harvesting. Not at
all coincidentally, 1965 was also the year in which Public Law 78 was ter-
minated, ending the Bracero Program. Growers howled in protest and
predicted the death of all agriculture in California if bracero labor were
taken from them, but most farm industries survived and in fact thrived,
either by mechanizing production or making more use of domestic and
undocumented sources of labor. The sugar beet industry made the transi-
tion to fully mechanized production with enormous help from the UC,
which deployed new advances in seed breeding, seed planting, and weed
control technology to reskill the practice of sugar beet farming.
In this respect, Spreckels did make a transformative change in beet
farming labor practices, but the changes took place over almost 30 years,
were tightly circumscribed by the larger politics surrounding farm labor,
and depended on aid from every level of the state. Even if the use of
Mexican nationals had been halted quickly at the end of World War II, it
is doubtful that increased use of thinning and harvesting technologies
would have truly solved Spreckels's production problems in the Salinas
Valley. Figure 4.9 provides indirect evidence for this claim, showing a
steady decline in sugar beet acreage after the Bracero Program ended in
1965, while the Valley's top vegetable crop, head lettuce, consistently
advanced in the same period.
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Today, there is virtually no sugar beet pro-
duction in the valley, and the Spreckels Salinas factory, once the larg-
est beet sugar processing facility in the world, closed in 1982 (Peterson
1981).
