News

A shortage of laborers to work farms in Southwest Colorado has stunted local agricultural operations’ ability to grow and, at the same time, cut a potential avenue of employment. A local effort, however, is working toward a solution.

Rachel Landis, former head of Fort Lewis College’s Environmental Center who now is director of the Good Food Collective, said a new cooperative has formed to help fill the labor gap in Southwest Colorado’s agricultural sector.

“It’s a theme over and over again that labor is a huge missing piece in the agricultural community,” Landis said. “But to get this done, we’re going to have to get creative.”

Peeling away the layers of why there is a shortage of available hands to help on ranches and farms in Southwest Colorado is a laboring task in itself.

For starters, Southwest Colorado’s erratic and fickle weather causes short growing seasons: It depends on the crop, but seasons average about 90 days. As a result, there is no assurance of year-round, or even reliable part-time, employment to be able to make a living wage and live in the area.

Even if a worker were to nail down a reliable job, the pay usually doesn’t meet the high cost of living, namely for housing and transportation. To receive better pay requires being more highly skilled, but the training usually doesn’t exist in this area, Landis said.

And on top of these logistical obstacles, there’s a troublesome cultural issue.

“There’s rural flight,” Landis said. “People don’t see meaningful opportunities in living rurally anymore.”

When there is no one to work the fields, it is hard for local farms and ranches to build their operation, and in worst-case scenarios, even get their product out.

“We have known for several years that labor is the most limiting factor for small farmers to take the next step and continue to grow beyond a one- or two-person operation,” said Beth LaShell, coordinator for FLC’s Old Fort at Hesperus.

In the last few years, there has been a concerted effort to find solutions that work both for agricultural operators as well as laborers. And one place to look has been the work the Rocky Mountain Farmers Union has done in other areas of the state.

Military veterans turned farmersDan Hobbs, lead cooperative specialist with the Rocky Mountain Farmers Union, said the group developed a model where workers make up a cooperative, which then can negotiate contracts, help with transportation and figure out insurance needs with ag operators looking for workers.

The model was tested in Brighton, with military veterans making up the workforce, during the vegetable harvest season last fall. Hobbs said the project’s first go around was rather successful, and the group hopes to refine it this year.

“We envision a pretty wide range of services, from unskilled to skilled, to help out with harvesting, transporting, weeding, pruning, fixing fences, helping with livestock and possibly landscaping,” he said.

Other similar initiatives were launched in Pueblo and Taos, New Mexico, with varying levels of success. But each area presents its own challenges.

So what could work in Southwest Colorado?

“We really have no models to work off,” Hobbs said. “We’re building the road as we walk it here.”

Landis said the Good Food Collective received a three-year grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture geared at a gleaning initiative to harvest unused fruit and vegetables and redistribute the food to people in need.

But the grant exposed a glaring problem: a lack of people to help glean.

This year, organizers said two crews, one based in La Plata County and the other in Montezuma County, will be on call for work four days a week. If there’s no work to be done on the farms, workers will be paid through the grant money for tasks like gleaning and other duties.

While it isn’t a sustainable model to rely on grant money, Landis said it will allow the cooperative to keep working out the kinks in a potential long-term model.

LaShell said it will also be important to figure out how to keep workers employed year-round. To maintain that employment continuity may mean reaching out to farms that need work at different times of the season. Landis also suggested exploring possible partnerships with Purgatory Resort.

Jude Schuenemeyer with the Montezuma Orchard Restoration Project said when most farms and ranchers are shutting down for the season, work at the orchard just begins. The operation has typically used resources like AmeriCorps crews but would be open to participating in the cooperative.

“The problem for the average small farm, to hire a person and do it right … is expensive,” he said. “It also takes a lot to train people for what they need to do.

“If it was an easily solvable problem, someone would have solved it,” Schuenemeyer said. “But (this cooperative) has potential.”

jromeo@durangoherald.com