By Oscar Jimenez
California’s Salinas Valley and the South Korean agricultural community of Paju—which hugs the North Korean border—are some 6,000 miles apart. But together, they tell the story of a global agriculture industry that is under stress from inflation, worker shortages and overall uncertainty.
The Salinas Valley is known for fruits and vegetables—“The Salad Bowl of the World”—while Paju is most famous for its soybeans. Every year, the city holds the Paju Jangdan Soybean Festival, where farmers gather to sell their crops to locals and tourists, and to talk about business.
Farmer Yun Chung-seong has been selling his beans since the festival's inception 27 years ago. He said his farming background goes back even further.
“I am 70 right now and have been farming ever since I was born,” Yun said.
Yun’s parents returned to Paju in 1961, eight years after the end of the Korean War.
The war left South Korea in a state of disarray. But as the years went by, Yun witnessed his country building itself back up from its war-torn and poverty-stricken state, into one of the world's leading economies.
That overall prosperity has led to serious complications in South Korea’s agriculture industry, however.
For one thing, it has meant that more lucrative sectors are crowding out agriculture. Farming and farm-related industries make up just 1.6% of the nation’s gross domestic product, according to the World Bank. That share has been declining for decades.
That means that the next generation of would-be farmers is finding opportunities elsewhere.
The result is a worsening farm labor shortage in places like Paju. According to South Korean government statistics, more than half the nation’s farm population is 65 or older.
The new generation includes Yun's son, Seong-jun, who is now in his 30s.
Yun Chung-seong came to the bitter realization long ago that his dream of passing the family farm down to his son had vanished.
“If farming were an industry that has a good future, and has sustainable economic gains, then I would think about teaching it to and handing it down to my son, but that isn’t the case. And, realistically, I don't think that will be possible,” he said.
Seung-jun has reached the same conclusion.
“If my father wasn’t working in this industry I may have thought to myself, ‘This is something I can work with,’ but since I've seen the realities up close, I still think I could do it and may be able to manage, but I don't think if I put everything into this line of work it would work out well,” he said. “As my father mentioned, it’s not easy.”
The U.S. faces an even deeper farm labor crisis, and the roots go far beyond an aging demographic.
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the number of family farm workers fell by more than 70% between 1950 and 2000. And, while farming has become much more automated since then, outside hires now make up more than half of the farm labor force. Many of those workers are migrants, in a time of immigration crackdowns.
It is one of the many factors making farming tough in the Salinas Valley, said Ryan Kelly, Vice President and General Manager of Boutonnet Farms, a diversified vegetable grower in business since 1935.
“It’s an extremely risky business. And, you know, it tends to be feast or famine, there are years when, you know, we do okay, break even, that's probably the majority of the years,” he said. “Occasionally, you make a little bit of money, and pretty frequently you lose a lot of money.”
These days, Kelly said, the operation is struggling.
He said that inflation alone has raised his total costs by around ten percent.
And, he said, the labor issues are complicated by government regulation. He points to California’s Assembly Bill 1066, known as the Phase-In Overtime for Agricultural Workers Act of 2016. As the name implies, the law gradually increased requirements for overtime pay and improved working conditions, beginning in 2019. Kelly said that the law has forced him to cut his employees hours to save money.
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