Student helps state
understand migrant farm workforce
Maine’s agricultural economy has long relied on seasonal workers from here and away, and some now call the state home, if only for part of the year.
Treva deMaynadier, a college student from central Maine, spent last summer meeting some of the estimated 2,700 migrant and seasonal farm workers who come to the state each year to harvest blueberries, broccoli and other crops.
As an intern with the Maine Department of Labor, deMaynadier surveyed migrant workers in Down East Maine during the summer blueberry harvest and in Aroostook County during the broccoli season from April to October.
Migrant workers account for about 60 percent of hired farm help in Maine, according to the labor department, and they help sustain rural agricultural economies doing work that can’t be mechanized but that many don’t want to do, such as picking broccoli and cauliflower.
“Their desire to improve the lives of their families provides motivation to travel great distances and make sacrifices to find work,” wrote deMaynadier, a graduate of Waterville Senior High School now studying at Oberlin College in Ohio who participated in the internship through the Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center.
DeMaynadier met workers from Canada, Mexico, Honduras, Haiti, the U.S. and elsewhere, some of whom usually spend half the year in Maine with their children, who attend local schools and learn English. In the first of 52 conversations, deMaynadier met a 32-year-old woman in Caribou originally from Texas who has come to The County for the broccoli harvest since she was a child with her family. She now comes to Maine with her partner and their three children from April through October, and she considers Texas and Maine to be her family’s permanent home.
“She says she likes working for this farmer,” deMaynadier wrote. “She likes Maine, and as long as there is work here she will continue to come.” Back in Texas, the family has usually lived half the year without working, relying on unemployment benefits, though she said her partner is now able to work in the winter as a commercial truck driver.
Maine farms have used seasonal laborers for decades, and started hiring migrant workers particularly from Mexico and central America in the 1990s. Despite so many hours of hard work, some have liked the area well enough to stay. About 600 Latino residents have settled in Hancock and Washington counties since 2000 and helped found the community integration group Mano en Mano.
In 2015, 1,560 migrant workers originally were hired for the Down East blueberry harvest and 297 were hired for the broccoli season in Aroostook County, according to the labor department. Others worked in wreath-making, packing and the potato and apple harvests.
At another camp housing broccoli workers last summer, deMaynadier met a woman originally from Mexico who’s been working there for more than a decade, along with her husband and son. While she and her husband usually left The County in October to vacation in her native Mexico and then work in Florida, their son has remained in Presque Isle, staying with a local family and going to school. He recently graduated high school but wasn’t sure what to do with his future, deMaynadier found.
“Her son wants to continue in school and she says she wants him to stay in Maine and go to a community college, but he wants to travel with her and her husband and work in the fields,” deMaynadier wrote. “She is hoping that after a year of work he will change his mind and go back to school. ‘El es muy joven’ (he’s too young),” she says, “He doesn’t know what is good for him.”
