Asparagus Farming Then and Now

 A recent article in the Los Angeles Times discussed how asparagus farming has been dying off in the United States with the transfer of the growing of asparagus to foreign countries. The primary reason is that asparagus farming remains very labor intensive requiring hand harvesting of the asparagus shoots. Labor costs have skyrocketed in the United States and the cost of labor is much lower in foreign countries. 

Asparagus farming unlike other crops has resisted all attempts at mechanization of the harvesting and still relies on stoop labor. 

Here is an excerpt from Auntie Soo Yin's new book "Asparagus Opera." . She is remembering following her father, San Tong, in the fields of their asparagus farm when she was a young child.:

"I have high regard for those who labor on a farm.  Their postures bent over; their faces tanned by a burning sun.  These silhouettes fill my horizon.  They are sweating.  Their boots are bought from a thrift shop.  And those heavy boots move field crates from row to row and onto sleds driven by mules.  Filled to overflowing, the sleds head for our packinghouse.  In the distance of time, I see the last of our slow-moving mules, the strongest mare that Father had kept against the onslaught of tractors and harrows.  The mule has been with us longer than I, and she knows to pull her asparagus sled filled with fresh harvest back to the right barn.  The old mule knows every worker on the Jue Joe Ranch too.

“It’s a backbreaking job,” says Father as he catches me watching the farm workers.  “It is ten to twelve hours a day—seven days a week—you stoop and rise until your back hurts; until your legs and shoulders and arms can’t stand no more.  But you can’t stop neither—you gotta take those shoots just as they come up!  You pick’em when they’re seven- or eight-inches high.  And they pop up day or night, and day or night you pick’em.  Even when we think the day’s over, they pop up come evening, and we gotta be out there with lamps lit and we gotta skin that field.

I pick up something heavy in our asparagus field.  My tool is a two-foot-long, medieval weapon.  It is forged of iron and its tip is forked like a rattler’s tongue.  Father shows me how to uproot expertly the earth’s green quills with this machete.  Like a reaper of old Song Dynasty times, he thrusts his machete at a steep angle—as if brushing the face of an exquisite scroll.  Soon, I follow my father’s motions, feeling clumsy with my iron rattler until, finally, I can do it, reaping asparagus shoots until the ground sings with the echo of a timeless rhythm; Verbena flows across his personal acreage.  I see the field’s stardust settle like silken specks on his hair and it softens the monkey grease routing across his suntanned face.  I see dirt buried beneath his fingernails, and when I kiss his rosy cheek, I taste the salt of the South China Sea."

Here is a link to the Los Angeles Times article which makes for fascinating reading concerning the current state of asparagus farming which has not changed much in 70 years!