Jon DeVaney, president of the Washington State Tree Fruit Association, was the featured speaker Monday at the Spokane County Fair in an afternoon session on apples. “Tree fruit is still a huge employment driver in our state,” DeVaney said. “During the peak, we have 140,000 people picking fruit. And 100,000 of those are seasonal workers.”
Since the statistics on income are always a year behind, because that’s how long many varieties of apples can be stored before they are sold, the most recent figures from 2016 show that apples from Washington generated $2.4 billion in sales, which is about 22 percent of all the dollars brought in by the state’s agriculture industry.
And local farmers have always relied on migrant workers to pick that fruit. During the early part of the last century, those workers tended to be out-of-work Americans, from Arkansas or Oklahoma for example. Now that the labor force mostly consists of Mexican nationals who legally come over part-time to pick the fruit.
