As California's farms adjust to less water and more extreme weather, farmworkers could face challenges in an era of new technology and shrinking farmland.

The state has long been a top food producer for the nation and home to about a quarter of the country's agricultural workers, but projections of a changing climate and concern over long-term water sources are causing growers, economists and workers to rethink how the employment picture could shape up in the coming decades.

"Maybe [there will be] more permanent jobs, maybe longer jobs in some areas, but for less people," said Gaspar Rivera-Salgado, project director at UCLA's Center for Labor Research and Education.  

That presents a dilemma for farmworkers, said Rivera-Salgado.

"How do you transition from agriculture to other industries? I think that is the other big challenge," he said. "Sometimes, there is a misfit between jobs that are available and your local labor force."

A field in Oxnard, where concern is growing over rapid urbanization and loss of farmland. (Dorian Merina/KPCC)

Losing farmland, straining workers

On a recent afternoon just east of Oxnard, Javier Gonzalez stood at his fruit stand, waving to an empty field behind him.

It hasn't been sown in 10 months, he said, though it used to yield rows of green celery. When asked why, he put it bluntly: "No water."

It turns out more farmland, like the field in Oxnard, is being left idle: about half a million acres statewide due to the drought, according to a projection by the UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences. That’s a risk for a place like Oxnard, where farmland has been lost at a fast rate to strip malls and housing tracts.

Recent laws in Oxnard have made it harder to do that, but all over, farmland is coming under pressure. Even before the drought, the state was losing more than 50,000 acres of farmland per year, or about one square mile every four days, according to California's Department of Conservation.

For workers, all of this may mean picking up and moving, or staying put and trying to learn new skills to compete.

This dry field, typically planted with celery, has been left idle for ten months, according to Javier Gonzalez who says the lack of water has kept the farm from planting. (Dorian Merina/KPCC)

Struggling to keep up

"Right now, there are lots of people out of work – those that are used to working in the fields – because there just isn’t water," said Alfreda Juarez, 45, in Spanish.

Juarez came from Oaxaca in Southern Mexico in the late 1990s, a time she said when work was easy to find in Oxnard. But now that’s changed. She said her hours cutting and packaging salad mixes of spinach, lettuce and radishes have been cut and shifts reduced.

"It’s tough to find work, but it’s also difficult because the economy: everything is still just as expensive," she said, noting that she and her family are struggling to cover house expenses, like a water bill that has risen past $170.

Juarez is one of an estimated 400,000 workers throughout the state, doing everything from planting and harvesting to irrigating and packaging. Many are undocumented and move from place to place to follow work, complicating the picture of just how many workers depend on agriculture for their livelihoods. A 2013 study by the Migration Policy Institute, for example, found that the number of workers may actually be double what is typically reported.

Recent data from the Department of Labor shows that these workers have been changing over the past decade: more likely to have young children, have lower levels of formal education and be less mobile.

Lost jobs, but also opportunities

California already is projected to lose 10,100 farm production jobs due to the drought, said  Josué Medellín-Azuara, associate research engineer at the Center for Watershed Sciences at UC Davis, referring to the August study.

"At the same time, there will be some improvement in yields and more drought-tolerant varieties as we've seen," said Medellín-Azuara.

So the picture for workers may not be all bleak.

"Some of this may be more labor intensive, some of this may be less labor intensive," he said.

Despite the challenges, some growers still see a demand for skilled labor.

"There's going to be a need for irrigation technicians that can read the data and interpret that data for more precise water use – that would be the highest need,"said Scott Deardorff, a fourth-generation farmer in Ventura County. He pointed at workers packing boxes of cilantro and loading produce at his facility in Oxnard during a recent visit.

"On the flip side, if we get cut too much more on our water allocation, we won't be able to farm all the land we have, so we'll need less people to work the fields and harvest and cool and ship our product," he said, noting that he's already had to fallow about 100 acres this year.

In the end, it will take a special kind of labor, and creativity, to face the years ahead.

"We need smart people in the farming industry," said Deardoff. "We have lots of problems we need to figure out."