COLUMN ONE : Betting on Hard Labor and a Plot of Land : Sharecropping, notorious in the Old South, is gaining strength in California. Despite potential for abuse, farm workers see it as a way to boost their fortunes.

SALINAS —  On a slow afternoon before the hectic days of harvest, Hipolito Meza squinted beneath his Michigan Wolverines baseball cap at his three acres of strawberries, each dark green plant an engine of agricultural wealth.

A big-shouldered, exuberant man, Meza gave up a $60,000-a-year paycheck as a welder and machinist two years ago, at age 45, so he could get into the strawberry business. He and his wife, Leticia, wanted to boost their income and spend more time with their children. And with their first year’s crop, they netted $4,000 more than they did with his old job.

Gaudencio and Raquel Aguilar had a similar dream. But they lost their shirts and are suing their former partner, a big Santa Maria farming company.

Both couples are modern sharecroppers.

The Mezas, the Aguilars and thousands like them have been lured by a controversial practice dating from the end of the Civil War that is quietly growing throughout California, home of the nation’s most productive farmland.

While sharecropping has a long--and sometimes lurid--history in the Deep South, the practice is relatively new to California, where the first sharecroppers were Japanese Americans who used the practice to get back into farming after being stripped of their land during World War II.

A new generation of sharecroppers has sprung up in the last two decades because of a glut of labor, new markets for carefully groomed produce and a desire by large farming companies to cut labor costs and paperwork.

This time, it is mostly Latino farm workers and hourly wage earners who sign up to sharecrop, fired with ambition to become their own bosses, buy a house and move up the economic ladder.

In the basic sharecrop deal, a large company puts up money, land, seeds or equipment. The farmer mostly provides labor. Profits are shared at harvest.

Not surprisingly, shippers and growers prefer to describe sharecroppers as subcontractors or independent growers. Yet the arrangement, by any name, has powerful appeal, particularly to those laboring in the state’s long, hot rows of berries and vegetables.

In fields around the state, farm workers--many of whom declined to give their names--told The Times that while there were bad harvests and bad deals, they had made money by sharecropping.

To be sure, exploitative sharecrop arrangements survive as well. Some deals leave ill-prepared workers in violation of tax and labor laws and locked in debt, their souls owned by the agribusiness company store.

Critics say that many deals are mere ruses by large farmers to avoid employer responsibilities. More than a dozen labor law investigations are under way around the state. And some sharecroppers are suing large farm businesses themselves.

But defenders say that sharecropping based on a fair distribution of profit and risk--and between honest business partners--can work.

“We all know there are abuses, but for a lot of guys, that’s where they got their start,” said Paul Bennett, president and chief executive of Naturipe Berry Growers, a Watsonville farmers cooperative founded in 1917.

More than 70% of the members of Naturipe, the first berry marketing co-op in the state, are Japanese American, many former postwar sharecroppers.

“Nobody had any money; we lost everything that we had, so [sharecropping] was a good way of getting started,” Tomio Tsuda recalled recently.

Now 70 and retired, Tsuda was in school in Delano when Pearl Harbor was attacked. He spent three years in an internment camp in Poston, Ariz., was drafted and served two years in the Army. In 1946, he and many other young Japanese Americans came back to the San Joaquin Valley to restart their lives. For three years, Tsuda sharecropped strawberries with one company in the Watsonville area before buying an auto repair business. He thinks he and most others got a fair deal.

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In California today, about 40% of the strawberries are grown and harvested by sharecroppers, as are more than 50% of the raspberries and other bush berries, more than 50% of snow peas, up to 25% of squash and green beans and 20% of cherry tomatoes, according to Jose Millan, an assistant labor commissioner for the California Department of Industrial Relations.

And though no one has a precise estimate, Millan says that at least several thousand farm workers are sharecropping in the state. Any agricultural commodity with several growing seasons, high yields per acre and relatively low capital investment needs lends itself to the practice, he said.

Many big growers set up sharecrop arrangements to avoid the liabilities and record-keeping of state and federal labor laws--including contributions to workers’ compensation insurance, Social Security and unemployment insurance, and requirements to pay minimum wage and provide portable toilets. The sharecroppers become liable for all this--for themselves and for any workers they hire.

Shippers and big growers also want to ensure that they have enough high-quality produce, particularly for growing overseas markets. Japanese buyers, for instance, generally insist on big, picture-perfect fruit. Sharecroppers often put in the extra effort in their fields to create such produce.

At the same time, high farm unemployment in the United States and Mexico has flooded California’s agricultural towns with job-seekers. Unemployment among state agricultural workers averaged 13.4%, compared to 8.2% overall, in the latest statistics from the state Employment Development Department.

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“In the past there was a lot of work and not enough workers; now, too many workers and not enough work,” said Jesus Lopez, a community worker for California Rural Legal Assistance, as he drove through the back roads of Salinas.

Lopez, who worked for 15 years as a member of the farm workers union, said that decades ago a worker during harvest could make $500 a week. Now, he said, one feels lucky to get $300.

If nothing else, sharecropping guarantees a job, usually for several family members. Older workers--less likely to be hired as harvest pickers--also turn to sharecropping to ensure that they have employment.

“The whole farm worker situation--their perception of employment vulnerability--has changed massively in the last six to seven years,” said William G. Hoerger, regional counsel for California Rural Legal Assistance, a state agency. “Workers are so afraid of losing their jobs.”

Sharecropping’s notorious abuses began after the Civil War. Unscrupulous landowners kept former slaves in the fields by setting up sharecrop deals, then charging inflated costs for supplies and other necessities.

At the end of the growing season, landowners juggled the books until sharecroppers’ debts were invariably bigger than their share of the harvest. Ending the year in debt committed the sharecropper to enter the same losing deal the next year in what amounted to a new form of slavery. The sharecropper did have work, and food on his family’s table, but he could never break free.

Some of the worst modern cases, according to investigators and labor attorneys, involve the same old schemes. One frequent point of contention is how much is actually paid at market for the fruit.

Sharecroppers may believe that their fruit is being sold at, say, $6 a box, said Lopez, the Salinas community worker. Then, weeks later when the accounting is done, the sharecropper might be told it sold for $3.50 a box.

“And the shipper says they ‘had to throw 500 boxes away because they were no good.’ But how do they know?” Lopez asked.

A packinghouse or large-scale grower might also give sharecroppers loans parceled out through the growing season, along with strict directions on how to tend the crop, when to water and weed. As in the old days, if sharecroppers do not make enough money to pay back the loans, some contracts commit them to repeat the arrangement the next season.

Modern sharecrop deals vary greatly but are usually lengthy documents--invariably in English--that spell out who pays how much for land leasing, planting, cultivation, boxes for harvesting the fruit and refrigerated warehouse space.

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Ironically, the part-time farm workers hired by sharecroppers can also be vulnerable. Critics say many sharecroppers fail to pay minimum wage and meet their obligations. And if they run out of money, their workers have little recourse, unable to tap the deep pockets of the larger grower or packinghouse. They were working for the sharecropper, not his business partner.

Ed Kelly, chairman of the California Strawberry Commission, stopped growing berries through sharecroppers in large part because of concern over these often murky relationships.

“We are much more comfortable when we are completely aware of what’s being done to our employees,” Kelly said. “There was a step in between with sharecroppers.”

Whether the sharecropper is effectively an employee of the larger company or a true independent subcontractor is the subject of intense interest among labor law enforcers. “It’s a very fine line in some cases,” said Tony Perrou, assistant district director in San Francisco for the U.S. Labor Department’s wage and hour division.

Sharecropping among black workers persisted in the South through the 1930s in cotton and other big field crops. But the modern version shows up more often, as in California, among Latinos in such labor-intensive crops as chilies and berries. Federal regulators say the practice is growing in New Mexico, Texas and some parts of the South.

In California, Millan runs the Targeted Industries Partnership Program, or TIPS, a federal-state project that since 1992 has rooted out labor law violations in California agriculture and garment manufacturing. TIPS has 13 ongoing sharecrop probes and three cases in court.

Federal investigators are poised to use a technique that could wield considerable leverage with shippers who have perishable produce stacked in warehouse coolers--stopping interstate shipment of any so-called “hot goods,” products made in violation of the federal Fair Labor Standards Act.

“We have not been using [the hot-goods provision]” in agriculture, said Rolene Otero, Los Angeles district director for the wage and hour division. “But as the economy has gone under and people have taken advantage of workers, we have decided to start.”

Meanwhile, the toughest critics say there is no such thing as a fair sharecrop deal.

“If sharecroppers pay below minimum wage, use their children, don’t get audited by the IRS and aren’t raided by the state or federal departments of labor--if they take advantage of people--yes, they can make money,” said Jeannie A. Barrett, directing attorney in California Rural Legal Assistance’s Santa Maria office.

Barrett has filed two lawsuits against Kirk Produce, a large farm company operating in Santa Maria, Oxnard and Orange County. Barrett represents Alfredo and Pomposa Zendejaz and the Aguilars in nearly identical lawsuits.

The Aguilars had a dream similar to the Mezas’. But they say they ended up almost $67,000 in debt. They are former sharecroppers who say Kirk owes them at least $40,000 in back wages from a deal in which they were treated as employees, not partners, despite their contract.

The lawsuit, filed in February in Santa Barbara Superior Court, charged Kirk Produce with breach of contract, taking a “secret profit” from sales of the sharecropped strawberries and other complaints.

But to the Aguilars, the heart of the matter is their allegation that the company got them to agree to take on the cultivation of eight acres of strawberries, in addition to 15 acres they were farming, with the promise that Kirk would help them if they had any problems with their first crop on the original land.

But when the first crop was infested with mites, they charged that Kirk refused to “provide necessary pesticide applications,” according to the suit. Left with no funds of their own, the Aguilars say they watched helplessly as the mites took over, destroying thousands of dollars worth of fruit.

“The whole thing is just a bundle of lies,” said David Kirk, president and chief executive of Kirk Produce, in a recent interview.

Soggy ground from recurring rains prevented pesticide sprayers from using their heavy trucks in the fields, and Gaudencio Aguilar refused his offer to fight the mites with predator bugs instead, Kirk said.

“He said he knew how to grow strawberries and he didn’t,” Kirk said. “He’s trying to blame his loss on somebody else.”

Still, sharecroppers like the Mezas firmly believe they have made a good deal--in their case, with GBS, a farming concern based near Watsonville.

GBS is one of several growers affiliated with Driscoll Strawberry Associates Inc., long known in the strawberry business not only for big, sweet, patented fruit but for its growers’ reliance on sharecroppers for more than 50 years. Even critics of sharecropping say Driscoll-style deals are about the fairest in the strawberry business.

“These people do make money for themselves and for us,” said Donald Driscoll, managing partner of GBS. “We could sign up half the countryside if we wanted to.”

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The Mezas were on a waiting list for almost five years before signing on as GBS sharecroppers. Leticia Meza’s father had sent eight children through college and bought five homes and a condominium rental property in his 18 years raising Driscoll fruit as a sharecropper. Other sharecroppers he knew, one a 30-year veteran, said they took vacations in Europe.

“You’re actually working for yourself,” Meza said.

Though GBS offers free advice weekly from a company expert, the Mezas and 17 fellow sharecroppers in one 60-acre field decide for themselves when to water and fertilize. “Everybody in this field made money last year, or at least they’re all doing it again,” Meza said.

The Mezas and their accountant also say they pay all their taxes and employer contributions, pay $6 an hour--above the $4.25 minimum wage--to part-time workers, and last season still netted $4,000 more than when Hipolito Meza punched the clock as a machinist. After their first harvest, he and his wife bought a new red Nissan with a cellular phone and started shopping for a bigger house.

Now, despite setbacks from the recurring rains, they are hard at work on their second strawberry harvest.

“I read a lot about old-time sharecropping when I got into it,” Meza mused recently. And though he knows there are substantial risks, he has no regrets. “I’ve worked hard since I was 13,” he said, “and this is the first time in my life I feel stress-free.”