By THOMAS HARTLEY
Business First

Springtime 2008 in Western New York is bringing more than air scented with the sweet essence of orchards in bloom.

For those growing the fruit and vegetables that have made the region famous, apprehension is greater this year as nature's cycle enters its new phase.

There are two unanswered questions:

• Will there be enough farm help to work the fields, orchards and vineyards?

• For peach growers, has a destructive disease threatening the future of the peach industry continued to spread?

Two to six weeks of waiting remain before most of the answers will be evident, say those in the know.

"Right now, there is probably a good enough workforce to get things done that want to be done," said Dan Sievert, president of Lakeview Orchards, Niagara County's biggest apple grower and New York's largest producer of sour cherries.

"But having said that, a few weeks from now when some of the vegetable growers want to start planting and when fruit growers are still pruning trees and some of the early harvest, like strawberries, is starting to come in, that's when the labor force could get awfully tight," he said.

Some of the potential problem stems from pressure, aimed at enforcing immigration rules for alien farm workers, that has dried up the former supply of foreign labor.

Included in that push were several raids in 2007 and 2008 on some Western New York growers and businesses by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.

As a result, Sievert said, growers are looking more to the federal H2A program for migrant workers from certain countries for particular jobs in a specific time period.

But the H2A program is more expensive because of requirements that employers have to fulfill.

These include paying a "prevailing wage rate" (this year, $9.70 an hour) that's higher than minimum wage; paying for air or bus transportation for workers from Jamaica, Mexico or Texas; providing accredited housing; and transportation for trips to the store or for doctor and dentist visits, for example.

"My gut feeling is that the H2A won't be able to provide enough of a supply. But how short it could fall is a hard call. Every day that goes by, we'll get a better feeling," said Sievert, whose more than 1,200 acres of orchards are situated in Wilson and Newfane.

Paul Bencal is president of the Niagara County Farm Bureau and also a Town of Lewiston grower. He said local help, including relatives and friends, has been sufficient to meet his labor needs thus far this year.

The work has involved trimming and tying vines in the 31 acres of grapes that he grows for Welch's products.

"The fruit and vegetable grower is at the mercy of the labor pool. Around the end of June, we will get a good idea of where we stand," said Bencal, who farms 50 acres.

Grape growers elsewhere also seem to have had an adequate supply of help. Trimming and tying vines, which begins in winter and continues into early spring, is the most labor-intensive type of work for grape growers, because most of the fall harvesting is done mechanically.

"We had no labor shortages anywhere in Western New York, including the Finger Lakes," said Thomas Davenport, director of vitaculture for the National Grape Foundation in Westfield. The Welch's brand is the foundation's wholly owned processing and marketing subsidiary.

When he isn't thinking of a possible shortage of hired hands, Sievert worries about the plum pox virus. Within three years, the disease, which spread into Niagara County from across the Niagara River in Canada, has grown into a serious threat to the peach and stone fruit industry in Niagara and Orleans counties.

If not checked, the fear of growers and state and U.S. agricultural officials is that it could spread eastward throughout the entire Lake Ontario Fruit Belt.

"Once the leaves are fully out on peach trees in May, the people will be back out here from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Ag and Markets in Albany taking (leaf) samples," said Sievert, who has 85 acres of peach orchards.

"Right now, I don't have a problem with any plum pox virus in my trees. But a lot of my peaches are in the quarantine area, so I can't plant any more trees there (while the quarantine lasts)," he said.

Since 2005, when plum pox was first identified in Niagara County, the number of infected sites has increased. Seven new hot spots were detected in Niagara and Orleans counties in 2007.

To stop or slow the spread of the disease, thousands of trees have had to be destroyed.

A quarantine was imposed on planting any new stone fruit trees - peach, plum, apricot and nectarine - within a 150-foot radius of where the virus was discovered.