April 29, 2016
H-2A
Grazing
CONTINUED from Page 1
willows off the range or pre-
vent the bull trout from recov-
ering.”
There’s no proof that “ex-
ceedances” of stream tem-
perature standards were
caused by grazing, as high
temperatures occur even
in areas where grazing
isn’t permitted, Horngren
said.
Impacts from grazing
don’t rise to the level of
causing unlawful harm to
the bull trout’s critical hab-
itat, he said. “Just because
you cut a tree or graze a
blade of grass does not
mean there’s an adverse ef-
fect.”
More than 90 percent
of the sites evaluated by
federal regulators were in
“proper functioning condi-
tion or showing an upward
trend,” the ranchers say.
Before bull trout can
re-occupy the allotments,
the streams would have to
be cleared of non-native
fish and culverts that act as
barriers for the species, the
government argues.
Federal regulators ex-
amined every pasture in
each of the allotments and
found grazing to have in-
significant effects, said
Sean Martin, an attorney
for the government.
While the environmen-
talists may disagree that
grazing doesn’t adversely
affect the fish, that doesn’t
justify overturning the fed-
eral agencies’ conclusion,
the government claims.
The
environmental
groups incorrectly argue
that any federally sanc-
tioned activity occurring in
the bull trout’s critical hab-
itat must improve the spe-
cies’ chances of recovery,
Martin said.
“That’s absolutely un-
workable,” he said.
Grazing is generally a
neutral activity that’s been
ongoing in the forest since
the 1860s and its effects
are now regularly moni-
tored by regulators, Martin
said. “The Forest Service is
doing what it said it would
do.”
Deer, elk and beaver
also eat streamside veg-
etation, such as willows,
but such “browse” hasn’t
been found to materially
increase stream tempera-
tures, he said. “To blame it
11
housing inspections and now
it’s USCIS, Fazio said.
“DOL has been responsive
just short-handed. USCIS has
not been responsive. We’re
seeking a meeting with them,”
he said. “We are working with
six governmental entities,
none of whom are responsible
for the outcome.”
Mark Zirkle, president of
Zirkle Fruit Co., said his com-
pany is two weeks late getting
H-2A workers and that the
holdup seems to be the Depart-
ment of Homeland Security.
USCIS is in that department.
Gebbers Farms, in Brew-
ster, hires about 1,600 H-2A
annually through WAFLA and
hasn’t had any delays, said Jon
Wyss, company government
affairs director.
WAFLA has brought up
2,500 workers from Mexico
since Jan. 1 and plans to bring
5,000 in May, its heaviest
month, Fazio said.
“Growers need workers
because there’s dramatic short-
age of domestic workers. We
have a solid plan in place for
contingencies if emergencies
happen,” he said.
WAFLA expects to account
for 10,000 H-2A workers this
year out of 15,000 total for the
state, Fazio said.
In the last two years there
have been H-2A visa delays at
the U.S.-Mexican borders not
only for WAFLA but H-2A
users in North Carolina and
other states.
Last season, 433 workers
lost a combined 2,593 days
of work due to visa printing
problems at the border that
began in May and peaked in
June, according to WAFLA’s
2015 annual report.
The Obama administration
has been “very hostile” to the
H-2A program, Craig Regel-
brugge, senior vice president
of AmericanHort in Washing-
ton, D.C., said at the Wash-
ington Growers League annu-
al meeting in Yakima, Jan. 26.
Dale Moore, American
Farm Bureau Federation
public policy director, said it
seems odd DOL and USCIS
request hard copy documents
and operate by regular mail
when most government pro-
grams require things electron-
ically.
It’s very frustrating USCIS
doesn’t have an online sys-
tem, Fazio said.
“They have to have orig-
inal signatures on things. We
FedEx to them and they snail
mail back to us,” he said.
Much of the problem was
caused by DOL shortening the
time period for H-2B applica-
tions this year which resulted
in it receiving three-fourths
of them on Jan. 2, said Kerry
Scott, program manager of
masLabor, Lovingston, Va.,
the leading supplier of H-2A
and H-2B-visa foreign guest-
workers in the nation.
“There was no way to
keep up and they didn’t want
to. They wanted to make it as
difficult as possible, knew it
would cause chaos and it did,”
Scott said, adding he thinks the
situation may be resolved now.
Lee Wicker, deputy director
of North Carolina Growers As-
sociation, said there have been
slight delays but that 4,500
H-2A workers arriving in the
state since February mostly did
so on time.
Delays across multiple
agencies confirm the need for
improvements so farmers can
have confidence they can get
workers on time, Wicker said.
AFBF received a few com-
plaints and then took a survey
and discovered H-2A-visa ap-
plication delays in 20 states,
Moore said.
Farmers are requesting 13
percent more H-2A workers
this year and the concern is
delays could become a major
problem in the next month, he
said.
It’s already resulted in
Litzenburger Landscape in
Harbor Springs, Mich., shut-
ting down after 31 years in
business. Owner Gow Lit-
zenburger announced March
14 he was closing because he
couldn’t get non-agricultural
H-2B-visa workers he needed
on time.
The company did land-
scape work at resort homes in
Northern Michigan in April
and May. It normally hired 65
workers, about half of them
H-2B.
“Our little town has just
over 1,000 people and in
summer explodes to 15,000.
It’s impossible to find enough
workers,” said a lead employ-
ee who asked to remain anon-
ymous.
“The Grand Hotel on
Mackinac Island usually takes
about 300 H-2B and it’s hav-
ing trouble too,” she said.
Three California straw-
berry farms and a labor con-
tractor sued federal agencies
March 21 for failing to pro-
cess H-2A applications on
time. That resulted in appli-
cations being expedited, the
U.S. Justice Department said.
Nationwide,
growers
requested 145,874 H-2A
workers and DOL approved
139,832 in 2015, according
to DOL. Generally, about 10
percent of farm jobs are es-
timated to be filled by H-2A
workers.
The top state was Florida
at 17,942, followed by North
Carolina at 17,696, Georgia at
14,393, Washington at 11,844
and California at 8,591. Lou-
isiana, Kentucky, New York,
Arizona and South Carolina
rounded out the top 10.
on grazing goes too far.”
It’s true that tempera-
tures in some streams are
too high, which is bad for
bull trout, but “what’s
speculative is which of the
contributing causes is the
culprit,” he said.
Natural conditions in the
region can cause “exceed-
ances” of water tempera-
ture standards, he said.
For more than a decade,
the Forest Service has part-
nered with Oregon’s De-
partment of Environmental
Quality to restore eroded
streambanks, replace cul-
verts and otherwise en-
hance water quality to en-
sure compliance with the
Clean Water Act, Martin
said.
“This is really for Ore-
gon DEQ to administer, not
for a group with an agen-
da,” he said.
CONTINUED from Page 1
face serious hurdles in getting
visas,” Duvall said.
Paperwork delays have
created a backlog of 30 days
or more in processing H-2A
guestworker visa applications
at the U.S. Department of La-
bor and U.S. Citizenship and
Immigration Services, he said.
DOL and USCIS both are
sending documents to farm-
ers by regular mail instead of
email which is “unacceptable
in 2016,” he said.
Duvall, state agriculture
directors in Georgia and Mich-
igan and farmers in Georgia,
Michigan and California re-
cently jointly expressed their
alarm to media.
DOL too often fails to com-
ply with rules requiring it to re-
spond to farmers’ requests 30
days before crews are needed,
Duvall said.
Farmers are missing har-
vest windows and losing rev-
enue and Congress needs to
reform immigration laws to
give farmers a legal and stable
workforce, he said.
Washington state was the
fourth-largest recipient of
H-2A workers in 2015, receiv-
ing 11,844, according to DOL.
Most of them worked in tree
fruit. Of that number, the farm
labor association WAFLA, in
Olympia, provided 7,895 to
growers by contracts. Zirkle
Fruit Co., Selah, hired 2,889
directly from Mexico.
Since early February, WA-
FLA has been running one to
six weeks late in getting work-
ers to growers because of gov-
ernmental delays.
“We feel terrible about it.
We’re working as hard as we
can to solve it, but it’s not
easy,” said Dan Fazio, WA-
FLA executive director and
CEO.
Initially, DOL was a prob-
lem, then it was state agency
CapitalPress.com
Dan Wheat/Capital Press
H-2A-visa foreign guestworkers from Mexico head to their crew bus for a 9 a.m. break at Zirkle Fruit Co.’s CRO Orchard south of Rock
Island, Wash., April 26. About 120 H-2A and 200 domestic workers are employed at the orchard right now.
Mateusz Perkowski/Capital Press
Ranchers, environmentalists and federal agencies recently en-
gaged in oral arguments at the James A. Redden U.S. Courthouse
in Medford, Ore., as part of a lawsuit over grazing’s effects on bull
trout habitat in Oregon’s Fremont-Winema National Forest.
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