12 CapitalPress.com
July 1, 2016
GMO
CONTINUED from Page 1
John DiLorenzo, attorney for the
plaintiffs, said he’s confi dent the
Oregon Court of Appeals will af-
fi rm the decision, preventing coun-
ty-by-county litigation if other lo-
cal governments pass similar GMO
bans.
“That’s why I’m not opposed to
an appeal. I think we’ll establish a
state rule,” he said.
Currently, Oregon’s Jackson
County is the only jurisdiction where
a GMO ban is allowed under state
law.
The initiative on Jackson Coun-
ty’s ordinance was already on the
ballot when the Oregon Legislature
approved the statewide pre-emption
statute, and it has since been upheld
by a federal judge.
However, county restrictions on
GMOs have come under fi re in the
9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals,
which has been asked to decide
whether such local regulations are
allowed under federal law.
Meanwhile, DiLorenzo is seeking
$29,000 in attorney fees from OSFF
and Siskiyou Seeds, alleging that
some of their legal arguments lacked
an “objectively reasonable basis.”
The non-profi t and farm have
objected to this request, arguing it
would have a “chilling effect” on
other groups that want to “challenge
unjust laws that impact local com-
munities,” according to a court doc-
ument.
Siskiyou Seeds owner Don Tip-
ping said the $29,000 award would
800
Farms
CONTINUED from Page 1
It costs packing houses
more than it’s worth to run their
lines for a few bins of fruit, and
co-ops are declining in number,
Limon said. That makes it tough
for a new grower, starting small,
to get going.
Another hurdle is the cost of
land.
Orchard prices are “skyrock-
eting” to $15,000 to $20,000
per acre for the cheapest estab-
lished orchards and $18,000 for
bare land where orchards are
expanding in Quincy, 30 miles
southeast of Wenatchee, he said.
Yet another factor, he said,
is few second- and third-gener-
ation Hispanics are interested in
farming.
That’s true in his family.
Limon’s sons graduated from
the University of Washington,
Gonzaga University and Central
Washington University.
The oldest, Jesus, 38, has a
computer science degree and
works for an airplane parts man-
ufacturer in Snohomish County,
Wash. Jose, 35, has a business
degree and is manager of the
USDA Farm Service Agency
offi ce in Wenatchee.
Eric, 28, also has a business
degree and is a banker with
Wells Fargo in East Wenatchee.
Carlos, 25, just graduated in
electrical engineering and works
for Avista Utilities in Spokane.
Though the growth in the
number of Hispanic farm oper-
ators in slowing in some states,
Philip Martin, professor emeri-
tus of agricultural and resource
economics at the University
of California-Davis, cautioned
against over-interpreting chang-
es in just fi ve years from one ag
census to the next. Longer spans
need to be studied to determine
trends, he said.
Age could be one factor in
the deceleration, Martin said.
The average age of Hispanic
farm operators is 57.1 years old,
barely below the average age of
all operators at 58.3. More will
retire as they age.
Hispanic farms tend to be
small and the number of His-
panic farm operators may be af-
fected by more spouses working
off the farm, Martin said.
It’s safe to say, he said, that
the number of Hispanic farm
operators will increase but how
fast and in what commodities
and in what size of farm is hard
to predict because that data is
not tracked.
At just 3 percent of total farm
operators, Hispanics won’t be-
come a majority any time soon
because they often lack capital
and marketing ability, Martin
said. He views those factors as
the two largest constraints and
points out that California straw-
berry companies often provide
capital and marketing for the
Hispanic growers who operate
most of that state’s strawberry
farms.
Humble beginnings
Jesus Limon was born on
Ruling
CONTINUED from Page 1
District includes a lot of la-
bor-intensive tree fruit or-
chards and packing houses.
Newhouse pledged to contin-
ue working for immigration
reform.
Tom Nassif, president and
CEO of Western Growers,
Irvine, Calif., issued a state-
ment saying Congress should
set immigration policy but
that it “abdicated its duty” so
Obama’s action was under-
standable. Nassif, instrumen-
tal in a 2013 Senate bill on
immigration, urged the presi-
dent and Congress to take up
the issue in earnest.
Mike Gempler, executive
director of Washington Grow-
ers League in Yakima, said the
decision is not unexpected but
is unfortunate.
The Washington Grow-
ers League, the Nisei Farm-
ers League in Fresno, Calif.,
Broetje Orchards in Prescott,
Wash., and Farmers Invest-
ment Co. in Sahuarita, Ariz.,
600
769
result in “great fi nancial harm” for
his company, since “farming is typ-
ically close to a breakeven liveli-
hood,” according to the document.
Middleton of OSFF said in the
document that the requested amount
is greater than the group’s operating
budget for the GMO ban campaign,
so being forced to pay it “may result
in shutting down and/or dissolution
of the entire organization.”
Hispanic farm, fishing
and forestry workers
age 16 and over
(Thousands of workers)
535
400
200
*For census years 1998-99,
count included Hispanic
workers age 15 and over.
Source: U.S. Census Bureau
317
385,000:
Down 49.9%
from 2000
Alan Kenaga/Capital Press
0
1994
Dan Wheat/Capital Press
Jesus Limon cuts furrows to plant rootstock for Honeycrisp apple trees on his 80 acres off Road 5
south of Quincy, Wash., on March 27, 2014. He bought his fi rst 10 acres of orchard in 1988 and now
owns 150 acres.
Hispanic farm operators in the
Northwest and California, 2012 *
Idaho: 1,113 or 1.1%
Oregon: 1,489 or 1.5%
Washington: 2,981 or 3%
California: 15,123 or 15.2%
Rest of U.S.:
79,026 or 79.2%
Hispanic principal operators sold
$8.6 billion in agricultural products
in 2012 which was 2.2 percent of
the U.S. total. Of that, $5.4 billion
was in crop sales and $3.2 billion
in livestock sales.
few days in Glendale.
“Kids were reading and
writing and I just couldn’t
make it because of the lan-
guage,” he recalled.
He met his future wife at
school and they decided to
run away because she was un-
derage, just turning 18. They
headed north, on their way to
Canada, when they stopped in
Wenatchee, decided they liked
the town and stayed.
Getting ahead
Christmas day in 1957 in Zapot-
lanejo, Mexico, 22 miles east of
Guadalajara.
“Everyone celebrates Christ-
mas but not my birthday,” he
said.
A Catholic, he doesn’t mind
being named after Jesus Christ
or being born on his birthday.
“If anyone was going to
mind it would be him. No one
will be as good as he was. No
way,” he said with a laugh.
Limon had an older sister and
was the oldest of fi ve brothers.
Their parents worked their small
farm and did farm work for oth-
ers. The family lacked food once
or twice a month. Limon knew
people who died because they
couldn’t afford medical care,
had no insurance and lacked ac-
cess to social programs.
Their father, Jose Isabel Li-
mon, sometimes worked in the
U.S. under the Bracero guest-
worker program to make more
money. He was working in a
Glendale, Calif., factory when
his wife, Teodora Casillas, died
in 1969.
Jesus Limon was 12. He
and his sister were helping their
mother haul water from a well
to their house. Limon got to the
house fi rst, put his buckets down
and went back to help his moth-
er. He found her collapsed on
the ground from a heart attack.
“She made it through the
night. The next day people made
a gurney and took her to Guada-
lajara. She had another heart at-
tack. I don’t know if she made it
to the hospital or not before she
died,” Limon said.
By this time, Limon’s fa-
ther had a U.S. green card — a
permanent work permit — and
decided to move his family
to California. It took several
years, bringing one or two of
the children at a time through
legal immigration.
At the U.S. consulate on the
border, Limon tested positive
for tuberculosis and was de-
nied U.S. entry. It was a false
reading. He didn’t have TB
but he had to wait a little over
a year in a town there before
fi nally gaining entry in 1974.
He was 17.
He lived with his father for
awhile in Glendale but didn’t
like city life. He worked a few
seasons picking celery in Sali-
nas and Irvine and oranges in
the Coachella Valley.
He attended school only a
Limon tended and picked
fruit in several Wenatchee-ar-
ea orchards and twice tried
attending Wenatchee Valley
College to learn English.
“I just couldn’t cut it. I
started reading novels and
books and picked it up faster
that way. I can read it, but I
can’t write it,” he said.
Three years in grade school
in Mexico is the extent of his
formal education.
In 1982, Limon hired on
as an orchard laborer at Auvil
Fruit Co. in Orondo, 17 miles
north of Wenatchee. The com-
pany was founded by the late
Grady Auvil in 1928. He was
an industry innovator who,
among other things, brought
Red Haven peaches and Gran-
ny Smith and Fuji apples to
the fore and co-founded the
Washington State Tree Fruit
Research Commission.
Limon worked his way up
to foreman and then moved
into management.
“Grady kind of took me
under his wing. If he saw you
wanted to do better, he gave
you a little push. He was a
good man,” Limon said.
In 1988, Limon tried to
buy stock in Auvil Fruit but
couldn’t because he wasn’t a
U.S. citizen. So he bought 10
acres of bare land to the north
at Bray’s Landing and planted
Fuji and Granny Smith apple
trees.
In 1992, he obtained Farm
Service Agency fi nancing to
buy 30 acres of orchard in the
same vicinity.
In 1996, he quit Auvil and
focused on his orchards, fi gur-
ing it was the best way to get
ahead.
The late 1990s and early
2000s were bad years in the
apple industry because of too
were the only agricultural
interests out of 63 business-
es and groups that joined the
Obama administration’s ap-
peal seeking to uphold the or-
der. Farmers Investment is the
largest integrated pecan grow-
er and processor in the nation.
“We will have to work
extra hard now to move
something in Congress,” said
Gempler, who months ago
cited congressional inaction
as a reason for supporting
Obama’s order.
“Whoever is elected pres-
ident will be under a lot of
pressure to move something,”
Gempler said. “Trump (pre-
sumptive Republican pres-
idential nominee Donald
Trump) uses a guestworker
program in some of his busi-
nesses so I’m sure he has
some understanding of how
they work, but he apparently
doesn’t have sympathy for
legalizing people who are
here.”
Hillary Clinton, the pre-
sumptive Democratic presi-
dential nominee, “seems to
be ready to go forward with
some sort of bipartisan reform
similar to the Senate bill of
2013. So that gives me hope,”
Gempler said.
Manuel Cunha, president
of Nisei Farmers League,
could not be reached for com-
ment.
Mace Thornton, a spokes-
man for the American Farm
Bureau Federation in Wash-
ington, D.C., said that or-
ganization “believes only
Congress” can provide immi-
gration reform.
“We want to make sure
farmers and ranchers have ac-
cess to adequate and stable la-
bor and that will only happen
through Congress,” he said.
In 2012, Obama gave de-
portation deferrals to 600,000
children, up to age 30 if they
came to the U.S. illegally be-
fore they were 15, under his
Deferred Action for Child-
hood Arrivals (DACA).
His 2014 executive order
extended DACA to 300,000
more people and created De-
ferred Action for Parents of
Americans (DAPA) for an
estimated 4.5 million adults in
the U.S. illegally for at least
fi ve years with children.
There are probably 90,000
to 100,000 people in Central
Washington and northeast-
ern Oregon who qualify for
DAPA, Tom Roach, a Pasco
immigration attorney, has
said. There are thousands
more in Idaho and many thou-
sands more in California, he
has said. Many of them are
farmworkers.
United Farm Workers has
estimated 250,000 farmwork-
ers would have benefi ted from
the order.
Farmworkers would bene-
fi t but the order does nothing
to address farm labor short-
ages, said Craig Regelbrugge,
national co-chair of Ag Coali-
tion for Immigration Reform
and senior vice president of
AmericanHort in Washington,
D.C.
Dan Fazio, CEO of WAF-
LA, formerly the Washington
Farm Labor Association, in
Olympia, agreed. Both said
guestworker reform is needed
to help address labor short-
ages. The current H-2A-visa
99,732
Hispanic operators
nationally *
More than one-third of farms
with a Hispanic principal
operator specialized in beef
cattle. The second largest
category was farms with no
majority crop. The third was
fruits and tree nuts.
*For counts of up to 3 operators per farm.
Source: USDA, 2012 Census of Agriculture
82,462
72,349
2002
2007
Up
20.9%
from
2007
2012
Dan Wheat and Alan Kenaga/Capital Press
To the U.S.
’00
many Red and Golden Deli-
cious apples. Prices were low.
Growers were quitting the
business.
Limon believes he was
saved by switching to organ-
ic production — by accident.
The owner of an orchard next
to his 30 acres was growing
organically and asked if he
could farm several rows of
Limon’s orchard as organic to
prevent Limon’s conventional
pesticides from drifting onto
his fruit.
“I said why don’t I just farm
the whole block organic and
when I found out the benefi ts
I converted my other 10 acres,
too,” he said. He made more
money and his workers could
re-enter the orchard sooner af-
ter spraying.
In 2006, Limon purchased
another 30 acres of apple or-
chard that had been repos-
sessed by a bank near Quincy.
In 2013, he bought 80 more
acres of bare land south of
Quincy, planted rootstock and
budded Honeycrisp apples.
“That’s taken a toll on me.
It was expensive,” he said,
adding it was a $2 million to
$2.5 million investment. The
fi rst fruit will be harvested in
2017.
Limon also manages 20
acres of cherries on a lease
south of Wenatchee and leases
several other 5-acre blocks of
apples in East Wenatchee.
He sells 90 percent of
his fruit on contract direct-
ly to Whole Foods, which
has it packed by Blue Bird
Inc. and Phillippi Fruit Co. in
Wenatchee.
’10
2013
common way for Hispanics to
get ahead, but it’s not always
easy, Limon said.
“Getting guys who sell
chemicals, equipment and ev-
erything else you need to open
accounts and trust you will
pay” and “getting warehous-
es to trust you will produce
quality fruit” are diffi culties,
he said.
Long hours away from fam-
ily present another challenge,
but probably his greatest has
been economic setbacks from
bad weather or a poor econo-
my, he said.
It’s a challenge, he said,
for small growers to stay com-
petitive, to grow big enough
to keep per-unit costs down.
New mandatory work breaks
for workers paid piece rate is
a “bookkeeping nightmare,”
so he’s switching to hourly pay
with a harvest bonus.
Being organic, keeping up
with new varieties and selling
directly to Whole Foods helps,
he said.
Labor and
immigration
Limon said he’s never felt
discrimination from any busi-
nesses in Wenatchee but occa-
sionally has seen it in individ-
uals. Sometimes it can be hard
to know if it’s racial or that
someone just doesn’t like you,
he said.
Misunderstandings from
miscommunication and a
steep learning curve from
lack of English, education and
knowledge of how American
systems work can all be chal-
lenges. Limon said he’s never
experienced those because of
Grady Auvil’s teaching and
coaching.
Workers becoming fore-
men and then managers and
eventually buying into a farm
when their bosses retire is a
Limon employs six to eight
orchard workers year-round
and hires 25 for seasonal thin-
ning and harvesting. Domes-
tic workers were plentiful 20
years ago but they’ve been get-
ting harder to fi nd every year
for the last eight, he said.
In recent years, he’s hired
H-2A visa guestworkers from
Mexico through the farm labor
organization WAFLA. He has
15 H-2A workers on a shared
basis with other small growers
and thinks he will need 20 next
year. He built housing for 32
workers in Orondo.
“I know of a couple of guys
last year who left cherries on
the trees because they didn’t
have pickers,” Limon said.
“Guys with light cherry and
apple crops will have to leave
them this year. Right now,
I’m not fi xing trellis the way
I should because I don’t have
enough workers and picking
cherries and thinning apples
takes priority. You see weeds
let go because there’s not
enough time to do that.”
Beyond a tighter U.S.-Mex-
ican border, Limon said part of
the labor shortage is caused by
“government not letting kids
work when they are young and
then when they are 18 they don’t
want to work because they don’t
know how.”
program supplies less than 10
percent of farmworkers, Re-
gelbrugge has said.
He characterized the Su-
preme Court action as a
“non-decision” since there
is no written elaboration,
nothing that illuminates their
views on arguments, standing
of the plaintiffs or whether the
order falls within the realm
of prosecutorial discretion or
not.
“Congress needs to fi nd
the wisdom and courage to
move forward and that won’t
happen in a serious way be-
fore 2017,” Regelbrugge
said.
People working on the is-
sue are somewhat optimistic
of action next year, he said.
If Trump is beaten with
low Hispanic support, it may
be a wakeup call for Repub-
licans to deal with the issue,
he said. If Trump wins there
would seem to be less chance
given his desire to deport ille-
gals and apparent opposition
to guestworker programs, but
“who knows where Trump is
on an issue on any given day,”
he said.
“Immigration reform and
a legal workforce remains
the absolute top priority for
labor-intensive agriculture,”
Fazio said. It doesn’t take
Congress, any administration
can fi x the H-2A program, he
said.
“The pressing need is for
the government to show it
can administer a legal worker
program. It has demonstrated
the exact opposite the last two
years,” Fazio said.
Jeff Stone, executive direc-
tor of the Oregon Association
of Nurseries in Wilsonville,
said the president only issued
his order after it was clear that
Republican House leadership
wasn’t going to allow a bipar-
tisan Senate bill to proceed to
a vote in 2013.
The Supreme Court action
“only highlights the need to
elect members of Congress
who will stand up for com-
prehensive reform. Such re-
form needs to address border
security, legal status for those
already here and a future labor
supply,” he said.
Challenges