NURSERY SPECIAL SECTION INSIDE
FRIDAY, AUGUST 19, 2016
Tight labor
supply
pushes
wages
upward
By DAN WHEAT
Capital Press
VOLUME 89, NUMBER 34
WWW.CAPITALPRESS.COM
$2.00
NOTHING EASY ABOUT
EASEMENTS
CASHMERE, Wash. —
It was their second day into
the Bartlett pear harvest. Pat
Burnett and his son, Anthony,
watched another carload of
pickers roll into their Cash-
mere orchard and then roll
out.
“They come in and look
and turn around
and leave,” An-
thony Burnett
said. “If the
trees are too
big or the fruit
too sparse, they
Pat
don’t like it.”
Burnett
With a short-
age of pickers
and high piece-rate wag-
es, pickers “aren’t hungry
enough” and can afford to be
choosy, he said, noting that
a fast picker can earn $200 a
day.
A large apple crop and a
deteriorating local workforce
is making this one of the tight-
est labor years ever for the
Central Washington apple and
pear harvest, says Mike Gem-
pler, executive director of the
Washington Growers League
in Yakima.
“H-2A (the foreign guest-
worker program) is generally
saving our bacon as an indus-
try this year,” Gempler said.
Washington growers hired
11,844 H-2A-visa workers in
2015 and the farm labor asso-
ciation, WAFLA, has estimat-
ed it will increase to 15,000
this year. Large companies
use H-2A but it’s harder for
smaller growers to follow
suit, Gempler said.
Growers with good pick-
ing and paying competitive
rates are doing well in attract-
ing labor, but a lot of small-
scale growers are struggling
to maintain small crews, he
said.
Wages have surged upward
with the $12.69 per hour min-
imum wage for H-2A workers
becoming the fl oor, he said.
Good pickers make the equiv-
alent of $15 to $17 per hour
on piece rate.
Anxiety surrounds conservation easements and making them work
By MATEUSZ PERKOWSKI
Capital Press
R
ancher Roger Ediger has no problem giving
up the ability to subdivide his nearly 2,700-
acre property near Mount Vernon in Eastern
Oregon.
Development is the biggest threat to
agriculture, wildlife and open space, Ediger believes,
which is why he decided to place a conservation ease-
ment on the land that preserves its current condition in
perpetuity.
“If we don’t look farther than our own lifespan, then
we’ll have nothing,” he said.
However, Ediger still faces a dilemma.
He is reluctant to have an environmentally oriented
land trust or similar entity impose conditions on how he
operates the ranch in exchange for “holding” the ease-
ment.
Since no third party holds the easement, though, it’s
possible that a future landowner will simply ignore the
prohibition against development if nobody’s there to en-
force it.
“An easement is only as good as it is enforceable,”
said Mike Running, executive director of the Coalition
of Oregon Land Trusts.
Photos by Sean Hart/EO Media Group
Roger Ediger’s cows are shown on his Eastern Oregon ranch. BELOW: Roger Ediger is
seen on his Eastern Oregon ranch with McClellan Mountain in the background.
Turn to EASEMENTS, Page 12
Bonus pay
The Burnetts pay $18 per
bin with a $5 per bin bonus if
a picker stays with them to the
end of harvest. That’s up from
$18 and a $4 bonus last year.
On Aug. 15, their second
day of harvest, the Burnetts
had seven of their regular crew
picking and one other. They’d
hoped for a total of 12. With-
out more pickers their Bartlett
harvest will take a few days
longer, stretching to perhaps
two weeks. Then there will be
Turn to LABOR, Page 11
Farmer seeks $50,911 in Oregon land use dispute
Petition requests recovery of attorney fees
By MATEUSZ PERKOWSKI
Capital Press
An Oregon farmer is seek-
ing to recover more than
$50,000 in attorney fees from
his opponents in a lawsuit over
his straw-compressing facility.
Last month, John Gilmour
prevailed in the dispute when
the Oregon Court of Appeals
ruled that straw-compressing
operations are allowed outright
on land zoned for farming.
Several neighbors and two
conservation groups had argued
that Gilmour’s straw-compress-
ing facility engaged in crop pro-
cessing and thus was required
to obtain a conditional use per-
mit from the county, which lim-
ited his hours of operation.
The appellate court held that
such permits aren’t necessary
because straw-compressing is
a form of crop preparation, not
processing, since “straw is un-
changed in substance from when
it is fi rst baled in the fi eld to when
it is packaged for resale.”
Gilmour’s attorney has now
fi led a petition asking the Ore-
gon Court of Appeals to order
his opponents to pay $50,911
because their legal position was
“not well-founded in law” and
they had “no objectively rea-
sonable basis” for their legal
challenge.
He’s also entitled to attorney
fees based on Oregon’s “right
to farm” law, which prohibits
Mateusz Perkowski/Capital Press
John Gilmour, owner of a straw-compressing facility near Albany,
Ore., is in a legal dispute over whether his plant should be allowed
outright on land zoned for farming. Several neighbors want him to ob-
tain a conditional use permit because they worry about traffi c impacts.
nuisance and trespass lawsuits
against common farming prac-
tices, the petition said.
“Petitioners brought this ap-
peal in an attempt to harass and
delay a working farmer who has
neither the time nor resources to
defend such a frivolous claim,”
the petition said.
The neighbors and conser-
vation groups were motivated
by “substantial animus” toward
Gilmour’s farming operation
and the associated “truck traffi c,
noise, and straw debris.”
Suzi Maresh, a neighbor
who opposed the facility be-
cause she believes it causes
traffi c hazards, said she was
taken aback by the request for
attorney fees.
The lawsuit concerned the
interpretation of state land use
laws, not nuisance and trespass
claims over common farming
practices, she said.
“We were certainly sur-
prised because we were under
the impression that would not
be the case,” Maresh said.
The $50,911 in attorney
fees would impose a steep
fi nancial burden, she said.
“We can’t afford that kind of
money.”
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