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FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 9, 2018 VOLUME 91, NUMBER 45 WWW.CAPITALPRESS.COM $2.00 Capital Press A g The West’s Weekly FARM LABOR Dan Wheat/Capital Press Margarito Najera picks Gala apples at Piepel Orchards, East Wenatchee, Wash., Aug. 20. Picker shortages were less severe this season in Central Washington, partly because of a smaller apple crop and orchards hiring more foreign guestworkers. Use of H-2A guestworkers sets record Program fills gaps in labor supply on U.S. farms, orchards 250 242.8 H-2A * guest- Certified workers nationally 200 By DAN WHEAT Capital Press T “Farm labor is tight everywhere because of the booming economy. It should be seen as good news.” Kerry Scott, program manager of masLabor he number of H-2A-visa for- eign guestworkers reached a record 242,762 this year, up more than 18 percent for the fifth year in a row, as farmers continue to look outside the U.S. for help with tending and harvesting their crops. While foreign guestworkers represent only 12 to 16 percent of the estimated 1.5 million to 2 million farmworkers in the nation, the growth in their use is indica- tive of continued shortages of domestic farmworkers. “Farm labor is tight everywhere be- cause of the booming economy. It should be seen as good news because American workers have choices and can go into things where the pay is greater or work is easier,” said Kerry Scott, program man- ager of masLabor in Lovingston, Va., the largest provider of temporary H-2A agri- cultural and H-2B nonagricultural work- ers in the nation. This year, masLabor (Thousands of workers) provided more than 20,000 guestworkers to 1,200 farms and businesses in 47 states. Scott sees continued 20 percent annual growth in the number of H-2A workers nationally for the foreseeable future. Aside from H-2A guestworkers, the number of seasonal farmworkers is dif- ficult to measure because so many are undocumented or improperly document- ed, said Veronica Nigh, an economist at the American Farm Bureau Federation in Washington, D.C. H-2A demand keeps increasing, she said. Five years ago it was 6 to 8 percent of the overall farm work- force; now it’s double that. “Every year we hear similar stories of difficulty in obtaining labor. Some years it’s more difficult in some regions than others, based on crop size and conditions, but it doesn’t seem to be going away,” Nigh said. Turn to H-2A, Page 10 *Certified by U.S. Dept. of Labor. **Decline in 2010 and 2011 due to Obama administration revoking Bush administration rule changes. 150 139.8 Up 21.4% from 2017 100 79 50 48.3 0 2005 ’10 ’15 Top H-2A * ag worker states 2018 2017 2018 Percent change 1. Georgia 2. Florida 3. Washington 4. N. Carolina 5. California 23,421 25,303 18,535 20,713 15,232 32,364 30,462 24,862 21,794 18,908 38.2% 20.4 34.1 5.2 24.1 U.S. total 200,049 242,762 21.4 Area Source: U.S. Dept. of Labor Dan Wheat and Alan Kenaga/Capital Press NRCS snowpack maps will hang around through winter Extension granted to address technical upgrade By GEORGE PLAVEN Capital Press The USDA Natural Re- sources Conservation Ser- vice will continue to gen- erate daily snowpack maps across the West for at least one more winter. An agency-wide software upgrade had threatened to nix the maps, which mea- sure percent of snowpack in mountain basins compared to normal conditions. Farm- ers, ranchers and irrigation districts have come to rely on the maps as an easy-to- read guide for predicting water availability, as melting snow gradually replenishes streams and reservoirs into summer. Rashawn Tama, manage- ment analyst and informa- tion technology program lead for the NRCS Wa- ter and Climate Center in Portland, said the maps are generated by a computer known as the “Black Box,” which is customized to process and format snow- pack data 24/7. But with the agency scheduled to upgrade to Microsoft Win- dows 10 beginning Nov. 1, staff anticipated problems File photo The USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service will continue to generate daily snowpack maps across the West for at least one more winter while staff troubleshoots technical concerns from a planned software update. getting the two systems to mesh. On Oct. 23, the USDA approved a six-month ex- tension allowing the “Black Box” to continue running on Windows 7 through May 1, 2019, ensuring the maps will hang around for one more season while the Water and Climate Center works to troubleshoot technical is- sues. “I am cautiously optimis- tic that by May 1 or shortly thereafter, we will be able to provide some long-term continuity with those prod- ucts,” Tama said. “In order to troubleshoot that system, we’re going to need the right technical minds looking at that.” In an email to the NRCS Office of the Chief Infor- mation Officer requesting an extension, Cara McCa- rthy, who works with the National Water and Climate Center in Portland, said the last time they did a system upgrade, it took two experi- enced programmers approxi- mately two weeks to get the “Black Box” up and running again. “Because we do not have that same IT support any- more, we anticipated this problem last spring and put a note on these maps,” Mc- Carthy wrote in the email. “We have received lots of feedback that they are still used by many.” Turn to SNOWPACK, Page 10 CoBank: Dairy farmers face longer periods of low prices By CAROL RYAN DUMAS Capital Press A structural shift in the U.S. dairy industry driven by consolida- tion to larger farms will challenge smaller farms and the cooperatives that serve them. But the changing dynamic is not without opportunity for those smaller operations and their co- ops, according to a new report from CoBank. “Consolidation on dairy farms in the U.S. has driven the dairy in- dustry to what might be a new era of longer, more drawn out prices cycles than the three-year pattern the industry has come to know,” Ben Laine, senior dairy econo- mists with CoBank, said in a video accompanying the report. The three-year cycle emerged in the 1990s as the federal Dairy Price Support Program was phased out. In the years that followed, the magnitude of price cycles increased as dairy exports picked up and ex- posed the industry to the volatility of the global market, he said. To withstand the ups and downs, many farms looked to ex- pand to take advantage of econo- mies of scale and lower their costs, he said. “Now, most of the U.S. milk supply is driven by these large, ef- ficient farms that are much less re- sponsive to near-term price chang- es,” he said. Dairy farms with 1,000 cows or more now comprise nearly 50 per- cent of the dairy industry, up from 29 percent in the previous decade, the report notes. These large farms are in the best position to survive extended periods of low milk prices during the new longer cycles, and the lack of supply response will likely mute the traditional three-year cycles, Laine said. Milk prices have been stuck in a sustained pattern of lower prices since 2014, and the prolonged peri- od of low milk prices have strained most small-scale farms without the relief of the expected peak year of price recovery, he said. “Smaller farms and the cooper- atives that serve them will have a difficult time competing with their Don Jenkins/Capital Press larger counterparts on a commod- ity basis due to the higher costs Dairy cows graze in Western Washington. Smaller op- erators and cooperatives need to position themselves Turn to DAIRY, Page 10 to take advantage of higher value opportunities.
