FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 9, 2018
VOLUME 91, NUMBER 45
WWW.CAPITALPRESS.COM
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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.