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Friday, September 20, 2019
Volume 92, Number 38
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wrap it up
Tarp business grows
into major player
in hay industry
Dan Wheat/Capital Press
A Tarp-it crew from Ellensburg, Wash., spreads a side tarp on an alfalfa stack near Ephrata.
By DAN WHEAT
Capital Press
OSES LAKE, Wash. — In the summer
of 1977, Glen Knopp was covering his
hay stacks with a sacrificial layer of baled
straw to protect them against rain dam-
age. His cousin, visiting from Canada,
said there was a better way.
New polyethylene tarps seemed to be working well in
Alberta, so Knopp, then just 22, bought five and used them
on his hay stacks.
“I wanted to sell a premium product to dairy
guys. Those thunder storms could come up and
dump water and I could lose several layers of
bales,” Knopp says.
No one was covering hay stacks in those days.
Growers knew rain would reduce portions of their
stacks from top grades to feeder or bedding qual-
Glen Knopp ity. It didn’t matter much. It would be used some-
where. Dairies could grind it with other feeds. It
just meant less money.
Exports to Asia and elsewhere were just getting started.
Exporters didn’t want rain damage but also didn’t need a
lot of hay. Heavy-duty vinyl tarps used in trucking were too
Dan Wheat/Capital Press
See Tarp, Page 10
Tarp-it tarped hay stacks at Anderson Hay & Grain Co., Ellensburg, Wash. Anderson is a
leading U.S. hay exporter.
M
More fruit companies sue over surprise wage hikes
By DAN WHEAT
Capital Press
YAKIMA, Wash. — Several
Washington tree fruit companies
are suing the U.S. Department of
Labor for increasing the minimum
wage for high-density apple har-
vesting to $16 an hour.
A July 24 DOL notice to Wash-
ington apple growers of a 97-cent
increase, from $15.03 to $16, is
“arbitrary and unsubstantiated” and
will cause the companies “irrepara-
ble harm” in labor costs in 2019 and
into the future, the lawsuit states.
The notice applies to growers
using H-2A-visa foreign guest-
workers and to all their workers
foreign and domestic.
The increase, effective July
23, does not reflect the actual pre-
vailing wage paid by a substan-
tial majority of the industry and
is based on “inadequate and pro-
cedurally deficient sampling and
inaccurate extrapolations of data
from what appears to be an extreme
minority of apple producers and
farm labor apple harvesters,” the
lawsuit states.
The suit seeks a prelimi-
nary injunction halting the wage
increase. It was filed Sept. 3 before
U.S. District Judge Salvador Men-
doza Jr. in Yakima by Evans Fruit
Co., of Cowiche, and McDougall
& Sons Inc. and Columbia Fruit
Packers Inc., both of Wenatchee.
The lawsuit is similar to an Aug.
7 suit filed by Zirkle Fruit Co., of
Selah, which resulted in Mendoza
granting a temporary injunction
halting a 50% wage increase for
blueberry pickers.
Zirkle argued that increase did
See Wages, Page 10
Luis Javier
Galarza picks
Gala apples at
Mt. View Orchard,
East Wenatchee,
Wash., on Aug.
26. Several
companies,
including Mt.
View’s parent
company, are
suing to halt a
minimum wage
increase.
Dan Wheat
Capital Press
Western winter weather forecast a toss-up
By DON JENKINS
Capital Press
The tropical Pacific Ocean proba-
bly won’t be particularly warm or cool
this winter, climatologists said Thurs-
day, depriving forecasters of their best
clue to how much snow will pile up in
the Cascade Range and the rest of the
Northwest.
Over the past month, odds improved
that sea-surface temperatures along the
equator will be close to average for
months to come, according to the fed-
eral Climate Prediction Center.
Meanwhile, chances that an El
Nino or La Nina weather pattern will
form are slight. El Nino is linked to
warmer Pacific Northwest winters. La
Nina is associated with colder winters.
The center said the chances of nor-
mal, or neutral conditions, prevailing
in December, January and February
are 58%, up from 49% a month ago.
NOAA
Neither an El Nino nor a La Nina
weather pattern is indicated for
this winter, forecasters say.
For farmers who rely on melting
mountain snow to irrigate, the good
news is that the chances an El Nino
will form dropped to 29% from 41%.
An El Nino prevailed in 2015 during
Washington’s “snowpack drought.”
“Right now, there’s no sign of it
being a terrible winter. By terrible, I
mean a lack of snow,” Washington
State Climatologist Nick Bond said.
The climate center, part of the
National Weather Service, put the
chances of a La Nina forming at 13%,
up slightly from 10% last month.
A weak El Nino formed late last
winter, arriving later than forecasters
predicted. It yielded in the summer
to neutral conditions. Ocean-surface
temperatures have continued to cool
slightly over the past month.
Bond said he would be shocked if
an El Nino or a La Nina formed that
was strong enough to influence this
winter’s weather.
“We don’t have the tropical Pacific
as a source for predictability this
time,” he said.
To arrive at the outlook, climatol-
ogists evaluated more than two dozen
forecasting models.
Most models showed neutral con-
ditions prevailing through next spring,
though some predicted a weak El
Nino. One forecast stood out by pre-
dicting a weak to moderate La Nina
this winter.
“It’s very much an outlier. Any-
thing is possible, and all that rot, but I
think we can dismiss that possibility,”
Bond said.
In the past two months, ocean-sur-
face temperatures along the West
Coast have warmed. It’s led to spec-
ulation about the return of “the Blob,”
the name Bond gave to an unusually
large body of warm water in the win-
ter of 2014-15.
Bond said the mass of warm water
off the coast is not as deep this time.
“It’s really warm out there, but it’s
a pretty thin layer of water,” he said.
“Right now, my expectation is that as
the fall storms roll through, that will
decrease in intensity.”