10
CapitalPress.com
Friday, August 26, 2022
Market for ag
robots is growing
By SIERRA DAWN McCLAIN
Capital Press
Washington Attorney General’s Office
Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson announces a lawsuit against Ostrom Mushroom Farms of Sunny-
side at a media event Aug. 17 in Seattle.
Washington AG sues mushroom grower
By DON JENKINS
Capital Press
A Sunnyside, Wash., mushroom
farm has been accused by Washing-
ton Attorney General Bob Ferguson
of firing female U.S. workers and
replacing them with male guestwork-
ers from Mexico.
Flanked by a United Farm Work-
ers flag, Ferguson outlined his office’s
allegations against Ostrom Mush-
room Farms at a press conference last
week in Seattle.
The UFW played a “key role in
bringing this conduct to light,” he
said. “We appreciate their work.”
Columbia Legal Services and North-
west Justice Project also helped, he
said.
“Ostrom had a clear goal: Get rid
of its female workers and replace
them with male H-2A workers,” Fer-
guson said. H-2A foreign guestwork-
ers must obtain a special visa to work
in the U.S. Employers must pay them
a higher minimum wage and provide
transportation to and from their home
countries. Employers must widely
advertise openings before they are
allowed to seek H-2A workers.
Efforts to obtain comment from
Ostrom were unsuccessful. The com-
pany calls itself Washington’s largest
mushroom producer. Ostrom moved
to Sunnyside from Lacey, Wash., in
2019.
A lawsuit filed in Yakima County
Superior Court alleges Ostrom vio-
lated the Washington Law Against
Discrimination and Consumer Protec-
tion Act. The suit seeks unspecified
fines and restitution for workers.
Agricultural employers are allowed
to hire H-2A workers if U.S. workers
are unavailable. The U.S. Department
of Labor must approve the positions
to be filled.
Ferguson accused Ostrom with
systematically supplanting available
female U.S. workers with male H-2A
workers who “have fewer rights.”
Asked which rights Ferguson was
referring to, his spokeswoman sent a
link to a 2013 Southern Poverty Law
Center report.
The report claimed the H-2A pro-
gram was “close to slavery,” with
workers “routinely cheated out of
wages” and “held virtually captive by
employers.”
Scott Dilley, a spokesman for
WAFLA, which recruits H-2 workers
for its members, said foreign farm-
workers have rights guaranteed to
them in contracts.
“To paint a federal program with
such a broad brush doesn’t do anyone
any good,” he said. Ostrom is not a
WAFLA member.
According to the suit, the company
grows 8 million to 9 million pounds
of mushrooms a year at its 43-acre
Sunnyside facility. It employed about
180 pickers, mostly women, in 2021.
That year, Ostrom increased its
minimum production to 68 pounds
from 62.22 pounds per hour. Work-
ers who didn’t pick the minimum
amount were first warned, then sus-
pended and finally fired, according to
the lawsuit.
By May 2022, about 79% of its
domestic workforce had been fired.
Women were fired at a higher rate
than men, according to the lawsuit.
Since April, the farm has hired four
female U.S. workers and 65 H-2A
workers from Mexico; 63 of them are
men, according to the suit.
The lawsuit claims U.S. workers
were further discriminated against
because they weren’t told they were
entitled to the same $17.41 an hour
minimum wage as H-2A workers.
The suit also alleges Ostrom hired
the foreign workers while rejecting
applications from U.S. residents with
more agricultural experience.
Ostrom worker Samira Rosas said
at the press conference that the com-
pany was concerned about “motherly
duties” interfering with work.
“They don’t want women because
as women we have children, we have
appointments, we have to go to pick
up our kids at school,” she said.
The Yakima Herald-Republic
newspaper reported that workers and
UFW officials marched from a park to
the Ostrom plant on June 22 and pre-
sented a petition demanding fair pay
and safe working conditions.
The attorney general’s lawsuit
alleges that the company has retali-
ated against workers since then.
Ostrom operated in Lacey for 50
years. The company said its opera-
tions became incompatible with an
increasingly urban area. Lawmakers
appropriated $1 million to help pre-
pare a new site for Ostrom at the Port
of Sunnyside.
Agricultural robots are
on the march.
According to a new
report from London-based
market research firm
Brand Essence, the market
for agricultural robots is
flourishing worldwide and
is expected to grow.
The report estimates
that the global market for
agricultural robots was
valued at $4.56 billion in
2020, continues to grow
in 2022 and is expected
to reach a $26.68 billion
value by 2027 — a com-
pound annual growth rate
of 28.7%.
Many factors are driv-
ing the growing popular-
ity of on-farm robotics,
including the increasing
cost of labor and advance-
ments in technology.
COVID-19
further
increased global demand
for agricultural robots.
According to the report,
more companies the past
few years have deployed
on-farm robots to reduce
risks of human contam-
ination during the pan-
demic and to fill labor
gaps.
The report, which cov-
ered Asia, Africa, the
Middle East, Europe
and the Americas, found
that North America is
poised to lead the move-
ment toward agricultural
robotics.
“North America is
anticipated
to
domi-
nate the global agricul-
ture robotics market due
to the high labor cost,
increasing technological
advancements, early adop-
tion of advanced technol-
ogy in the field of agricul-
ture and presence of key
players in this region,” the
report says.
Experts from the mar-
ket research firm pre-
Carbon Robotics
A Carbon Robotics au-
tonomous weeder in a
field. Globally, the market
for agricultural robots is
growing, according to a
new report.
dict that countries in
the Asia-Pacific region,
including Japan and South
Korea, will follow North
America as leaders in pro-
ducing and adopting agri-
cultural robots in the next
several years.
Researchers and robot-
ics companies have already
invented robots that can
perform a wide spectrum
of tasks, and robots capa-
ble of more fine-tuned
tasks are expected in the
future.
On livestock opera-
tions, robots now exist that
can automatically milk,
wash, castrate animals and
perform other tasks.
On crop farms, agricul-
tural robots assist farmers
with many duties, includ-
ing with weeding, spray-
ing, trimming, planting,
environmental monitoring
and soil analysis.
Worldwide,
accord-
ing to the report, the most
common task robots are
used for in agriculture is
harvesting.
The
report
identi-
fies several top players
in the agriculture robot-
ics market. These include
AGCO, AgJunction Inc.,
Autonomous
Solutions
inc., Autonomous Trac-
tor Corp., BouMatic LLC,
Clearpath
Robotics,
DeLaval, GEA Group,
Deere & Co., DJI and
Lely.
VISIT OUR WEBSITE FOR UPDATES: NORTHWESTAGSHOW.COM & COAGSHOW.COM