Game show host

In the central Washington tree fruit industry, the end of fall harvest season is quickly followed by winter meeting season. When it's too cold for the fields, it's time for the classroom. All the packing houses, where fruit is cleaned and sorted and packed into boxes for storage and shipping, hold winter meetings for their growers. All the chemical distribution companies, who sell growers pesticides and provide recommendations on how and when to use them, have grower meetings (they even have special meetings for organic growers). Tree fruit industry groups holds two-day conferences. The state department of agriculture holds recertification classes for pesticide applicators to renew their spray licenses. And so I've been hitting the circuit of winter grower meetings lately too, usually as a speaker in the Spanish language tracks.

Ever since small farms have given way to larger commercial farms, farmers have needed to hire extra workers to harvest crops. Earlier in the century, workers came to Wenatchee from Arkansas and Oklahoma to pick fruit during summer and fall. More recently, Mexican migrants have traveled to do the picking. Many of these migrants have now settled in Washington, and while there are still plenty who travel the coast following the harvests, those who have stayed have often moved into positions of higher responsibility in the orchards. Many of them supervise harvest crews. Others drive tractors, and still others are pesticide applicators. Some have bought their own farms and orchards and become independent growers. The orchard industry in Washington, while largely still run by an "old-boy" network of Anglo growers, is really powered by up and coming Mexican workers. And with fewer young people wanting to go into farming, existing farmers getting older, and more Mexican immigrants settling in the area, it is likely that in the next 10-20 years, the higher echelons of the orchard industry too will look quite different than they look now.

In response to these changing demographics, the larger winter grower meetings have added Spanish language sessions to their agendas, creating parallel tracks of lectures in Spanish and in English. And in recent years these Spanish language sessions have become so popular that attendance is now far outpacing attendance at the English language sessions. Many of the English session attendees are thinking about retirement and yet the Spanish sessions are overcrowded with young new orchardists. Many of the speakers in the Spanish language sessions were born in Mexico too, and started in the industry as fruit pickers. Now, as trainers, they seek as much to inspire their audiences to move up in the ranks as they do to teach about pesticide or tractor safety.

And so it is into these rooms that I walk, as a little gringa, to talk about pesticide regulations and sustainable agriculture. Often I feel like a game show host. At work we have gotten our hands on an audience response system, where each of the (3-400) audience members presses a number on a small calculator-shaped responder device to answer a multiple choice question displayed on the screen of a powerpoint presentation (picture below from the Turning Technologies website).

Like a game show, the results are recorded by the computer, and then a graph flashes up on the screen, showing everyone just how the group answered. Individual answers are anonymous, but within a matter of seconds everyone in the room knows, for example, what percent of the audience works with pesticides, knows about pesticide regulations or reduced-toxicity chemicals, or wants to have more information on using natural predators as insect control.

So I spend a lot of time pacing large conference rooms with a microphone, asking audiences to press the buttons on their magic responders and interpreting from their answers what a given group is like, what they think, and how the subsequent presentation should best target their interests and knowledge. I give presentations in English language sessions too, and while that's in some ways easier, it's not quite as fun. Part of it is that the Spanish sessions have a warmer energy to them. Part of it is that because the Spanish sessions are geared towards audiences with less formal education and lower literacy, there is no room for a rushed presentation with tiny-font typed slides and jargon -- the burden is to be creative and engaging. Part of it is also cultural, with teaching directed not just to peoples' brains but also, as one speaker I heard yesterday put it, to their hearts and spirits... Which is a bit abstract I know, but at the end of the day just means there are more and varied ways to engage people. Part of it too is that, at least for me, there is less winning over to do of the audience. I get credit just for being a Spanish-speaking gringa, without having to spend half my presentation subtly convincing people that a young little upstart recent arrival to "the industry" can still be worth listening to. Not that the English sessions are unwelcoming -- maybe it's more that the English language participants are more reserved or sometimes more complacent. The Spanish speaking growers are newer to the old-boy tree fruit network too. Maybe they just understand new arrivals better.

Anyway, work lately has therefore consisted of driving all over the state to these winter meetings. This has been made simpler by the major snowmelt we had since last I wrote. Simpler, but a little sad. We had probably built a good 2 feet of snow in Wenatchee when a Hawaiian front called the Pineapple Express came through. It rained for two days, and then all the snow was gone. The water pushed snow off the mountain passes, closing all the roads to Seattle for several days due to avalanche danger. High water levels from rain and snowmelt took bites out of the mountain roads (photo from the Wenatchee World newspaper).



The goats were happy, as they had never really liked the snow. But Mike and I, who had just been gearing up to go snowshoe hiking, were a little disappointed. Luckily there is still snow if you go slightly up in elevation, and so it is pretty easy to get to winter, as we did multiple times to ski while Yoni the bro was visiting in January. But meanwhile in town, a low and foggy cloud layer has settled, turning normally sunny Wenatchee into a consistently gray space (and grounding all four of the daily airplane flights that typically serve as the alternative to driving to Seattle). It's not actually too bad -- the roads have reopened by now, and the planes have started flying again, and you can still drive 20 minutes up the mountain to get above the cloud layer -- it's just been a bit of a change. [Recent update: It was sunny yesterday for the first time in a long time! And today we even had a new half-inch of snow.]

On that note, I'm going to close this summary of work and weather. I'm writing this on a plane ride back from a San Diego conference on migrant farmwork, so maybe our next installment will move from settled specialized workers at Spanish language training classes to migrant fruit pickers and cross-border labor issues... we'll see how it goes. Meanwhile, sending best wishes to you and yours.

Winter in Wenatchee

It’s been a while since my last post, mostly because until now I had always had more ideas stored in my head than time to write them down. So whenever I had the chance to blog, I already knew what to say. But November took care of all those low-hanging fruit posts (hee hee), and so since then I’ve been in a bit of an empty spot in terms of what to write. But here we are now in January, and so maybe it’s time for a catch-up.

The first news here is that we have snow, and a good bunch of it at that. The fall stretched long this year and it stayed warm unusually late. And then from one day to the next, it became winter. See photos of snowy mountains (from my window at work and my walk to work) as well as a video of goats in the snow (although turns out that by now the snow is way higher than it was when this video was taken a few weeks ago).

Luckily Mike and I had trimmed the goats’ hooves before the snow came, because it turned out they weren’t big fans of the process even when it was warm out (and we were slow at it). It seems they’re not really huge fans of the snow in any case and spend a lot more time in their dogloo (improvised goat house) now than they did in summer. But they have grown enormous fuzzy coats that make them super cute. Here are contrast photos of goat pen in fall and the dogloo covered with snow in winter.

Winter is interesting (and neat) here for a lot of reasons. First there are lots of places to snowshoe and ski (both cross country and downhill). Second there’s a lot of snow to do all that on. Third, the city doesn’t plow the roads terribly well, so snow tires are a huge help all over town and especially on streets like ours where the plow rarely comes. And the bigger roads tend to be plowed toward the center of the road, so for example three-lane roads turn into two-lane roads with a 3-foot mound of snow in the middle lane. Which would be fine, except that because the roads are often one-way, you have to decide as soon as you turn onto the street which direction you might want to eventually turn off from it, because there is no crossing the snow pile if you choose the wrong lane.

Fourth, things look different covered with snow. Normally when you drive south towards Yakima, for example, you get into this severe, stark, desert canyon landscape, really different than the wavy hills and orchards around Wenatchee or the forests and craggier rocks up towards Leavenworth. But when they’re all covered in snow, some of that difference is muted. What does stays the same, though, even in winter, is that the weather can change dramatically from one place to the next – from rain in one spot to clear skies 10 miles down the road to snow over the mountain passes to serious wind another 10 miles down the road. And when there’s a lot of snow falling in the mountains, crews close the roads across the passes for hours or days at a time, and before the roads reopen, push snow off the mountains to minimize avalanche danger. Which means that you can’t always, for example, drive to Seattle in winter.

These uncertainties of traveling in winter certainly came clear when Mike and I and my brother Yoni who is visiting for a few weeks tried to get to and from Montana to visit parts of Mike’s family – you never really know if you’re going to get to leave on the day you plan to, or whether when you check the online mountain pass cameras (fancy :)) you find that you need postpone your trip a couple of days on either end. I think that’s why a lot of people here just tend to stay put over long winter holiday weekends and save the traveling for summer.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking lately that maybe I should write a little about my job on this blog. It’s not really quite as fun as the goats, but there are definitely interesting parts. So let’s talk a little about apples. In the apple world, this is the time of year when you’re pruning trees and perhaps thinking about which trees to replace or add to your orchard. Until recently, most of the apples produced in this area were red delicious and golden delicious, but since the advent of all sorts of newer varieties of apple -- varieties that tend to get less mushy when stored and transported, and/or that haven’t had as much of the taste bred out of them – lots of orchards have been tearing out their old trees and planting Braeburn and Gala and Fuji and Honeycrisp and Pink Lady.

And even more recently, they’ve started planting Jazz (look for them in your supermarket) and other “club” varieties – varieties that you have to qualify to plant (i.e. the supply is controlled by breeders or whoever) and that you also pay more for the privilege of planting in the first place. But of course, with a controlled supply, club varieties command a higher price. That is, of course, if they succeed. Essentially, when you’re deciding whether or not to plant a club variety, someone from New Zealand will send you a box of apples for you to taste and pass around to your friends, and then you decide whether or not to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to plant fruit that you are guessing consumers might like in three years once the trees start producing. If you guess right, it’s a big payoff. If you guess wrong, you have to absorb the costs.

Tree fruit growers are actually a lot like gamblers. There’s a lot of skill involved, but also a lot of luck, and a lot of moving around of large quantities of money. Cherry growing especially can come with huge risks, as cherries are more weather-sensitive and produce during a shorter season, which also creates some labor complications. Because most of the labor in tree fruit is seasonal (and much is migrant), if you’re a grower, you rely on workers coming back each year to pick fruit for you. This means that your workers have to not have taken permanent year-round employment since last year and have to like (or need) your orchard enough to come back.

Cherries in particular are picked in a three-week window in July, about a month before apple harvest. And while orchards support a small crew year round, they need an enormous influx of workers to pick cherries in July, after which they drop back down to a smaller crew for a month and then increase again for apple harvest. Which is complicated… as in, where do people live if they migrate from place to place and job to job every few weeks? And what do pickers do in the month between cherries and apples? The housing issue is somewhat resolved by orchard-sponsored and state-sponsored housing camps (trailers & tents) that spring up in summer (of course with issues of their own). But the problem of peaks and valleys in labor is a bit trickier. In an ideal world there would be other industries that need workers during the down times for tree fruit, but in practice that’s not quite the case.

And let’s say you have an orchard with early cherry varieties and late apple varieties – if you lay off half your workers for a month after cherry harvest, they might find work in other orchards, ones with late cherries and early apples, and may not be available when you need them again for apples – which of course puts you at risk of having acres of apples rotting on the trees without the ability to pick them in time. So many orchards have been trying to base their choice of new varieties (including club varieties) not only on cost and taste and storability and likelihood of consumer appeal, but also on how the timing of the fruit compares to the timing of labor. Or they start nurseries, or they start coming up with other ways to keep people employed in the down times.

Of course, seasonal and migrant workers face a whole series of challenges on their side as well, both related and unrelated to the challenges growers face in keeping them employed. But I figured I’d start here with growers, and with their ever-expanding efforts to find just the right mix of fruit varieties and ways of farming that can capture ever-changing price premiums and consumer/retailer preferences and labor constraints and government regulations and so on and so forth with a product that takes a 3-5 year investment to even begin to pay for itself. Next time we’ll try to shift the spotlight to workers.

With that, here's hoping you are all well and having a good start to 2009.