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.
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