“It’s an impossible situation,” Senator Gordon Smith has said, “to have farmers as felons and farm workers as fugitives.” And yet that is where much of Oregon, and U.S. agriculture, has found itself precariously cornered today, hemmed in by a long history of failed agricultural and immigration policies.

One Oregon Farmer’s Story

Finding a way through all of this to a fair, affordable, legal food system has a lot of folks stumped.

Jim Bronec, a third-generation conventional grass-seed farmer turned organic squash grower, has spent the past decade trying to tackle the challenge on his farm. Bronec’s operation, Praying Mantis Farm, rolls across 50 acres near Canby. He grows cover-crop seed and pumpkins, but almost half of his ground is planted with a variety of giant butternut squash that gets turned into soup and baby food by local processors.

For labor, he maintains a contract with Oregon’s only farmworker union, PCUN (Piñeros y Campesinos Unidos del Noroeste). His is one of only four contracts PCUN has in the state, three of which are with organic growers.

Nine years ago, when Bronec started growing organically, he hired through a labor contractor who would deliver a crew to hoe weeds in the summer and harvest squash in the fall. As time went on, though, he became uneasy about the situation. “The problem was, I was paying $10 to $11 an hour for those workers, but I knew the contractor was only paying them minimum wage, covering the insurance, and pocketing the rest,” he explains. “I wanted to know that the money I was paying was going to the people who were actually doing the work on my farm.”

Convinced that there was a better way to afford hired help on his farm, Bronec was motivated to seek out a contract with PCUN. Now his workers, all unionized, are ensured a fair grievance process and a seniority structure that creates opportunity for job advancement. Bronec pays take-home wages that are at least one dollar above minimum wage and takes care of the payroll withholdings. Although it’s not in his contract, he also provides his workers a paid lunch break and time and a half for overtime.

Bronec says it pencils out for the farm, even selling squash at ten cents per pound to the processing market.