From farmhand to farm owner
By Marc Ramirez
Seattle Times staff reporter
LACEY, THURSTON COUNTY — Not a day goes by that Javier Lopez isn't thankful to have Tom Reinhardt by his side. With late afternoon here, it's time to check on the livestock, and the two head past the workshop where they store tractors and can peaches and into the rolling wedge of pasture that is their backyard.
"¿Estan las vacas acá o allá?" Lopez asks. Are the cows over this way or over that way?
"Creo que estan allá," Reinhardt answers. I believe they're over there.
Over nearly two decades, Lopez, 43, and Reinhardt, 59, have taught each other their native tongues and become the best of friends and neighbors. From Reinhardt, the aspiring Lopez learned a career; in return he gave his mentor, a lifelong bachelor with no kids of his own, a family to feel part of.
"He gave me the opportunity," Lopez says, "to do what I'm doing now."
When the amiable, pragmatic Reinhardt wanted someone to take over the operation he'd struggled to keep alive, he turned to Lopez, his business partner of nearly 10 years — and his one-time foreman and former field hand. Now Lopez owns the 20-acre farm operation, growing organic rhubarb and raspberries on leased land a mile east of Interstate 5 in Nisqually.
Stories like theirs are playing out again and again nationwide, even as small farms struggle and debate rages over who and how many should be entitled to the American Dream.
The number of farms owned or run by Latinos — many who came here as immigrants — continues to climb as former foremen and laborers take on retiring farmers' operations, seeing opportunity where others see risk and providing a much-needed boost to the industry.
The two friends now live in houses side by side, running a separate livestock business and raising greenhouse vegetables. Originally, Lopez — who earned U.S. citizenship in 1997 — thought he'd work here a while and save enough to build a house in Mexico. Now, he says, "my children are Americans. I can't go back and live by myself — what am I going to do there? My children, my grandchildren live here. My life is here."
Earning success
Lopez found success by earning not just new citizenship but confidence and friendship, too.
For years, he had cleaned toilets and dance floors at a fancy Guadalajara resort. It was decent work for a guy from San Juan Huaxtepéc, a hillside village in Oaxaca. But Lopez, knowing he was capable of more, didn't want to be a janitor forever. When managers wouldn't promote him, he decided it was time to leave.
He came to the United States illegally in the 1980s, trying in vain to gain a livable foothold with Oregon farming operations. But he'd arrived just in time to take advantage of immigration-reform programs granting permanent residency to certain farmworkers. By summer 1988 he was picking cherries in Yakima, beginning a long, slow process toward citizenship.
Then he learned through a friend that Reinhardt needed workers. Lopez became one of about a dozen laborers the longtime organic grower employed that summer.
"I didn't pay too much attention to him," says Reinhardt, one of the state's first organic farmers and a founder of the "Farmer's Own" label now used by Charlie's Produce in Seattle. "He was just another guy in the field."
Reinhardt didn't know any Spanish then, and Lopez knew no English. "Ni una palabra," Lopez says. Not a word.
Earnest and accommodating, Lopez stood out by being handy and unafraid to try new things. That included driving a truck that needed moving when Reinhardt wasn't around — even though Lopez didn't know how to drive. Instead of getting mad at Lopez, Reinhardt offered to teach him how.
Other workers would bring a broken machine back to the barn and say: Let me know when it's fixed.
Lopez would bring it back and say: The tractor broke. But I fixed it.
Reinhardt appreciated his initiative, and a year later chose Lopez to manage the Spanish-speaking crew while he focused on the business side of things. When Lopez asked Reinhardt if he could help find a house to which he could bring his family from Mexico, Reinhardt bought a cheap mobile home and told Lopez they could live there rent-free on one condition: He had to be Reinhardt's foreman.
As time went on, boss and foreman began to embrace the roles of mentor and friend. Lopez and wife Ana showed up to help Reinhardt with weekend irrigation projects and invited the farmer over for family dinners. Eventually, Reinhardt would visit Mexico with Lopez and his family, learning to see the world through his friend's eyes and speak his language.
"He still corrects me," Reinhardt says.
Says Lopez: "He's doing better."
Reinhardt and Lopez were among those bothered by the sight of waving Mexican flags during the mass May Day immigration demonstrations. "They're shooting themselves in the foot," Reinhardt says.
Just the same, they know U.S. agriculture is largely built on the backs of illegal immigrants. "The reason we're able to go to the store and get produce at the price we do is because we have cheap labor," Reinhardt says.
These immigrants, they say, don't eat away government benefits; they won't apply for fear of getting caught. And the talk of immigrants "taking our jobs," Lopez says, is nonsense. "I've been here 17 years," he says, "and no Americans ever want this job ... . It's too hard. They want every two hours a coffee break, a cigarette break."
When the farm got too hard to handle alone, Reinhardt asked Lopez to be his partner. They incorporated as Nisqually Produce Farms in the early '90s, and at one point leased additional land to grow the farm to 80 acres.
Recalling those days now over an outdoor dinner of grilled steak and pasta salad with Lopez, his wife and son Javier Jr., Reinhardt says fellow growers "probably thought I was absolutely crazy" when they heard he'd taken a former field hand on as his partner.
"But I didn't care much about what they thought," he says. "None of them attempted to have any relationship with their employees."
Other farm operators, Lopez says, are on their radios all day, issuing orders. "But look," he says, seizing Reinhardt's hand across the picnic table and turning it over to show his friend's dirt-smudged fingers. "This is a hand that works."
"I never asked them to do anything that I didn't," Reinhardt says.
Keeping the farm alive
The partners raised everything — organic beets, celery, cucumbers, cauliflower. But even as demand grew — at one point their farm shipped 200 tons of potatoes nationwide — their profit margins shrunk as shipping and machinery expenses rose and larger growers jumped into the organic game.
Reinhardt eventually decided he wanted to retire from full-time farming and focus on the pair's budding livestock venture.
In the past, farmers passed their enterprises on to their children. Today, "nobody wants to go into farming," says Diane Dempster, organic buyer for Charlie's Produce. "There's no money in it. It's no fun. It's a lot of work. Kids see their parents work really hard, and they're not inspired to do it."
The nation's small farms are struggling, as high costs and falling profits challenge enterprises to either grow or vanish. Nationwide, their numbers fell to about 2.1 million, a 4 percent drop in five years, with a 10 percent plunge in Washington state.
Some farmers, with family members unwilling to take on their enterprises, sell out to land developers or larger operations. Others look to the closest thing to family to keep their operations alive — their longtime, mostly Latino, foremen and laborers.
Instead of being put off by the challenges of running a farm, these new, mostly Central Washington owners are drawn by the prospect of business ownership. They learn the industry by getting Spanish-language training from places like Wenatchee Community College and bilingual business management advice and low-interest loans from Yakima's Center for Latino Farmers.
The number of Latino farm owners and operators grew by half in five years, to 50,592 in 2002, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Washington's increase was less dramatic, but still reflected a 13.7 percent jump, to 1,107 the same year.
When the time came for Reinhardt to pass on his farm, there was only one place to turn. In 2000, for a $25,000 down payment, he turned it over to Lopez, who had been saving up all along for just the right opportunity.
Learning the hard way
Look, Lopez motions. Breezes tease through the trees on the horizon. This broad expanse of land he knows so well, stretching out in long fingers of fertile soil, patches of leafy green rioting among the furrows. "I love this place," he says.
Plant rhubarb in January and it's ready by April the year after. In a good year, the first radiant burgundy-shaded stalks are so big they have to be cut to fit the boxes.
"This year was a crappy year," he says, gnawing a freshly picked swatch; it's juicy and tart, leaving a starchy sting on the tongue. May nights were too cold to spur much growth, so he spent his days fixing greenhouses and eyeing the classifieds for a manure spreader. The end of June was too hot, so the last of his crop needed to be harvested and shipped with even greater alacrity.
The early days were ripe for mistakes; Lopez would plant carrots and beets too close together to yield much product, while accounting errors hit him in the pocketbook.
Over time, he has learned to deal with the season's moods and the uncertainty of running a business — the same lessons that Reinhardt learned years earlier. Income is steady six or seven months out of the year, carefully rationed for future and unplanned expenses such as medical costs. In 1994, Lopez lost the tip of his ring finger to a potato-packing machine sprocket when he tried to fix it without removing the cover.
But having learned from Reinhardt, Lopez has been better prepared than many novice Latino farmers.
"Thomas, he never went to school to learn this," Lopez says. "We learned the hard way."
Early one Friday morning, he and his men are wheeling boxes of rhubarb to the work shed to be weighed, hosed down and then stacked onto a pallet for transport. Orders sometimes change at the last minute, and Lopez's cellphone is audible even above his roaring tractor. The customer changes the order to 42 boxes of rhubarb from 35.
In 2003, he reincorporated as Lopez Farm. First harvest can require 10 workers; this year he had to fire one, he says, because his rhubarb was sub-par. "For me, it's important to put quality in my boxes. I don't want garbage in my box. So I try to tell this guy how to do the job. He doesn't listen, so I tell him 'Goodbye, thank you.' "
He aims to pay well, seeing himself in his crew — guys who've left families behind, looking for a break. He's never going to get rich, he understands that. He also realizes that he and his men fill a particular niche in society.
"Think about it," he says. "What if 100 percent of the population go to school, get a degree? Who's going to grow all the food?"
Lopez sees Reinhardt mostly after his work on the farm is done, though in the leisurely mornings of off-season, Reinhardt will plink Chopin or Tchaikovsky on his baby grand. "Yeah, I torture him when he comes over for coffee," Reinhardt says.
He is the man who taught Lopez nearly all he knows about running a farm, who gave him the chance he was looking for. Asked if he would live anywhere else, Lopez's eyes mist over and he says: "He is like my father. I cannot live too far from him."
He dreams of owning the land his farm sits on someday, even as it's unclear whether his kids will want much to do with it. "It would be better to find a little place that's yours. I would like to build a bigger cooler, but it's too much money. The kids, they see these problems, and they have other ideas."
But bilingual and better educated, he says, than they would have been back home, his four children, ages 17-23, give him something else to be proud of. "I reached what I was looking for," he says.
Here is a place, he will say, where a guy from a tiny Oaxacan village can go from farmworker to farm owner with a little bit of sweat, muscle, patience and sure, a good amount of his own money.
This place is his joy, despite the toil. "I like being outside," he says. "I like being on the tractor and ... ." His voice trails off and he nods skyward, as if waiting for heaven to swallow him up, but it's clear that it already has.
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