Our Farming Community, Under Pressure

By Beverly Faxon

According to Washington State University Extension, Skagit County farms grow over 90 different commercial crops on 90,000 acres. They produce more tulip, daffodil, and iris bulbs than any other county in the country.

As impressive as that data is, it can’t capture the magic of living in a farming community: bins and baskets of colorful local produce at the Co-op or the farmers markets; summer farm stands as they circle the seasons with tulips, berries, dahlia bunches, tomatoes, and pumpkins.

Daily commutes take us through the fields, and we watch the growth shift with time and climate: blueberries, Brussels sprouts, corn, potatoes, spinach seed, daffodils, raspberries, sunflowers.

I live on farmland, and love the soft geometry of field grass cut, stirred, and laid out in clean rows for the local dairy farmer to bale. I am used to driving through late summer corn tunnels, used to the sound and lights of midnight harvests, with an urgency to get crops in before the fall rains.

For one brief year, I tried being a farmer.

So. Much. Work.

Flooding fields, 14 hour days, potato sorting in freezing weather in an open barn. And also glorious sunsets, abundant ripe strawberries, and hands that felt useful. I have an emotional stake, an identity stake, in being part of a farming community. And I don’t think I’m alone in this.

So, when I considered writing about community for this Natural Enquirer issue, I wanted to explore how the farm community is faring right now. I wanted to consider what might happen if we disregard our farming culture, what might happen if we take for granted that it can survive no matter what. Many recent federal administrative practices have focused on the agricultural community, and I looked at three of those stories for this article.

But First, a Caveat, and Lelo

Perhaps the hardest part of writing this article was knowing that it might be a risky idea to mention specific farms or farmworkers by name—that by doing so the Co-op might inadvertently make a target of that farm and its workers. In forty years of writing for the Natural Enquirer, no matter how controversial the topic might have been, no one has ever asked me for anonymity. And, I have never felt that I should suggest it myself, but I felt that need for this article.

It is not paranoid to think workers, especially those who might speak out, are in jeopardy, knowing that one of the earliest national farmworker incarcerations and eventual deportations was Alfredo Juarez Zeferino (Lelo), a young, widely-respected, local farmworker activist who was stopped, pulled from his car, and arrested in March by ICE while driving his partner to her job at Washington Bulb. Lelo had lived in the area since he was a child and is widely believed to have been targeted for his farmworker advocacy.

Photo by Bev Faxon

He was held for months in the Tacoma Northwest Detention Center before eventually agreeing to self-deport back to Mexico in July. His decision came as his petitions for bond were repeatedly denied, and as he saw his next hearing date pushed out to November. After his release, he recounted poor treatment for all detainees: a lack of food, with meals sometimes delayed to the next day; chronically undercooked food, to the point of being unhealthy; delays in receiving health care, including for illnesses he felt were caused by the diet.

Lelo’s high profile detention and deportation—reported as far afield as The Guardian, and garnering attention from Washington State and federal legislators—sent immediate alarms throughout the farmworker community.

Valuing Our Farmworkers

The agricultural community is about food, and about land, and it’s even about money, but when it comes down to it, the community is about people.

I spoke with a local farmer who relies on an immigrant workforce. Many of his workers reside here full time and have done so for years. He preferred not to be identified, not because of any personal fear, but out of a desire to protect his workers, whose welfare and sense of ongoing community are writ large for him.

He expressed his understanding of the value of having a secure job, how that can reverberate out and benefit the community as a whole by contributing to a stable, healthy population, “The biggest accomplishment of this farm is the number of students who graduate from high school because mom or dad have a steady job. They can stay in the same school. They don’t get behind. These kids have lived here their whole lives.”

“Farm labor is a skilled job... like an electrician or a plumber,” he told me. “The people who work at the farm are the most valuable asset any farmer has. It’s important to take good care of the people who work with you. People need to be treated as people.”

We talked about how his workforce is reacting to deportation actions. He replied, “In the first Trump administration, there was more fear. People stayed home. Now, people are cautious, but not feeling the same fear. They just feel this is how it is. They are doing their best to follow the rules.”

He cited the Keep Washington Working Act, which recognizes the role immigrant labor plays economically and states that Washington law enforcement will not engage in enforcing civil federal immigration laws. He added, “I think Skagit County is respectful of the need to be here. We have people who have been working on farms in Skagit County for 30 years. We need to appreciate what they’ve done and how they’ve fed us all these years. The reason some farmworkers are undocumented is we don’t have a system to document them. It’s not their fault we don’t have that system. It’s our fault. Voters have not insisted on immigration reform.”

He expressed doubt at the suggestion that we somehow shift U.S.-born Medicare recipients into farming, saying, “They are on Medicaid for a reason,” and then adding, “The typical American is too out of shape to bend over and pick. They are three to five generations away from farming, and they won’t have a clue.”

National Immigration Legislation with Local Repercussions

Some local farmworkers and their allies fear that proposed federal legislation could have a damaging effect on the local farmworker community, and by extension, on our small farms.

The “Farm Workforce Modernization Act,” HR3227, expands the H-2A agricultural visa program. Community to Community (C2C) is a food justice organization in Skagit and Whatcom Counties. At a recent C2C presentation, members of the farmworker community and of C2C expressed concerns regarding H-2A visas—citing fears that the H-2A program will increasingly replace long-time Valley farmworker families and will not offer adequate protections for the H-2A workers.

Unlike the rest of Washington State, neither Skagit nor Whatcom Counties have seen a rapid expansion of the H-2A visa program in the recent past. Skagit and Whatcom Counties are unique in Washington because they have an independent union, run by local farmworkers, Familias Unidas por la Justicia. Now, there is fear that immigration deportation targeting long-time resident workers will push up the number of H-2A workers in Skagit and Whatcom.

H-2A visas were intended to allow farmers to temporarily hire workers when they were experiencing actual labor shortages. But in practice, they have also been used to replace long-standing farmworkers with temporary workers. For example, in the past two years, there have been lawsuits in the Yakima area charging that farms have fired their local farmworkers in order to immediately bring in H-2A temporary workers, and have engaged in discriminatory practices involving H-2A workers versus local farmworkers.

H-2A workers are predominantly male—97% nationwide in the U.S. according to a 2024 Government Accountability Office report—and can end up replacing women in the workforce, a potentially discriminatory action reflected in at least one of the Yakima suits.

The 2017 death of an H-2A worker, Honesto Silva Ibarra, during a smoky heat wave while working on a Sumas farm, shook the Whatcom/Skagit community. A co-worker contended that Ibarra’s requests for time off and for medical care when he was ill were ignored, leading to his death. The farm disputed that account. Washington State Labor and Industries eventually ruled the Sumas farm was not liable for Ibarra’s death, but fines were levied on the farm for other labor violations. The incident brought local attention to the possibility of abuses in the H2-A program.

Community to Community presenters stated that H-2A workers do not always receive federal or state protections. (Indeed, the U.S. Department of Labor announced in June that they were suspending enforcement of the protection of fundamental rights put in place in the H-2A program during the previous administration.) C2C presenters fear the pending H-2A legislation strengthens the H-2A program and puts a lot of control, without oversight, in the hands of farm owners who use it.

Although the H-2A program supposedly leads to a path for citizenship, C2C presenters point out that path is complex and limited, and often requires the employer’s cooperation. Housing and transportation are provided by the farm, which may sound like a plus, but also can create an isolated and dependent environment. All this could make it risky for workers to imagine reporting abuses if they occur. When H-2A workers at the Sumas farm demonstrated the day after Ibarra’s death, they were fired and, having lost their housing, were also displaced.

A version of the Farm Workforce Modernization Act did not pass in 2019. The Act was reintroduced in May 2025 by Reps Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) and Dan Newhouse (R-WA) and is expected to be voted on this fall. Sister legislation is HR4393, the oddly titled (given its focus) “Dignity Act.” This legislation limits wage increases for farmworkers. It also mandates that all farmworkers submit information to an e-verify database allowing tracking by Homeland Security.

The H-2A visa program is controversial, with some farmers and farming advocates believing it is unfairly attacked, and is a reasonable potential solution to farm labor needs, including those caused by current immigration practices.

Yet, circling back to community, there is no doubt that a local farming workforce is an integral and valued part of the community in a way a transitory workforce can’t be. Resident farmworkers pay taxes in the community (even though they are not eligible for many of the services taxes provide). They support local businesses with their purchases. They are often active community members­—attending and supporting schools, places of worship, and community events.

When I asked the farmer I interviewed about H-2A visa labor, he noted, “With the H-2A program, you don’t know who you are getting. Right now, our farm employs skilled, experienced workers who know their jobs and happily do them. They know the farm’s history. They have years of experience and know our philosophy and how we do things.”

Safeguarding Our Future

Viva Farms serves aspiring and historically underserved farmers in both Spanish and English. They welcome all community members who want to start a farm business. A non-profit organization, Viva provides “training in holistic organic farming practices, as well as access to land, infrastructure, equipment, marketing, and capital.”

I spoke with Elma Burnham, Communications Manager for Viva Farms. Viva was subjected to the first federal funding freeze, in February. Although some grants were eventually turned back on, Elma says Viva is “still in a place of precarity.”

Says Elma, “We are grateful to the community (including the Co-op) who helped us to continue. We have secure funding to the end of year, but 2026 is just around the corner. We know we depend on community support more than ever. Our former federal funding is not as reliable as we once thought, and we are making efforts to diversify our funding streams.”

I asked Elma what our community would lose if we lost Viva. She responded, “The obvious answer is food. One of Viva’s main concerns is—who will grow our food in the future? Across the country, we are losing farms every day for many reasons, such as farmers aging out, a lack of succession plans, and land pressure. There is a risk to the next generation of losing farmers of all backgrounds if we don’t support beginning farmers.”

Elma also sees a greater potential loss, “In Skagit, Viva is not the only source of unique agricultural knowledge in our community, but who is going to carry that knowledge into the future? And if we lose our farmers and farmworkers, their livelihoods will go, and food will follow. And then what will happen to our entire agricultural ecosystem—the mechanics and seed suppliers, the farmer supply businesses? We are uniquely positioned in Skagit, where agriculture is a top industry. We need farmers to have success to help shape and support Skagit’s wider agricultural community.”

This is community in a broader, and also a more specific, sense than I sometimes think of it. I have thought a lot about how we are connected in an emotional way. Perhaps I am naive, but any thriving of one population while others suffer seems a lopsided hollowness, sure to catch up with us eventually.

But we also depend on each other because we are essentially an interdependent ecosystem—materially, environmentally, economically, by all measures of survival.

If our farming community is in jeopardy, whether from a loss of experienced workers or a failure to pass on the knowledge and practices to a future generation of farmers, then many supporting businesses, and our healthy, farm-fresh food supply, will be in jeopardy as well.

The world is full of places where identity, the distinct marks of a land and its people, has eroded and slid away—where the grid and gridlock of sameness numb both sense and sensibility. That is not yet the Skagit. We still have a community to root us, a community to protect.