Western Farm Press Article 1-23-17 ### Vessey & Company join Labor of Love program
Imperial Vegetable Growers Assn., Vessey & Company join Labor of Love program
The Labor of Love program thanks farm workers for their service to the agricultural industry and by sharing their talents, loyalty, and incredible work ethic through social media and the Labor of Love websites.
Farm Press Staff | Jan 23, 2017
The Imperial Valley Vegetable Growers Association has joined with the Yuma Fresh Vegetable Association (YFVA) to expand the Labor of Love program in California’s southern-most winter vegetable fields.
In addition, Holtville-based Vessey & Company is the first California grower from the Imperial Valley to support the Labor of Love program.
In Fall 2015, YFVA launched the program in Yuma, Ariz. and followed farm workers into California’s Salinas Valley during the summer months before returning to the Yuma area in the fall.
According to YFVA, the purpose of the Labor of Love program is to thank farm workers for their service to the agricultural industry and by sharing their talents, loyalty, and incredible work ethic through social media and the Labor of Love websites.
Labor of Love visited the Vessey ranch on Jan. 17, surprising workers with a catered meal and a random act of kindness basket, plus a handwritten note from community members.
For more information, contact Susan Sternitzke at (928) 246-9255 (cell) and susan@limelightcreativegroup.com.
http://www.westernfarmpress.com/vegetables/imperial-vegetable-growers-assn-vessey-company-join-labor-love-program
http://laborofloveyuma.com/
CA GROWN Blog Article 1-20-17 ### Meet a Farmer: Jack Vessey of Vessey & Company
Meet a Farmer: Jack Vessey of Vessey & Company, Inc.
Meet Jack Vessey, President of Vessey & Company, Inc. As a fourth-generation farmer, he is proud of the hard work and dedication his father showed on the farm. Learn more about Jack and why he says it’s important to support as many local organizations in his community as possible.
CA GROWN: Tell me about the history of the company.
Jack: My great grandfather started the business in the early 1920s after he started out as a produce wholesaler in the LA produce market. He lived in Pasadena and through purchasing lettuce and other commodities throughout California and Arizona, it became a classic story of “maybe I’ll just get into the farming business myself.” So the family moved from the LA area to the Salinas area and became shippers in the lettuce business and had other commodities as well. Later on in the mid 60s, the Salinas operations were sold and the company was relocated to the Imperial Valley. At that point, we became growers, packers and shippers in the lettuce business until the early-80s and we had lettuce in six different growing regions, from Brentwood, CA and all the way down to Wilcox, AZ. What changed our business in the early 80s was my dad seeing that wrap lettuce and back sales were beginning to be the new thing. There was also consolidation on the shipper end and through our relationship with his good friends, Tom and Steve Church, they started Fresh Western Marketing in Salinas and at that point, we decided we don’t need to have our name on a box, so let’s do what we’re better at, like being growers and marketers. So instead of being full time growers, packers and shippers, we chose to instead be just a grower, make strategic partnerships with Salinas marketers and have joint ventures with year-round shippers out of Salinas and dabble in the marketing side.
CA GROWN: What does a typical day look like for you?
Jack: A typical day for me this time of the year allows me to get a feel for the ranch and what’s going on. My ranch manager holds a meeting every Monday from 5 – 6 a.m. starting in mid-August through March and all our supervisors and foreman attend that meeting every morning. It’s a great opportunity for me to sit there and really listen to what’s going on and see the dynamics of what we do these days and what’s happening. It’s a great way for me to get the day started. The business side has grown so much and it’s a lot different than it was when my dad was my age because for one, we’re doing business in California now and two, it’s about the competitiveness that makes you be so dedicated to be able to survive in this business. That’s really changed because we know we have to do the best job we can on a daily basis or we won’t be in business anymore. People come to us and expect us to supply those contracts and what I mean by that is, through my joint venture partners, we’re supplying a solid processing plant. When they come to us and say they want 100,000 pounds of X every Monday through the winter season, we do our best job to make sure we have that 100,000 pounds every Monday throughout the harvest season to supply those contracts.
CA GROWN: What are some ways your company gives back to the community?
Jack: My father was a very giving man and supported a lot of different things in our community, not just the community of Holtville where we’re headquartered, but the Imperial Valley as a whole. We’ve been supporters of the Boys and Girls Club, the local hospital, the Holtville Athletic Club, the Holtville Rotary Club, the Holtville Take Down Club, Little League, the local high school, FFA and 4-H groups and the list goes on and on. For me, it’s important to be a part of the community. I was raised in Holtville for my entire life and I feel like I have a big responsibility because I was born and raised here in the Imperial Valley to try and do everything in our power to support different causes here. We rarely say no to anything and I’m proud of that.
CA GROWN: What drew you into the farming profession?
Jack: I was born. I spent a lot of time with my dad growing up. Every Saturday and Sunday if I didn’t have a sporting event, I would go to work with my dad. I was always in his truck or at the office and he used to sit me at his desk and tell me to listen. That was how a lot of my Saturdays went, sitting there and listening to him on the phone or being in his pickup and listening to him conduct business. So, it was something that I really wanted to do and I couldn’t see myself doing anything else but what I’m doing today. A lot of us in agriculture are proud to plant the seed, cultivate and grow a crop to the best of your ability. Going out to the fields during harvest is like going out there and saying “there’s my babies” and then you have to let them go in the end. It means a lot to us to see different bagged salads and labels and there’s a good chance that some of our products are in there.
CA GROWN: What are your hobbies or pastimes when you’re not farming?
Jack: Family. I love to spend time with my wife and my children. We love to go up to the dessert and enjoy it. I’ve got three children, my girls are 4 and 6 and my son is 10 years old and I love having fun with them and driving with them around the ranch when I get the chance to.
CA GROWN: What advice would you give to someone who wants to become a farmer?
Jack: Dedication. It has to be something you really want to do and you have to be dedicated to it. You have to be prepared to work long hours and know that when work has to get done, it has to get done. If you don’t want to do it with 110 percent effort, then this isn’t the spot for you and you’re not going to be a happy person. If you like to see projects come to fruition from start to finish and that really means a lot to you, this is definitely the career to be in.
CA GROWN: What is something that’s unique about your business or makes it stand out?
Jack: We’re a fourth-generation produce business. Sometimes people talk about corporate agriculture when it comes to California, but if you still look up and down the state, there’s still plenty of farms that are family-held and family involved. To be able to be a fourth-generation farmer with the fifth generation coming up, I’m just hoping to survive in this business climate and at least give my children the opportunity to do this if they’d like. But they would have to have the drive, the want and the desire to do it because I don’t want them to spin their wheels doing something they don’t want to do.
CA GROWN: What has contributed to your past success and what are you doing to ensure continued success going forward?
Jack: A lot of our success has to do with the people on the ranch, our team. These people have been with us for many, many years and we’ve got a lot of long-term employees and generational employees that have been a part of the ranch for so long. It’s because of the people who work with us that things get done. Without them, we wouldn’t be where we are today and we take pride in creating a team situation where people understand they’re part of our family and a part of the team. At the end of the day, we’re all working towards one common goal and that’s to be here for the next year, five years and ten years not just for my family, but for their family as well.
CA GROWN: What’s the most rewarding part of your job?
Jack: Seeing people learn and prosper and at the end of the day, us doing what we said we’re going to do. I mentioned that morning meeting before that we go through everyday Monday through Saturday during the winter season and the amount of organic and conventional commodities we do and how much planning it takes to get through a season. The scope of work that we have in front us and accomplishing it makes you feel good. Laying out that plan and progressing and getting better at what we do every year and having people working with us who are happy is key.
http://californiagrown.org/blog/meet-a-farmer-jack-vessey-of-vessey-company-inc/
Bloomberg Business Article 11-4-15 ### The Water Barons of California's Imperial Valley
Huffington Post Article 4-2-12 ### Imperial Valley, California's Last Frontier
Imperial Valley, California's `Last Frontier,' Sees An Unsure Future
ELLIOT SPAGAT
CALEXICO, Calif. -- The day begins at 1:40 a.m. for Maria Guadalupe Pimentel when her husband knocks on their bedroom door, less than four hours after she fell asleep.
"It's time," Ignacio Erape says before heading to the kitchen of their home just across the border in Mexicali, Mexico. He finishes preparing a lunch of spicy chorizo sausage rolled into tortillas for his wife and four children.
Within minutes, Pimentel is in the back seat of her son's 1998 Honda Civic, passing through deserted boulevards on her way to the United States.
She and thousands of other Mexicans enter the US legally each morning and return home each night – forming an unusual pillar of one of America's most depressed labor markets. California's Imperial Valley consistently registers the nation's highest unemployment rate – 26.7 percent in February_ yet it looks south of the border to fill many of its jobs because locals shun $9-an-hour jobs picking crops.
And that's not all that distinguishes the Imperial Valley, barely 100 miles east of San Diego but a world away.
It's a place where a massive diversion of the Colorado River created a garden in the desert that stocks the nation's supermarkets with vegetables during winter. It's a place that embraced new prisons and a huge build-up in border enforcement, making law enforcement one of the only careers for young men and women hoping to stay close to home. Trying to grow further beyond its farming roots, it's a place that lately has made its abundant sunshine, wind and underground heat available to renewable energy companies.
A look at a day in the life here shows how issues that all Americans ponder, especially in this election season – environment, jobs, immigration – play out in unique ways in the Imperial Valley.
___
By 3 a.m., Maria Pimentel is in the long, slow line to reach border inspectors. "Don't let them cut," others shout at line-breakers as she shakes her head in disgust.
Finally, she enters Calexico, pop. 39,000, and walks three blocks to "La Dona," a donut shop that serves weak coffee and is one of the main gathering spots for crew leaders to find workers.
"I need two workers," says one crew leader to Pimentel, who politely declines. It is 5 a.m. and the tiny downtown's streets are bustling with buses and cars headed to the fields.
Pimentel has the best job in her family, making $9 to $11 an hour working for Steve Scaroni, one of Imperial Valley's largest farm labor contractors. He cuts her a check every Friday with $40 cash advances three days a week, and she has never had to haggle over missing pay.
Now 49, she quit a job earning the equivalent of $7 a day assembling heating vents at a Mexicali factory when she became a legal U.S. resident in 2006. She earns more money in an hour working in California, lifting organic romaine hearts from a conveyor belt and putting them into plastic bags three at a time.
Pimentel and her husband never attended a day of school in central Mexico and neither can read. She began picking strawberries when she was 12. He began herding cattle when he was 6.
The young couple heeded the call of Pimentel's half-sister to join her in Mexicali in the late 1970s, hoping for steady work. Erape, now 59, became a legal U.S. resident after a 1986 law granted amnesty to 2.7 million people. For three decades, he worked half the year picking crops in California's Central Valley. But in 2008, spiraling U.S. housing costs led him to stay in Mexcali to care full-time for three of his 11 grandchildren.
They live in a comfortable house on Mexicali's southern outskirts, painted orange with three white arches over the front patio and a well-manicured garden. On Sundays – Pimentel's only day off – it is an open house for family and friends to feast on dishes like shrimp ceviche and tripe soup. Laughter fills the air as Pimentel hovers near the stove.
Money is always tight. The house has no bathroom sink and only enough white floor tiles to cover two of four bedrooms. Telephone service was cut off in December.
And so Pimentel, a stocky woman who pulls her black wavy hair into a ponytail and has a few missing teeth, keeps working in Imperial Valley's fields, as do her children, who also became cross-border commuters when they turned legal residents in 2006.
Alejandro, 32, and Jose, 28, work seven days a week, making $8 an hour connecting irrigation pipes and doing other odd jobs. Alejandro, who drives across the border in his 2006 Chevrolet Silverado around midnight and sleeps in his vehicle to beat the morning rush, was making $800 a week driving trucks in Southern California but the economic downturn forced him to the farms.
Eloisa, 30, makes $8.25 an hour packing lettuce, and Liliana, 28, gets $8 an hour plucking weeds. Both must pay $5 a day for car rides to the fields from the border.
Scaroni, whose Swiss grandparents were among the Imperial Valley's first settlers in 1912, worries his employees are aging. Stricter immigration enforcement has made it more difficult to find Mexican workers, and he believes Americans would be unwilling to take the jobs even at $15 an hour.
"It's a shrinking pool. Nobody raises their kids to be farmworkers," said Scaroni, 54, who employs hundreds of workers in the area during peak season.
Gerardo Arballo, one of Scaroni's crew leaders, hired Pimentel in December when she approached him at the donut shop. Because of her age, he assigns her to the conveyor belt.
"She's tired. I try to look for ways to make sure she doesn't wear herself out," said Arballo, 31, who wears a cowboy hat and tries to lighten the mood with jokes.
Downtown is almost emptied when Arballo gets behind the wheel of an old school bus at 6:10 a.m. Everyone is in their regular seats – Pimentel and two other women in front and eight men in back. Few words are exchanged during the one-hour ride as several close their eyes.
___(equals)
The no-stoplight Imperial Valley town of Holtville is called the world's carrot capital. It's here that Jack Vessey begins his workday listening to about a dozen lieutenants take turns addressing their areas of specialty on the 10,000 acres his family owns or leases.
One updates the staff on the 160 acres of organic romaine hearts that Pimentel's crew was hired to pick. Bart Reis, the operations chief who runs the meeting from the head of a long table, orders 10 of those acres watered one last time before it is turned over to the crew for harvesting.
Vessey, a boyish-looking 37 with close-cropped blond hair, grows lettuce, spinach, broccoli, onions, cauliflower, carrots, cabbage, bok choy, arugula, celery. In spring, he picks cantaloupe, honeydew and watermelon. He is constantly on the phone negotiating with Dole, Fresh Express and other companies that slap their labels on his produce.
Vessey is unlike many big farmers who trace their roots in the Imperial Valley to its pioneers a century ago. Early settlers went broke when they got too zealous diverting the Colorado River in 1905, creating a two-year flood and setting the stage for another wave of European immigrants whose descendants own much of the land today. The Vesseys settled full-time in the 1960s after about two decades as part-time residents.
The family occupies some of the region's best land near the Arizona state line, where the river feeds into the All-American Canal, an 82-mile channel that straddles the Mexican border and was built in the 1940s to prevent Imperial Valley's lifeline from meandering outside the United States. His fields thrive on about 30 of the hundreds of narrow, concrete canals built along country highways and dirt roads. The water gets saltier as it runs downhill about 30 miles north to the Salton Sea, California's largest lake.
Water has always been the driving political issue in Imperial Valley, fueled by fears that 19 million people living on Southern California's coast will suck it dry. Los Angeles dealt that fate to Owens Valley farmers almost a century ago, as portrayed in Roman Polanski's film "Chinatown."
Imperial Valley, with only 175,000 people – but a half-million acres of productive farms – gets nearly 20 percent of the Colorado River's flow, which would be enough for more than 6 million homes. It gets more than any of the seven western U.S. states and northern Mexico, which also rely on the 1,450-mile waterway. Early settlers were first to claim the water and, under Western water law, farmers can keep it as long as they can demonstrate it is put to good use.
Imperial Valley got a jolt in 1984 when a state panel ruled farmers were wasting water, forcing the sale of a slice of its share to cities. The Bass family, Texas oil billionaires, soon became the largest landowners in an ill-fated attempt to sell even more water to cities.
Vessey joined other big farmers to campaign against a 2003 agreement under which Imperial Valley sold water to San Diego in the nation's largest farm-to-city transfer.
Mike Morgan, whose great-grandfather settled in 1904, is their leader. A walking encyclopedia on water disputes, Morgan has refused to cut his hair until his concerns are addressed. Now, eight years later, the 64-year-old's gray and strawberry blond ponytail stretches down his back.
The farmers' main target is the Imperial Irrigation District, which bought the canal system from the region's bankrupted pioneers in 1911 and manages its water rights. The government agency employs 1,300 people, ranging from "zanjeros" who open and close 6,000 metal canal gates to meter readers at its electric utility. To critics, the agency is a bloated, misguided bureaucracy.
Non-farmers now control the agency's five-member elected board, a shift welcomed by some who fear large landowners might squander the region's most precious resource.
Vessey disagrees: "It makes me nervous when a jeweler in El Centro has control over that water."
___
A canal-lined highway carries Roy Limon from his home in the Imperial County seat of El Centro to his job in a different industry that has become a mainstay in the region: law enforcement.
Limon, 57, whose graying mustache rises when he smiles, has been a guard at a prison in Calipatria since it opened in 1992 at the peak of California's prison construction boom and shortly before voters approved a law requiring life sentences for many three-time felons.
He rakes in overtime pay on double shifts three nights a week and he gets weekends and holidays off. His pension guarantees 75 percent of his salary when he retires in five years. Limon, whose great-grandfather settled in the Imperial Valley in the early 1900s, was the first in his family to shun farming after a stint picking watermelons as a teenager.
Calipatria and another state prison that opened nearby in 1993 employ 2,400 people – a big reason why federal, state and local government agencies account for one in three jobs in the Imperial Valley, even more than farming. Nationwide, government provides only one in six jobs.
Still, at California prisons, the flushest times are over. Court orders reduce the inmate population, and budget cuts end vocational programs. Since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, federal agencies behind heightened border enforcement have stepped in with jobs that start around $40,000 a year and rise quickly. The Border Patrol nearly doubled its presence in the Imperial Valley over the last six years to 1,240 agents.
Students at an Imperial Valley College criminal justice class say their parents pleaded with them not to follow their footsteps into farming.
"They just wanted something better for me," said Michelle Herrera, 20, whose sister is a supervisor for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. "It was either be a teacher or law enforcement."
The region's unemployment rate has been sky-high for as long as anyone can remember, never dropping below double digits.
It topped 40 percent six months after Limon quit his job at the county jail to work at the new prison in 1992, doubling his pay overnight. He celebrated by buying a larger home, and his family took trips to Disneyland and Las Vegas. In 2004, he moved into an even larger custom-built home with his wife, Josie. High ceilings open to a yard of mesquite, palm and magnolia trees, next door to the one-bedroom house where Josie grew up sleeping on the living room couch.
Limon understood when his wife persuaded their two sons to avoid careers law enforcement. She was terrified during a prison disturbance in 1994, the first of several at his maximum-security prison.
"You live with it, but you know things can happen," she said.
One son is a local barber, the other a psychology student.
A nephew, Robert Limon, joined the Border Patrol in 2008 at the peak of the agency's hiring boom. He and his wife are raising four children in the Imperial Valley.
"I'm going to stay here as long as I can," Robert Limon said. "It's home."
___
To keep its people, Imperial Valley knows it must broaden its economy.
Previous efforts to diversify fizzled, from resorts on the Salton Sea that drew the likes of Frank Sinatra and the Beach Boys in the 1960s to a short-lived housing boom in the last decade that fueled talk of Imperial Valley becoming a distant San Diego suburb and ended in a wave of foreclosures.
The North American Free Trade Agreement brought some warehouses in the 1990s but the region has largely failed to capitalize on Mexicali's huge output of televisions, kitchen appliances and other goods for export to the United States.
Three Wal-Mart Supercenters and a host of other new big-box stores cater to droves of shoppers from Mexicali, a booming industrial city of nearly 1 million people. But the malls built over the last decade mainly offer low-paying jobs.
The past struggles don't discourage Andy Horne.
"We're always optimistic down here," he says. "We know we're the last frontier for development potential in Southern California."
Horne, 59, whose grandfather settled in the Imperial Valley in 1913 as a banker, is the county's deputy chief executive officer for natural resources development. He thinks renewable energy may be the right fit for the local economy. Luring solar, geothermal and wind companies is a big part of his job, and there have been hefty investments already.
Imperial Valley's cheap land and proximity to Los Angeles, San Diego and Phoenix make it a natural for renewable energy companies. The summer heat is so intense that stores put foam on metal door handles to prevent customers from burning their hands.
But the valley's traditions and competing interests have to be balanced, too. Keenly sensitive to growing complaints from farmers about the 18,000 acres that solar developers want to turn into about 30 plants, Horne says, "We don't want to kill the goose that laid the golden egg."
In December, Tenaska Energy Inc. of Omaha, Neb., broke ground on 1,000-acre solar plant in Imperial Valley. It anticipates hiring as many as 300 workers during construction but only five full-time employees after operations begin.
"(Solar plants) eat up a lot of our land, they don't create a lot of new jobs, and they also don't pay a lot of property taxes," Horne says in his drawl, behind a large desk that displays a thick binder on another proposed solar plant.
Horne is more enthusiastic about the handful of geothermal plants already built or on the drawing board, saying they generate taxes and good-paying jobs.
One new geothermal plant employs about 30 people along the road that Roy Limon takes home from the prison at the end of his workday.
Jack Vessey closes his farm around 4 p.m. but answers phone calls and emails well into the evening.
As for Maria Guadalupe Pimentel, she gets home bleary-eyed around 8 p.m. after a three-hour commute on two buses from the field, across the border, and finally back to her home in Mexicali. Her husband greets her with tacos of shredded beef.
"The hardest part of the job is the commute," he says.
Lights are out at 10 p.m. Accordion-driven ranchero music plays softly from neighboring homes until 11 p.m., just a few hours before her husband will give her another wake-up knock.
AP Photo By Gergory Bull
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/02/imperial-valley-california-last-frontier_n_1396825.html
Fox News Article 2-4-12 ### Living on Both Sides of the US-Mexico Border
Living on Both Sides of the US-Mexico Border in the Imperial Valley, California
Published April 02, 2012
CALEXICO, Calif. – The day begins at 1:40 a.m. for Maria Guadalupe Pimentel when her husband knocks on their bedroom door, less than four hours after she fell asleep.
"It's time," Ignacio Erape says before heading to the kitchen of their home just across the border in Mexicali, Mexico. He finishes preparing a lunch of spicy chorizo sausage rolled into tortillas for his wife and four children.
Within minutes, Pimentel is in the back seat of her son's 1998 Honda Civic, passing through deserted boulevards on her way to the United States.
She and thousands of other Mexicans enter the US legally each morning and return home each night — forming an unusual pillar of one of America's most depressed labor markets. California's Imperial Valley consistently registers the nation's highest unemployment rate — 26.7 percent in February— yet it looks south of the border to fill many of its jobs because locals shun $9-an-hour jobs picking crops.
And that's not all that distinguishes the Imperial Valley, barely 100 miles east of San Diego but a world away.
It's a place where a massive diversion of the Colorado River created a garden in the desert that stocks the nation's supermarkets with vegetables during winter. It's a place that embraced new prisons and a huge build-up in border enforcement, making law enforcement one of the only careers for young men and women hoping to stay close to home. Trying to grow further beyond its farming roots, it's a place that lately has made its abundant sunshine, wind and underground heat available to renewable energy companies.
A look at a day in the life here shows how issues that all Americans ponder, especially in this election season — environment, jobs, immigration — play out in unique ways in the Imperial Valley.
___
By 3 a.m., Maria Pimentel is in the long, slow line to reach border inspectors. "Don't let them cut," others shout at line-breakers as she shakes her head in disgust.
Finally, she enters Calexico, pop. 39,000, and walks three blocks to "La Dona," a donut shop that serves weak coffee and is one of the main gathering spots for crew leaders to find workers.
"I need two workers," says one crew leader to Pimentel, who politely declines. It is 5 a.m. and the tiny downtown's streets are bustling with buses and cars headed to the fields.
Pimentel has the best job in her family, making $9 to $11 an hour working for Steve Scaroni, one of Imperial Valley's largest farm labor contractors. He cuts her a check every Friday with $40 cash advances three days a week, and she has never had to haggle over missing pay.
Now 49, she quit a job earning the equivalent of $7 a day assembling heating vents at a Mexicali factory when she became a legal U.S. resident in 2006. She earns more money in an hour working in California, lifting organic romaine hearts from a conveyor belt and putting them into plastic bags three at a time.
Pimentel and her husband never attended a day of school in central Mexico and neither can read. She began picking strawberries when she was 12. He began herding cattle when he was 6.
The young couple heeded the call of Pimentel's half-sister to join her in Mexicali in the late 1970s, hoping for steady work. Erape, now 59, became a legal U.S. resident after a 1986 law granted amnesty to 2.7 million people. For three decades, he worked half the year picking crops in California's Central Valley. But in 2008, spiraling U.S. housing costs led him to stay in Mexcali to care full-time for three of his 11 grandchildren.
They live in a comfortable house on Mexicali's southern outskirts, painted orange with three white arches over the front patio and a well-manicured garden. On Sundays — Pimentel's only day off — it is an open house for family and friends to feast on dishes like shrimp ceviche and tripe soup. Laughter fills the air as Pimentel hovers near the stove.
Money is always tight. The house has no bathroom sink and only enough white floor tiles to cover two of four bedrooms. Telephone service was cut off in December.
And so Pimentel, a stocky woman who pulls her black wavy hair into a ponytail and has a few missing teeth, keeps working in Imperial Valley's fields, as do her children, who also became cross-border commuters when they turned legal residents in 2006.
Alejandro, 32, and Jose, 28, work seven days a week, making $8 an hour connecting irrigation pipes and doing other odd jobs. Alejandro, who drives across the border in his 2006 Chevrolet Silverado around midnight and sleeps in his vehicle to beat the morning rush, was making $800 a week driving trucks in Southern California but the economic downturn forced him to the farms.
Eloisa, 30, makes $8.25 an hour packing lettuce, and Liliana, 28, gets $8 an hour plucking weeds. Both must pay $5 a day for car rides to the fields from the border.
Scaroni, whose Swiss grandparents were among the Imperial Valley's first settlers in 1912, worries his employees are aging. Stricter immigration enforcement has made it more difficult to find Mexican workers, and he believes Americans would be unwilling to take the jobs even at $15 an hour.
"It's a shrinking pool. Nobody raises their kids to be farmworkers," said Scaroni, 54, who employs hundreds of workers in the area during peak season.
Gerardo Arballo, one of Scaroni's crew leaders, hired Pimentel in December when she approached him at the donut shop. Because of her age, he assigns her to the conveyor belt.
"She's tired. I try to look for ways to make sure she doesn't wear herself out," said Arballo, 31, who wears a cowboy hat and tries to lighten the mood with jokes.
Downtown is almost emptied when Arballo gets behind the wheel of an old school bus at 6:10 a.m. Everyone is in their regular seats — Pimentel and two other women in front and eight men in back. Few words are exchanged during the one-hour ride as several close their eyes.
The no-stoplight Imperial Valley town of Holtville is called the world's carrot capital. It's here that Jack Vessey begins his workday listening to about a dozen lieutenants take turns addressing their areas of specialty on the 10,000 acres his family owns or leases.
One updates the staff on the 160 acres of organic romaine hearts that Pimentel's crew was hired to pick. Bart Reis, the operations chief who runs the meeting from the head of a long table, orders 10 of those acres watered one last time before it is turned over to the crew for harvesting.
Vessey, a boyish-looking 37 with close-cropped blond hair, grows lettuce, spinach, broccoli, onions, cauliflower, carrots, cabbage, bok choy, arugula, celery. In spring, he picks cantaloupe, honeydew and watermelon. He is constantly on the phone negotiating with Dole, Fresh Express and other companies that slap their labels on his produce.
Vessey is unlike many big farmers who trace their roots in the Imperial Valley to its pioneers a century ago. Early settlers went broke when they got too zealous diverting the Colorado River in 1905, creating a two-year flood and setting the stage for another wave of European immigrants whose descendants own much of the land today. The Vesseys settled full-time in the 1960s after about two decades as part-time residents.
The family occupies some of the region's best land near the Arizona state line, where the river feeds into the All-American Canal, an 82-mile channel that straddles the Mexican border and was built in the 1940s to prevent Imperial Valley's lifeline from meandering outside the United States. His fields thrive on about 30 of the hundreds of narrow, concrete canals built along country highways and dirt roads. The water gets saltier as it runs downhill about 30 miles north to the Salton Sea, California's largest lake.
Water has always been the driving political issue in Imperial Valley, fueled by fears that 19 million people living on Southern California's coast will suck it dry. Los Angeles dealt that fate to Owens Valley farmers almost a century ago, as portrayed in Roman Polanski's film "Chinatown."
Imperial Valley, with only 175,000 people — but a half-million acres of productive farms — gets nearly 20 percent of the Colorado River's flow, which would be enough for more than 6 million homes. It gets more than any of the seven western U.S. states and northern Mexico, which also rely on the 1,450-mile waterway. Early settlers were first to claim the water and, under Western water law, farmers can keep it as long as they can demonstrate it is put to good use.
Imperial Valley got a jolt in 1984 when a state panel ruled farmers were wasting water, forcing the sale of a slice of its share to cities. The Bass family, Texas oil billionaires, soon became the largest landowners in an ill-fated attempt to sell even more water to cities.
Vessey joined other big farmers to campaign against a 2003 agreement under which Imperial Valley sold water to San Diego in the nation's largest farm-to-city transfer.
Mike Morgan, whose great-grandfather settled in 1904, is their leader. A walking encyclopedia on water disputes, Morgan has refused to cut his hair until his concerns are addressed. Now, eight years later, the 64-year-old's gray and strawberry blond ponytail stretches down his back.
The farmers' main target is the Imperial Irrigation District, which bought the canal system from the region's bankrupted pioneers in 1911 and manages its water rights. The government agency employs 1,300 people, ranging from "zanjeros" who open and close 6,000 metal canal gates to meter readers at its electric utility. To critics, the agency is a bloated, misguided bureaucracy.
Non-farmers now control the agency's five-member elected board, a shift welcomed by some who fear large landowners might squander the region's most precious resource.
Vessey disagrees: "It makes me nervous when a jeweler in El Centro has control over that water."
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A canal-lined highway carries Roy Limon from his home in the Imperial County seat of El Centro to his job in a different industry that has become a mainstay in the region: law enforcement.
Limon, 57, whose graying mustache rises when he smiles, has been a guard at a prison in Calipatria since it opened in 1992 at the peak of California's prison construction boom and shortly before voters approved a law requiring life sentences for many three-time felons.
He rakes in overtime pay on double shifts three nights a week and he gets weekends and holidays off. His pension guarantees 75 percent of his salary when he retires in five years. Limon, whose great-grandfather settled in the Imperial Valley in the early 1900s, was the first in his family to shun farming after a stint picking watermelons as a teenager.
Calipatria and another state prison that opened nearby in 1993 employ 2,400 people — a big reason why federal, state and local government agencies account for one in three jobs in the Imperial Valley, even more than farming. Nationwide, government provides only one in six jobs.
Still, at California prisons, the flushest times are over. Court orders reduce the inmate population, and budget cuts end vocational programs. Since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, federal agencies behind heightened border enforcement have stepped in with jobs that start around $40,000 a year and rise quickly. The Border Patrol nearly doubled its presence in the Imperial Valley over the last six years to 1,240 agents.
Students at an Imperial Valley College criminal justice class say their parents pleaded with them not to follow their footsteps into farming.
"They just wanted something better for me," said Michelle Herrera, 20, whose sister is a supervisor for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. "It was either be a teacher or law enforcement."
The region's unemployment rate has been sky-high for as long as anyone can remember, never dropping below double digits.
It topped 40 percent six months after Limon quit his job at the county jail to work at the new prison in 1992, doubling his pay overnight. He celebrated by buying a larger home, and his family took trips to Disneyland and Las Vegas. In 2004, he moved into an even larger custom-built home with his wife, Josie. High ceilings open to a yard of mesquite, palm and magnolia trees, next door to the one-bedroom house where Josie grew up sleeping on the living room couch.
Limon understood when his wife persuaded their two sons to avoid careers law enforcement. She was terrified during a prison disturbance in 1994, the first of several at his maximum-security prison.
"You live with it, but you know things can happen," she said.
One son is a local barber, the other a psychology student.
A nephew, Robert Limon, joined the Border Patrol in 2008 at the peak of the agency's hiring boom. He and his wife are raising four children in the Imperial Valley.
"I'm going to stay here as long as I can," Robert Limon said. "It's home."
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To keep its people, Imperial Valley knows it must broaden its economy.
Previous efforts to diversify fizzled, from resorts on the Salton Sea that drew the likes of Frank Sinatra and the Beach Boys in the 1960s to a short-lived housing boom in the last decade that fueled talk of Imperial Valley becoming a distant San Diego suburb and ended in a wave of foreclosures.
The North American Free Trade Agreement brought some warehouses in the 1990s but the region has largely failed to capitalize on Mexicali's huge output of televisions, kitchen appliances and other goods for export to the United States.
Three Wal-Mart Supercenters and a host of other new big-box stores cater to droves of shoppers from Mexicali, a booming industrial city of nearly 1 million people. But the malls built over the last decade mainly offer low-paying jobs.
The past struggles don't discourage Andy Horne.
"We're always optimistic down here," he says. "We know we're the last frontier for development potential in Southern California."
Horne, 59, whose grandfather settled in the Imperial Valley in 1913 as a banker, is the county's deputy chief executive officer for natural resources development. He thinks renewable energy may be the right fit for the local economy. Luring solar, geothermal and wind companies is a big part of his job, and there have been hefty investments already.
Imperial Valley's cheap land and proximity to Los Angeles, San Diego and Phoenix make it a natural for renewable energy companies. The summer heat is so intense that stores put foam on metal door handles to prevent customers from burning their hands.
But the valley's traditions and competing interests have to be balanced, too. Keenly sensitive to growing complaints from farmers about the 18,000 acres that solar developers want to turn into about 30 plants, Horne says, "We don't want to kill the goose that laid the golden egg."
In December, Tenaska Energy Inc. of Omaha, Neb., broke ground on 1,000-acre solar plant in Imperial Valley. It anticipates hiring as many as 300 workers during construction but only five full-time employees after operations begin.
"(Solar plants) eat up a lot of our land, they don't create a lot of new jobs, and they also don't pay a lot of property taxes," Horne says in his drawl, behind a large desk that displays a thick binder on another proposed solar plant.
Horne is more enthusiastic about the handful of geothermal plants already built or on the drawing board, saying they generate taxes and good-paying jobs.
One new geothermal plant employs about 30 people along the road that Roy Limon takes home from the prison at the end of his workday.
Jack Vessey closes his farm around 4 p.m. but answers phone calls and emails well into the evening.
As for Maria Guadalupe Pimentel, she gets home bleary-eyed around 8 p.m. after a three-hour commute on two buses from the field, across the border, and finally back to her home in Mexicali. Her husband greets her with tacos of shredded beef.
"The hardest part of the job is the commute," he says.
Lights are out at 10 p.m. Accordion-driven ranchero music plays softly from neighboring homes until 11 p.m., just a few hours before her husband will give her another wake-up knock.
Based on reporting by the Associated Press.
http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/news/2012/04/02/living-on-both-sides-us-mexico-border-in-imperial-valley-california/
Photo: In this March 7, 2012 photo, farmer Jack Vessey talks on his cellphone in the middle of his lettuce field near Holtville, Calif. Vessey, grows lettuce, spinach, broccoli, onions, cauliflower, carrots, cabbage, bok choy, arugula, celery on the 10,000 acres his family owns or leases. In spring, he picks cantaloupe, honeydew and watermelon. He is constantly on the phone negotiating with Dole, Fresh Express and other companies that slap their labels on his produce. (AP Photo/Gregory Bull)
San Diego Union-Tribune Article 9-28-06 ### Uncertainty is lay of the land
Uncertainty is lay of the land
Imperial Valley growers bracing for spinach market fallout
By Diane Lindquist
STAFF WRITER
September 28, 2006
HOLTVILLE – Far from the Northern California fields that produced the spinach that has sickened consumers across the United States, growers in the Imperial Valley and around Yuma, Ariz., are struggling with some multimillion-dollar questions.
Should they plant the huge winter spinach crop? If they grow it, will anyone buy it?
NADIA BOROWSKI SCOTT / Union-Tribune
Jack Vessey (right), one of the largest growers of spinach in Imperial County, and his ranch foreman, Bartt Reis, looked out over a field that has been prepped and fertilized for winter spinach. Vessey said he hasn't decided whether to risk planting the crop.
They know they'll take a financial hit from the E. coli outbreak that has left at least 175 people ill in 25 states and one woman dead in Wisconsin.
The uncertainty growers face is whether the market will rebound now that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has isolated the contamination to spinach from three Salinas Valley counties and declared that plants grown elsewhere are safe to eat.
Early this week, Jack Vessey, one of Imperial County's largest spinach growers, stood in a dusty field already prepped for spinach seeds and contemplated whether to put in the crop or cut his losses.
“We've never been in limbo like this. We knew what we were going to do two months ago, and now,” he said, his voice trailing off.
“To be honest, we just don't know what to do.”
Spinach crop
by the numbers
$350 million: Value of total annual U.S. spinach crop (spring and winter)
40 percent: Percentage that is grown in the Imperial Valley and Yuma region
10,000: Number of acres in the region usually planted in winter spinach
2 dozen: Number of winter spinach growers in Imperial Valley and Yuma
SOURCE: USDA, California andArizona agriculture
Nearly all fresh spinach sold in the United States from November through March comes from the Imperial Valley and Yuma region. The winter crop accounts for 40 percent of the $350 million market. The remainder comes from the spring production around Salinas, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture statistics.
“Spinach is one of our successes. It's been steady, one of our safe crops, if you will,” Vessey said, noting that he's grown the crop for 10 years. “We usually get through the season making money.”
Every few days during a typical production year, Vessey said, he plants seeds in 10-acre plots so restaurants and supermarkets will be provided with a continuous spinach supply throughout the winter.
Vessey's business, Vessey & Co., which he runs with his father, Jon, reached agreements months ago with marketers, a few as investment partners, to provide specific amounts of the vegetable at specific times in upcoming months.
If the market fails to materialize as originally planned, both grower and marketer will suffer the hit, he said.
Vessey has already spent money on seed, insecticide, fertilizer and workers to ready the fields. He is reluctant to invest more if no one will buy the product. If Vessey halts production now, he said, his loss would amount to about a half-million dollars.
NADIA BOROWSKI SCOTT / Union-Tribune
Imperial Valley and Yuma growers said much is riding on whether consumers can differentiate between their spinach and crops from the Salinas Valley, which the FDA has identified as the source of the E. coli outbreak.
“In this business, it's said your first loss is your cheapest loss,” he said.
The E. coli outbreak is certain to spread financial damage all along the supply chain, Vessey said, from field workers to agricultural service suppliers to marketers, distributors and stores and restaurants.
Nobody yet knows how widespread the losses will be.
“The effects are a lot greater than the public thinks,” Vessey said.
He said he will decide whether to plant by Oct. 10.
“We want to be sure we're going to be able to harvest,” he said.
Switching to another of the 20-some crops Vessey & Co. grows is unlikely because plans for those products already are set. If Vessey leaves the spinach acreage barren, he might be able to plant later if sales pick up.
“But for us to react, it would be a minimum of 30 days to plant it and put it on the market,” Vessey said.
Across the Arizona border in Yuma County, grower Steve Alameda said he's cutting back his spinach acreage even though shippers and marketers are urging him to plant.
“When in doubt, don't do it. That's what people usually do,” Alameda said. “It's really a mess. It's really sad.”
About two dozen farmers in Imperial and the Yuma area raise spinach, according to county and state agricultural officials. Most also grow other vegetables such as lettuce, broccoli, cauliflower and peppers. Slightly less than 10,000 acres are devoted to spinach in the two regions. Nearly all the spinach produced is bagged.
Losses are most likely to be minimized, the region's growers said, if American consumers can make the distinction between spinach from the Salinas Valley, which included the tainted product, and spinach grown hundreds of miles away in the Imperial and Yuma desert areas.
“Of course they are suffering, and we don't blame them,” Vessey said. “But we are not implicated in this nor have we been implicated in any outbreak in the past.”
“We'd hope there's a different perception about spinach grown in the desert,” said Vessey's ranch foreman, Bartt Reis.
Vessey and Reis ticked off a list of the safety precautions they take to prevent contamination, including frequent tests of irrigation water, daily power washes of the harvesting machines and use of independent firms to certify stricter safety measures than those required by law.
Such practices are routine throughout the industry, however, and it's probable they failed to prevent E. coli from tainting the Salinas Valley spinach, experts say.
Developments
Spinach returns: East Coast grocery chains Giant Food, Stop & Shop and Tops Markets began restocking produce shelves yesterday with fresh spinach grown in Colorado and Canada.
Safe to eat: Federal officials continued to reassure the public that spinach was safe to eat as long as it was grown outside the Salinas Valley.
Positive test: A third bag of Dole baby spinach in Pennsylvania that tested positive for a deadly E. coli strain has been linked to a specific batch packaged at a Salinas Valley plant.
E. coli is a bacteria that lives in the intestines of cattle and other animals and typically is spread through fecal contamination. There are various strains, and not all are dangerous to humans.
According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, E. coli O157:H7, the strain identified as the cause of the illness outbreak, is responsible for about 73,000 infections and 61 deaths annually in the United States.
In hopes of informing consumers that the winter spinach is safe, Imperial Valley and Yuma growers are working closely with industry associations.
Suggestions include putting stickers on bagged spinach identifying where the product is grown and posting signs in supermarkets, said Kathy Means, spokeswoman for the Produce Marketing Association.
No formal plan has been devised, however, because the business groups are focusing on how the Salinas Valley spinach became tainted.
“First is taking care of the current crisis,” said Western Growers Association spokesman Tim Chelling.
Given the uncertainty and confusion in the industry, it's unlikely consumers will start buying the vegetable again in sizable quantities anytime soon, Yuma grower Gary Pasquinelli predicted.
“When something like that happens, people stop eating spinach. Period,” he said.
For his part, Vessey foresees a difficult season. The loss of reputation the entire industry has suffered might not be reversed until the source of the contamination has been identified. And some food experts are saying the cause might never be known.
“A lot of these ranches had top-notch food safety practices, and we need to know what happened because we might need to make adjustments,“ Vessey said.
“I don't want anybody to get sick. I don't want anybody to die. We want to give people safe food.”