Fixing what wasn’t broken
By Paul W. Jackson
As bees float from one flower to the next, guided by navigation only they understand,
there’s quiet and peace between blueberry rows.
It’s spring as they work, and the bees are frenzied. They have their own agenda, and they’ll have no peace until it’s fulfilled. The same is true of blueberry growers and people who would attack them.
When the two agendas collide, there can be no peace.
The grower’s agenda is simple enough:
Survive another year, keep a close eye on quality,
try to gain profit from a very short season and find
peace in the winter where it can be found.
The anti-farmer agenda, however, seems as difficult for farmers to comprehend as the bee’s flight plan.
It’s been surmised that the media celebrity who first created conflict amid South Haven’s blueberry fields and fabricated a story has a singular agenda – television ratings. A more generous – and perhaps more naive – evaluation of the “Blueberry Children” report that ABC News aired last fall says ABC was altruistically exposing the shameful practice of children forced to work in fields. That would be a noble agenda, if the allegations were true.
Blueberry growers such as Randy Adkin, however, don’t have the time or inclination to try to understand motives. They have theirown business to conduct, and it’s useless to try to understand today’s media as it floats on every breeze and follows the strongest smell.
Sometimes, however, growers have to plug their noses and react when media attacks, and that’s what Adkin Blue Ribbon Packing Co. did. It spent the winter in frenzied activity, trying to undo the damage done when its reputation was sullied. Even though the company had done nothing to deserve a shallow and distorted attack on its reputation, it had to do something.
“We’ve been really busy over the entire winter,” said Tony Marr, general manager at Adkin. “We had an audit and hired a social re-sponsibility company from Buffalo, New York, to review our policies. They tweaked what we had and suggested adding some new things.”
Oddly enough, the phrase “social responsibility” was barely a blip on grower or buyer radar screens before the ABC report. Perhaps, said Kimberly Clarke, Adkin’s attorney, it’s just a new, popular term for old practices that Adkin followed for years.
“It seems like most of the social responsibility practices are just good business practices,” she said. “They involve things like a harassment policy and investigations of complaints, and creating an appropriate work environment as required and enforced by many government agencies.”
Regardless, Adkin decided to go the extra mile and spend an estimated $400,000, Clarke said, to “develop and implement practices which exceed buyer documentation requirements to demonstrate their continuing commitment to compliance issues.”
Adkin’s company developed a video in both English and Spanish, which every single employee is required to view. Highlighted in the video is an emphasis on child labor designed to prevent parents from allowing underage children from being anywhere near the work environment. Adkin also increased information for workers about summer schools and day care. To keep kids who travel with their families from boredom, which might lead to illegal work, Marr said they built soccer fields and picnic areas, and invited a statewide organization to bring kids snacks and provide entertainment.
Adkin created a new one-person position responsible for daily housing and field inspections to be sure housing is immaculate and no children are working. A report is filed every day. There are gates and guards at every field entrance, and people who do not have official worker badges will not enter. No exceptions.
“While recent activities are consistent with their long history of good employment practices, Adkin now clearly understands the value of compliance evidence,” Clarke said. “Many people may be nostalgic about the simplicity of the past, but Adkin is focused on leading the industry in current and future issues.”
But people whose only connection to blueberry growers is the ABC news report might think spending all that effort is a sure sign of guilt.
Not true, Clarke said. “This is not a fix, because there was nothing to fix,” she said. “Adkin’s customers (such as Walmart and Meijer) said they needed the grower to show things they’re doing, to have things on paper. It doesn’t mean they weren’t doing the right things before.”
Walmart did not return calls seeking comment, even though it was first to threaten Adkin with a public refusal to buy from them after the ABC piece. Since then, however, Adkin has been reinstated by every customer, and even gained a buyer or two, Marr said.
“We took this seriously because we don’t want it to happen again,” he said of the media attack. “We worked hard, flew around the country this winter and spoke with Walmartevery week.” Walmart, Marr said, even experienced the new emphasis on “social responsibility” personally.
“We had a surprise visit from a Walmart auditor because apparently someone from ABC called Walmart and said they’d observed kids in our fields,” Marr said. “So the Walmart guy showed up unannounced, and was immediately greeted at the field gate and was not allowed in until I gave the OK”, he said. “He spent half a day in the field, interviewed about 40 workers, inspected the packing plant and reported back that he’d sent a favorable report to Walmart because he was amazed at the organization in the field and the cleanliness of the labor camps. And the funny thing is, we got a letter from NBC, saying their crews observed kids picking in one of our fields. But the field where they said they saw it is a machine-only field 25 miles south of where we were picking.”
Whether national news media are trying to bait blueberry buyers into reportable action without proof is open to speculation, but it didn’t work this time because there is a newfound trust between buyer and grower, Marr said.
“We thought that whether we did anything wrong or not, the problem (caused by
a shallow and speculative TV report) wouldn’t go away totally,” Marr said. “But we’ve now restored all relations with every last one of our customers, and trust has been restored. We felt good about that, but the media seems to want to keep pounding away on this issue. I don’t think anything was broken here, but the media reports last fall raised the level of awareness about labor issues within the industry. We went as far as we did because we’ve always viewed ourselves as a leader in the industry, and we invested all this money to help it move in the right direction and protect itself from this sort of black eye.”
And so, as frenzied harvest activity replaces the peace of a springtime blueberry field, growers all over the state and nation are on alert that there are people watching, people who apparently have an agenda that ignores the efforts of farmers who invest and work all year to bring high-quality blueberries – known as a superfruit – to consumers. And if creating a story through speculation, intimidation and tricks is the media norm these days, the norm on blueberry farms will be tight security, which in itself contradicts the peace found on a farm when only bees are around.
“We’re in a new era,” Marr said. “But we’ve stepped up, and the entire industry will step up.”
See the previous Farm News story on this subject “How to frame a farmer” at www.michiganfarmnews.com