WELLINGTON: From potatoes and vegetables to apples and hay, growers in many parts of the West Coast are going in loss due to slow down at ports. Product isn’t getting shipped and growers face decisions on how much to plant for 2015.
Stan Boshart was headed for a meeting with a rye grass grower when he received a text from his daughter, Shelly Boshart Davis, vice president of international sales of his export company.
Members of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union had walked off the job again at the Port of Portland. It meant Boshart’s nine trucks hauling rye grass straw 54 miles from his straw press in Salem to the port for shipment to Japan and South Korea would have to turn around.It was the morning of Jan. It wasn’t the first time he’d received such news. “Instead of two (walkouts) a month, it’s turning into six a month. It’s really bad. It’s as if the longshoremen are trying to figure out the most effective way to hurt truckers,” Boshart said. “Sometimes it’s right after their (the longshoremen’s) morning break or right after lunch.”
Boshart, 56, and his wife, Lori, own Bossco Trading, Bossco Trucking and SJB Farms in Tangent, Ore., a small town south of Portland that claims the title of “Grass Seed Capital of the World.” His father started the farm in 1950.But the slowdown at West Coast ports over the past three months — while longshoremen and terminal operators negotiate a new contract — has Boshart by the throat. He said he’s not sure how much longer he can last before he’ll have to lay off his 49 employees and start shutting down.
The truck turn-arounds are costing him $1,800 a day. He’s been shipping 25 containers a week, and sometimes as few as 10. Before the labor trouble, the number was 51 to 55.Boshart normally bales 55,000 tons of rye grass straw a year to be exported for dairy and beef cattle feed. Annual sales run $11 million to $13 million, about 10 percent of the Willamette Valley’s straw export business. “I’m limping along for customers who need the feed, but at some point I won’t be able to,” he said. “I’m almost there but I have way too many people counting on me on both sides of the ocean.”
“It will take months to unwind this, not just in clearing up port congestion but many importers already are shifting to the East Coast and saying they’re not coming back,” he said. “People who grow apples and hay here in the Northwest will have more difficulty getting containers because they will be landing on the East Coast. So I think the ILWU may win in the short term, but one has to wonder about the permanent damage to the cargo volumes and work available to longshoremen on the West Coast in the long term. I don’t know if ILWU thought this through,” Friedmann said.
“That shows how completely ignorant he is. This whole thing is not about short-term wins but trying to preserve our jobs in the future,” responded Dean McGrath, president of ILWU Local 23 in Tacoma. Longshoremen are not only concerned that importers are shifting to the East Coast but that foreign-owned companies operating the ports are trying to do away with the longshoremen’s jobs altogether, McGrath said. There’s also uncertainty about 2015 crop production levels in potatoes, vegetables, hay and other crops as growers and processors make planting decisions now. Many growers of potatoes, sweet corn, green peas, carrots and lima beans are on contracts with processors that have already been set or soon will be, said Larry Schaapman, who grows potatoes and vegetables near Quincy, Wash.
Contracted growers should be OK but growers playing the open market without contracts could end up with nowhere to sell their produce, he said.Growers are concerned and “those who aren’t should be,” he said. Gary Ash, manager of National Frozen Foods, Moses Lake, Wash., said the company produces 400 million pounds of frozen vegetables annually from its three Washington plants. Fifteen percent, or about $65 million worth, is exported. So far, he said, they’ve experienced delays but no substantial losses.
“Our biggest concern and fear is loss of future business. As soon as you can’t deliver, people go elsewhere,” he said.National is about to sign grower contracts for 2015 and fully intends to move forward, anticipating the port issue will be settled, Ash said. But a far greater volume of frozen potato products, mainly french fries, are exported from Washington than frozen vegetables, he said. Potato growers have purchased seed, are fumigating fields and will plant in March, said Matt Harris, assistant executive director of the Washington State Potato Commission in Moses Lake. It costs about $500,000 to grow 130 acres of potatoes, he said.
McGrath said he wants farmers to know PMA is to blame for cutting hours. “A lot of my members go to Eastern Washington a lot and they’ve been almost attacked over there. I understand their (farmers’) feelings, but they don’t know the whole story,” McGrath said. “I want them to know.”
A good time for longshoremen to talk to farmers is when they make the same pay and benefits for the same hours as farmers, Friedmann said, in reference to the high pay and benefits of longshoremen. McGrath said longshoremen can make big money with overtime but that their “high pay” is often overstated. The entry level wage is $25 per hour and higher skilled positions are about $40 per hour, he said. “I can’t begin to decipher the differences. The he said-she said,” said Mark T. Anderson, president and CEO of Anderson Hay & Grain in Ellensburg, Wash.
“At this point we have a broken system. We have publicly owned facilities (the ports) that have global operators who can’t come to terms with the people who work there and it’s costing billions of dollars to the U.S. economy,” Anderson said.Government is responsible for assuring efficient, dependable ports for the growth of export markets, he said. “The last time I checked most politicians ran on the idea exports were important and jobs were important,” he said. “It doesn’t seem to be playing out that way. From the president on down, they are aware but seem to have done little. It’s incredibly disappointing.”