I-1433 and Farmers Pt 2

With today's Fruit Grower Report, I'm Bob Larson. An initiative on next week's ballot that would push Washington's minimum wage to $13.50 by 2020 could doom many small farmers in our state.

The Washington Policy Center's Madi Clark says big farms are better equipped to handle the added labor costs ...

MADI CLARK ... "Large farmers are great, but if you are voting thinking this will help small farms, this will help workers, you're actually creating regulations that will further a consolidation of the industry. And then, you're going to encourage economies of scale because the large farms will be able to mechanize. They'll be able to create solutions to their high labor costs which is adopting mechanized processes and that will lose jobs in the end."

Clark says before the current minimum wage law was enacted in the 1980's, Washington was a world leader in crops like asparagus ...

MADI CLARK ... "Now there's 38-hundred acres in 2015, where as we used to be like 30-thousand, so we're 10% of what we used to be. And that's what labor costs do. It's understandable to think that paying somebody more would improve their quality of life, but in reality, in rural Washington and in agriculture in Washington, that cost increase will actually make jobs disappear because the economics of it do not allow for the high cost of labor."

Bottom line, Clark says the added labor costs would make Washington agriculture less competitive on a global market.