Human-rights movement comes to Colorado with promise of more protections, rights for farmworkers
Rancho Durazno in Palisade is the first agricultural enterprise in Colorado to join the Fair Food Program, an innovative human-rights movement that began in Florida’s vast tomato fields.
Nancy Lofholm published Jul 4, 2023
The steady sound of shovels stabbing into the soil of a Palisade orchard signals where half a dozen workers — all of them Mexican, here on work visas — are replacing peach trees killed by a late freeze three years ago. The workers grab knee-high baby trees that are swaddled in yellow plastic. They plunk them into the damp soil, settling them in with pats of their shovels.
Some of these workers were in these same orchards near the foothills of the Grand Mesa on Colorado’s Western Slope when plunging temperatures shriveled and blackened the trees. They were saddened they had to chop down brittle trees they had been caring for through previous seasons of planting, pruning, thinning and picking. They say they hope to be here to see these replacement trees begin producing fruit in several years.
These workers feel invested in the prosperity of 40-acre Rancho Durazno. They do tough work that few locals are willing to tackle. According to interviews with multiple migrant workers, as well as the director of a Palisade-based migrant service group, Rancho Durazno workers are rewarded with decent working conditions, housing and pay. Mutual respect thrives here along with fruit.
That is why they return on work visas year after year to tend the trees and augment their diminishing winter-season fishing earnings in Paredoncito, the tiny Sonoran coast village most of them call home.
“Está muy bien,” said 52-year-old Adolfo Yebismea Jupa, who started working at Rancho Durazno 14 years ago. Through an interpreter, he added: “We have everything we could want here.”
“They treat us well. They show us respect,” said Yebismea Jupa’s son-in-law Luis Angel Guzman Mancillas, who also spoke through an interpreter. (No Rancho Durazno owners or supervisors were present during these interviews.)
Beginning this season, these workers at Rancho Durazno are joining a broader effort to improve farmworker protections in Colorado so more migrant farm and ranch workers can be treated with the same respect.
Through a unanimous vote taken at a gathering in a packing shed last summer, the Rancho Durazno workers gave their owners the go-ahead to join the Fair Food Program, an innovative human-rights movement that began a dozen years ago in Florida’s vast tomato fields. Rancho Durazno’s worker approval led to Rancho Durazno becoming the first agricultural enterprise in Colorado to join the movement.
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