News stories open old wounds at Grant Farms

WELLINGTON – Andy Grant feels like he got sucker punched.

Grant, who owns Grant Family Farms about 10 miles northwest of Wellington, has always taken pride in how he treats the people who work in his organic operation, especially the migrant workers who do the nearly backbreaking labor of tending and harvesting produce in the hot summer sun.

But in 2006, Grant got smacked with a civil lawsuit by five illegal Mexican laborers whose main beef was with a Hudson-area contractor they claimed had abused them and kept them as virtual prisoners in shelters that were little more than filthy hovels.

The men’s attorney saw an opportunity to bring Grant into the lawsuit as well because Grant Farms had hired the contractor to supply some field workers. A federal court judge in Denver recently ruled in favor of the men and awarded them $7.8 million – more than $1.5 million each. Although denying he mistreated any worker or knew they were being mistreated away from his farm, in 2007 Grant decided to settle out of court to avoid a potentially long and costly legal battle and pay $70,000, or $14,000 to each of the men.

Grant remembers the 2006 lawsuit vividly and painfully.

“We were right in the middle of our Chapter 11 bankruptcy at the time,” he said. “I knew we were the most fair and proactive of any farm in Colorado and for this to come out was personally devastating to me.”

And it’s having an impact on his business, too. One of his biggest organic produce buyers stopped buying from him after stories about the lawsuit were published in the Denver Post in mid-May. Fortunately, that large retailer started buying again a few weeks later.

Grant says he’s disappointed with how the whole thing was handled on several fronts. First was the abuse that the contractors – Moises and Maria Rodriguez – heaped on the workers they apparently helped smuggle into the United States. Both were eventually sent to jail and later deported.

Grant said the Rodriguezes had a good reputation for supplying field workers in Northern Colorado and he used their laborers for several years. “We never once heard a complaint from any worker,” he said. “Had we heard a complaint we would have quickly addressed it.”

Grant’s also disappointed that the lawsuit did not include other Northern Colorado farms that used the same workers. “They were contractors for at least 20 years,” he said. “They virtually worked with every vegetable farm in Northern Colorado.”

And he’s disappointed in the Post, which did not emphasize that fact in its articles. Grant said he believes other farms – unlike his – did not pay workers’ compensation insurance premiums for the laborers and had no paper trail linking them to the contractors.

“We got trapped in this because we were the only ones doing it right and doing it by the law,” he said. “Nobody else was reporting it. They all did it illegally and didn’t report the workmen’s comp.”

Grant said his farm has always paid its workers above-average wages and takes pride in how it shelters and treats its seasonal employees. In 2006, the farm started using the H2A federal guest worker program that’s aimed at ensuring only legally documented workers are employed.

The recent Post stories brought all of the pain of the lawsuit back again, but Grant feels confident he will weather yet another challenge to his business. And he hopes the publicity will soon die away and his family’s true treatment of its migrant laborers will be what’s remembered.

“For 20 years my late Mom would go to Goodwill and Salvation Army and bring back free hats and coats to give to our workers,” he said. “That’s how we have as a family always behaved toward our farm workers.”

Steve Porter covers agribusiness for the Northern Colorado Business Report. He can be reached at 970-221-5400, ext. 225, or at sporter@ncbr.com.

on Facebook on LinkedIn