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Gwen Cameron, owner,Rancho Durazno: “It’s a good way to communicate our values to our customers. I think the general public has become more aware of and interested in the treatment of ag workers and the Fair Food Program made me realize we need to do a better job of sharing our story.”
Colorado Sun: "Navidad Yevismea [worker at Rancho Durazno] said he recommends the Fair Food Program to other workers in the orchard and vineyard network around Palisade. 'Honestly, I recommend this program because there are workers who don’t get treated as good as here,' he said. 'Here, I am getting everything that is promised.' ”
Dan Waldvogle, Director of the Rocky Mountain Farmers Union: “This is a program with a lot of integrity.”
Even as the Fair Food Program expands internationally from Chile to South Africa, the groundbreaking, worker-driven human rights program continues to spread to new states and new crops right here in the United States. Last year, Rancho Durazno, a family-owned peach and melon grower, became the first farm in Colorado to join the FFP. Now, in the wake of the success of that pioneering partnership, the Fair Food Program is gaining steam in the Rocky Mountain State with more and more of Colorado's rich tapestry of small and family-run farms seeking certification.
The Colorado Sun’s Nancy Lofholm spoke with farmworkers, farmers, local community organizations, and CIW staff about the Fair Food Program – how it started and built its unique approach to human rights monitoring, how it has worked in its first year at Rancho Durazno, and how it benefits workers, consumers, growers, and buyers alike. The result is a vivid feature piece outlining the transformative power of the Fair Food Program, and the potential for the Program to bring real, worker-driven, market-backed human rights to the fields of Colorado. We are excited to share it with you below!
If you, too, are inspired by the Fair Food Program and would like to support its expansion, please consider donating by clicking here [[link removed]] . Whether it's a one-time donation or a recurring contribution through the FFP's Sustainer Program, your generous financial support makes it possible for us to guarantee the human rights of thousands of farmworkers across the globe.
And if you are a farmworker or farm owner interested in bringing the Fair Food Program to your farm, please contact us as: [email protected].
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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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