YAKIMA VALLEY, Wash. – Maribel Teran works quickly and methodically. She doesn’t like to take breaks. The faster she works, the more asparagus she cuts. The more asparagus she cuts, the more money she makes.

But the basket on her hip weighs about 15 pounds when it’s full.

“It’s heavy,” she said.

The first couple of weeks, she really feels it. In her legs. In her back. Her muscles are stiff from stooping. “You get sore,” she said. “Many people, they quit.”

Harvesting asparagus hurts. Each spear is hand-cut with a quick jab of a long knife that ends with a notched “V” tip designed to clip stalks below the soil. So asparagus cutters spend most of the harvest with their backs bent in fields throughout the Columbia Basin and Yakima Valley.

Teran is one of the best cutters at Inaba Produce Farms, which owns asparagus fields west of Wapato. The company supplies the fresh-cut tender green shoots to high-end grocers, such as PCC Natural Markets in the Seattle area and New Seasons Markets in Oregon, California and the West Side of Washington.

Sometimes, as her knife slices through the base of a single spear, Teran said she wonders, “Who’s going to eat this asparagus?”

Washington is one of the nation’s largest asparagus growers. Fresh-cut spears from Adams, Benton, Franklin, Grant, Walla Walla and Yakima counties end up in grocery stores throughout the U.S. and Canada. Frozen spears from the same fields also are delivered to doorsteps across the country through companies such as Schwan’s. And asparagus that’s been cut and pickled outside Pasco can be purchased in 16- and 32-ounce jars at Costco.

Production has been on the rise in recent years, and there are reasons for optimism about the future of asparagus farming in Washington. New technology and growing practices are making it more efficient at a time when Americans are eating more fresh asparagus.

The industry, said Alan Schreiber, director of the Washington Asparagus Commission, seems to be on the cusp of what could be considered a new age for Washington asparagus.

“We are not like any other crop,” he said. “The way it’s handled. The way it’s grown.”

And, perhaps more importantly, “No one else has the quality Washington has.”

Yet the Washington asparagus industry remains a shadow of its former self. Production is about 80 percent less than what it was in 1990, when Washington was the world’s leading producer of green asparagus.

Today, the crop faces competition from foreign markets that weren’t major players three decades ago – Peru and Mexico, in particular – as well as ever-present concerns about rising labor costs and a shrinking labor force.

While the demand for fresh asparagus is rising, industry experts agree Washington asparagus production will never return to previous levels, when canning was king.

At the industry’s peak in 1990, Washington produced 102 million pounds of asparagus grown on 30,000 acres. A year later, the U.S. enacted the Andean Trade Preference Act, allowing Peruvian asparagus – heavily subsidized by the U.S. government – to enter America tariff-free. Canneries closed and moved to Peru.

Today, Washington grows 22 million pounds on 4,400 acres.

The numbers, Schreiber said, “are pretty stunning.” They show, he said, the collapse of an industry. The low point was 2013, when Washington asparagus farmers produced 15.8 million pounds, or about 15 percent of what was grown in 1990.

“There’s no comeback for canned asparagus,” Schreiber said. “I doubt we will see Washington ever returning to being a largely processed-asparagus industry. We’re not going to go back to the way it was.”

The focus now is on fresh.

The same year Washington asparagus growers hit an all-time low in production, Schreiber, in his annual state-of-the-industry address, encouraged them to plant more.

“We are not planting enough asparagus to make our industry as competitive as it needs to be,” he said that year. “It is time to start planting asparagus.”

If they didn’t plant more and change things, Schreiber told the growers, the Washington asparagus industry “would no longer be viable.”

Now four years later, it’s working.

Growers are switching to new varieties and trying different planting techniques. They’ve adopted more intensive management methods, as well as increased automation in packing sheds. And, for the first time since 1990, Schreiber said, they’re “planting more than they are taking out.”

Washington asparagus is emerging as a “more competitive” industry with “more aggressive” marketing, he said. Yields are increasing. One new acre now can produce double what an old acre produced.

“No one has the yields we have,” Schreiber said, noting this year’s harvest is projected to be more than that of either Michigan or California.

“Buyers recognize Washington quality,” Schreiber said. “We get paid a premium over everybody else,” including Peru and Mexico, Michigan and California.

“In a sense, the Washington asparagus (industry) is back,” Schreiber said. “But it is not your father’s asparagus industry.”

It even has its own hashtag: #GetFreshWithUs.

Crowning glory

Once classified as a lily, asparagus thrives in well-drained, sandy, alkaline soil. It evolved around the Mediterranean Sea, growing from Spain to Syria and dating to ancient times. Ancient Greeks, Romans and Egyptians ate fresh asparagus.

It’s difficult to pinpoint when asparagus farming started in Washington. Schreiber, head of the state asparagus commission since 2002, said it’s been cultivated in the Columbia Basin for at least the past 110 years. He knows this, he said, because he has a photo that’s dated 1907 and portrays Columbia Basin farmers with the delicate, quick-growing crop.

Asparagus can grow anywhere from 5 to 7 – and even 9 – inches in one day during warm weather. To keep up, cutters must harvest spears daily. Harvest is done entirely by hand. Cutters bend at the waist, positioning their knives at a 45-degree angle, pivoting between rows at a quick clip, sharpening their blades on the go and watching where they step. They must take care to not damage the spears.

The perennial plant has a short shelf life and is best enjoyed while it’s young. Once the tips start budding, or “ferning out,” the stalks quickly become tough and fibrous.

The season is short but intense. It generally starts in early April and runs through mid-June. This year, because of cooler weather, it began about two weeks late.

Harvest typically runs 65 to 70 straight days. “It’s not religious,” Schreiber said. “It does not observe the Sabbath.”

Cutters harvest spears one by one until they have a handful. They trim the woody ends with a single slash of their long-handled knives and tuck the spears into the box at their hips.

“It’s stoop labor. It’s hard work,” Schreiber said. “I’d like to see you finish a row.”

Teran, 27, cuts on a two-person crew with her boyfriend, Nivardo Santiago, 26. Together, they tackle 72 half-rows, or the equivalent of 31 regular rows. Most cutters harvest 12 to 16 full rows, or about 2 acres, in a four- to six-hour workday.

Crews of generally two to five or six people – often fighting the darkness with light from headlamps – cut out morning glory, thistle and other weeds as they care for the same section every day.

“Everybody has their own number and their own area,” said Norm Inaba, who owns this farm with his family. “The way you cut dictates what the next day will be. A good cutter makes the asparagus better. A bad cutter will make the asparagus bad.”

‘It just shoots up’

Teran and Nivardo are two of his best. They’re in his organic field near Harrah by 5 a.m., sometimes earlier, to start cutting before the break of dawn, when it’s still cool. They must assess every spear, deciding – based on length and appearance – whether to cut, cull or leave it for tomorrow.

Long and straight spears are prized. Crooked ones are culled. So are the skinny ones, which pull nutrients from the wider, weightier and more desired spears.

It’s difficult to keep up, especially when the weather’s warm.

“You return the next day and it looks like a different field,” Inaba said. “It just shoots up.”

Cutters empty their baskets as they go, placing spears into larger boxes set at the end of their rows. Those boxes are picked up by truck and taken to a packing line. Inaba packs his own. But most farmers take their asparagus to a nearby plant for packing or processing into pickled or frozen products.

About two dozen growers bring asparagus – anywhere from 20 to 1,200, even 1,500, boxes a day – to Johnson Foods in Sunnyside, where spears are washed, weighed, measured, graded and sorted by size: jumbo, extra large, large, medium and small.

Within three days, the spears ship throughout the Pacific Northwest and as far away as New York. They leave the plant, bound for shelves at Fred Meyer, Safeway and Costco – and, eventually, people’s plates.

Teran thinks about them sometimes. She wonders if they ever think about who cut the particular spears they’re consuming.

After a four- or five-hour stint in the organic field at Inaba Produce Farms, where they’re paid by the pound, Teran and Nivardo move onto a conventional field at the same farm, where they’re paid an hourly wage. Many asparagus cutters work double shifts to make more money during the fierce but fleeting season.

Fast cutters like Teran can make $28 to $30 an hour, which is about 30 cents per pound. The industry average, Schreiber said, is $15 to $20. At the very least, farmworkers make minimum wage, which in Washington is $11, one of the highest in the country.

Teran moved to the United States from Mexico City when she was 15. None of the faces in the fields where she works are white. Cutters here have varied ethnic backgrounds: Mexican, Guatemalan and Haitian are common.

Like Teran, many work other crops within Washington’s rich agricultural industry. Apples, sweet corn, green beans and grapes need people for the harvests throughout the summer and fall. Asparagus, which she’s been harvesting since finishing high school, is hardest. But it’s her favorite. “I make more money here.”

After two or three weeks in the asparagus fields, her body becomes used to the bending, and, she said, “I feel nothing.”

Still, asparagus season takes its toll. Teran usually loses weight during harvest, “maybe 10 pounds,” she said.

She finishes in the fields around 2 or 3 p.m. and is usually in bed before 10 p.m.. She wakes around 3:30 a.m. to make lunch – sometimes tacos or tortas or tostadas. She likes asparagus, too. Her preparation of the slender, tender, labor-intensive vegetable is simple. She likes it with eggs or with butter, cooked “just in the microwave.”

Inaba encourages Teran to save money for college. She wants to go. Or, maybe, beauty school. But she’s also saving money to support her mom, who was in a car accident on her way to come to work in the fields.

The same fields drew Inaba’s grandfather from Japan in 1907. He sees a comparison between the workers in his fields and his own immigrant ancestors. Whether they arrived 110 years ago or in the recent past, Inaba said, “Everyone came here for one reason: for a better life.”

Deep roots

Inaba and his two older brothers and business partners, Lon and Wayne, are third-generation farmers with deep roots in the Yakima Valley, once the epicenter of asparagus production in Washington.

When they were growing up here in the 1960s and ’70s, they would hunt for errant asparagus spears, sprouted from seeds spread by birds and the wind. “My grandmother and I and all us kids would pick it on the ditch bank,” Norm Inaba said.

The Inaba brothers didn’t get into asparagus until 1988, beginning with about 20 acres. “A lot of other people were growing it, and we wanted to grow something different,” Norm Inaba said.

Today, he and his brothers farm 250 acres of asparagus. It accounts for about one-sixth of all of their crops. It also takes three or four years to mature.

Planting is Year Zero. In Year One, a grower generally gets five to 10 days of cutting, Inaba said. Year Two, maybe 10 to 30. Year Three usually yields a full or nearly full harvest. Year Four is a mature crop.

It’s an investment that takes time, money and patience to earn a return. The plant’s root masses, or crowns, are typically planted in March beneath 7 to 9 inches of soil and 60 inches apart. Farmers need about 2,600 crowns per acre. At a cost of about $100 per 1,000 crowns, that’s $2,600 per acre. Add in the cost of field prep and labor, and it’s about $3,500 just to plant 1 acre of asparagus, Schreiber said.

Lately, farmers have been experimenting with tighter rows, planting crowns 40 inches apart, for larger yields. Some also have started direct seeding and trying new varieties, such as Guelph Millennium – which, “right now is the rock star,” Schreiber said.

Inaba also sees opportunity in the organic market. He has 50 acres of organic asparagus, plus another 40 acres in transition to become organic. In all, Schreiber estimated, Washington has some 200 acres of organic asparagus.

People are experimenting with purple, too. There are about four farmers in the state growing a combined total of about 20 acres of purple asparagus, Schreiber said. People pay more for it because it looks dramatic and quantities are limited. But that might change, just like the industry.

These days, some 70 percent of Washington’s asparagus growers are located in the Columbia Basin, which is closer to Walla Walla and Dayton, where the canneries once processed the harvest. It’s also where bigger fields with larger capacities for production were available.

Gourmet Trading Co., the biggest fresh asparagus plant in America, spans 85,000 square feet outside Pasco, where the company has about 445 acres of asparagus.

Phil Clouse, 73, oversees them.

“I really think that Gourmet has really added some stability to the fresh market in this state,” he said, rolling through the company’s uniform, undulating fields in the 2011 red Ford F-150 he refers to as “my office.”

The soil is sandy loam and the yields are way above average. Farmers are shooting for 15,000 pounds per acre or more, or three times the average. And cutters here are making more than $20 per hour.

“Asparagus has probably sent more kids to college than any other crop,” said Clouse, who’s been in the business more than 40 years.

“People just go crazy for it,” he said. “It’s a sign of spring.”

Gourmet’s operation is a sign of something, too.

“This is the future of asparagus,” Clouse said. “Right here.”

Schreiber, sitting in the cab of Clouse’s truck, agrees. “I’m very much in awe of this operation. I have a lot of respect for it. But part of me doesn’t want this to be the future of asparagus. This is a multi-national corporation. It’s going to be very hard for the littler grower to keep up.”

‘Fresh is better’

To help the entire industry, the commission launched a limited marketing campaign in 2015, including starting a Facebook page. Today, it has more than 800 “likes.” More concentrated efforts started last year.

“Growing asparagus has gotten more challenging,” said Inaba, who’s a board member for the commission. “It’s kind of an experiment. If you can’t adjust, you die. You have to adapt.”

The Inabas’ first full asparagus crop was ready right around the same year the trade agreement took effect, crushing the state’s canned asparagus industry and flooding the fresh market. Farmers plowed under asparagus fields. Some replanted with other crops. Others walked away.

“I saw a lot of friends and other people who had to leave when the Del Monte plant and the Green Giant plant closed,” Inaba said. “I don’t think we’ll see 30,000 acres again. I just don’t. There’s just a few growers now.”

Inaba encourages consumers to support the ones who are left. He advises them to check labels for “Washington grown.” He also advises them not to buy asparagus on sight alone.

“It will tell you when it’s old,” he said. “Pick it up and smell it. If it doesn’t smell good, put it back and walk away.”

Inaba likes his asparagus grilled with olive oil and Johnny’s Seasoning Salt. His wife prefers Montreal Steak Seasoning. She also prepares it with butter, garlic salt and Parmesan.

Either way, “It’s hard to beat fresh asparagus,” he said. “Fresh is better.”

DAYTON, Wash. – Nearly every lifelong resident has at least one story about the town’s old asparagus cannery.

Ginny Butler, past president of the Dayton Historic Depot, remembers her mother and three friends took a job processing asparagus one summer to earn some extra spending money.

“They each wanted something for their house and their husbands didn’t want to buy it,” Butler said, laughing. Two of the women quit right away, but Butler’s mother stuck it out, working grueling shifts while caring for her children.

By the end of the season, she was able to buy a decorative piece to hang over the family fireplace.

For decades, the plant defined life in Dayton. Each summer an influx of about 1,000 migrant workers would join the town’s other 2,000 permanent residents. Hundreds more workers would tend the nearby fields.

And then it came to an abrupt stop. In 2005, the company moved much of its business to Peru, taking Washington’s entire asparagus canning industry with it. Farmers plowed under fields. Two other canneries closed.

“It totally wiped us out. I’ve never seen such a huge, significant industry collapse,” said Alan Schreiber, executive director of the Washington Asparagus Commission.

The culprit? Cocaine.

Growing a Giant

The Green Giant cannery, as it would come to be called, opened in 1934 after a 45-day construction blitz, according to records from the Dayton Historic Depot. Workers processed peas from surrounding fields at first, then added asparagus in 1939. The company soon created a seed research department with a greenhouse to work on improving pea seeds, and set up a labor camp in 1942 to house Mexican-American workers from Texas.

The Minnesota Valley Canning Co. merged with Blue Mountain Canneries, Inc., the plant’s original owner, in 1947. By 1950, the company was called Green Giant.

In the early years, they packed asparagus grown in the Dayton area.

The crop, which is perennial, can grow for 15 years after a single planting, though shorter periods are more typical. Once it’s done, farmers plow it up and plant something else.

Duane Dunlap, who started working as an agriculture personnel supervisor in 1966, said Green Giant would lease the fields from farmers for 20 years. When one cycle of asparagus was over, they’d move on to new land. By the 1970s, asparagus was migrating west, toward the Columbia Basin.

“Once the crop quit producing enough to be economical, you had to plow it up,” he said. “Pretty soon we had no asparagus here.”

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Dunlap’s job was to recruit migrant workers. In the early years, they were mostly single men, but by about 1972, he said, the plant started recruiting families.

Children sometimes worked in the fields with their parents before the company stopped that practice, requiring kids to go to school. Women often worked in the Dayton plant receiving asparagus from all over the region.

More than 40 years later, Dunlap can still recite the towns where the company kept workers housed: Starbuck, Tucannon, Grandview, Khalotus. Many cutters lived in Dayton and were bused out before sunrise to reach the fields, working until midday. The barracks in Dayton, recently donated to the county, sit on Green Giant Camp Road.

“It just mushroomed. We had asparagus fields all over the Columbia Basin,” he said.

Mauricio Ramos started working in the asparagus fields around Dayton in 1975. His uncle began working around Dayton in 1942, when Texas migrant workers were bused up in the back of covered 10-wheeler trucks. By the time Ramos came from Eagle Pass, Texas, the workers traveled in buses with bathrooms.

Workers in the barracks woke at 4:30 a.m. and had to be ready to go to the fields by 5 a.m., Ramos said. Crews were driven to fields, about 20 miles outside of Dayton.

A 1983 filing with the U.S. Department of Labor calls for 150 plant workers, paid $4.26 per hour, or about $10.50 in today’s dollars. Cutters made at least the federal minimum wage of $3.35 an hour, but earned $11.75 per hundredweight of asparagus harvested.

“If you moved fast, it was good pay,” Ramos said.

A ‘War on Drugs’ casualty

As Washington’s asparagus fields moved toward the Tri-Cities, cocaine gripped American cities. Powdered cocaine was the king of drugs on Wall Street in the 1980s. Crack cocaine laid waste to the inner cities.

In a 1986 Gallup poll, 42 percent of Americans said crack and other forms of cocaine were the country’s most serious drug problem, besting alcohol by eight percentage points.

This was the golden age of the War on Drugs, and officials in the other Washington came up with what they thought was a good solution: go after the source. So the United States signed the Andean Trade Preference Act, which went into effect in 1991. It gave trade preference via duty-free imports and grants to Andean countries that trafficked cocaine into the U.S.

The goal was to incentivize farmers to grow crops other than coca. The U.S. Agency for International Development built irrigation infrastructure and other projects in Peru. Farmers started planting asparagus.

Asparagus crowns take a few years to mature, and farmers needed time to get the crop right. The Washington market didn’t start feeling the effects until about 2002, Schreiber said.

“Asparagus is not a hard crop to grow if you know how to grow it,” he said. Once Peru developed that knowledge, Washington’s canneries didn’t have long.

Seneca Foods was the last in a string of Dayton plant owners who canned asparagus for Green Giant, which was then owned by General Mills. General Mills made the decision to move operations to Peru in 2005, citing Washington’s high minimum wage and the lower cost of doing business in South America.

“They gutted the plant of all those machines and sent them to Peru,” Dunlap said.

Dayton’s plant was the last of three Washington asparagus canneries to close. In 2003, a Del Monte plant in Toppenish and another Seneca plant in Walla Walla stopped processing asparagus.

Ramos moved his family to Dayton after a few years in the fields, and eventually began doing irrigation work for the company. He left Green Giant in the early 1990s to take a job at City Lumber, a hardware store in downtown Dayton. His wife spent about a decade in the plant, earning better wages than she could have gotten in Texas.

By the time he left Green Giant, Ramos said, rumors about the cannery’s closure were always floating around. The asparagus fields had already moved out of Dayton further west.

“That year when they closed it, they didn’t say anything. They just did it,” he said.

Jennie Dickinson, now the Port of Columbia manager, was the director of the Dayton Chamber of Commerce at the time of the closure. She said Seneca had been talking about Washington’s minimum wage for a long time before the closure, saying they couldn’t raise prices to make up the increased costs.

“You can only get so much for a can of asparagus,” she said.

Peru deal a local bust

Cocaine still comes to the U.S. from Peru, though the amount of coca growing in the Andean highlands has fallen since the 1990s. Whether Peruvian asparagus production has helped depends on whom you ask.

The Peruvian government and White House drug policy office have both defended the trade preference, saying many asparagus farmers came from coca-producing regions.

Schreiber doesn’t buy it. Coca is usually grown in the Andean highlands, while asparagus does best at sea level. A 2015 map by the Peruvian government showing hot spots for coca cultivation has almost no overlap with asparagus growing areas.

“They’re the No. 1 exporter of coca and the No. 1 exporter of asparagus,” Schreiber said.

That may not be strictly true – Colombian coca production surged in 2015, putting it ahead of Peru – but Peru has historically been and continues to be a major coca supplier.

USAID sent a little over $384 million in foreign aid to Peru in 2015, the last year for which complete data was available. About a third of that was spent on the Andean Counter Drug Program, and more on other law enforcement related to narcotics. Peru’s agriculture sector got $24 million.

The amount of coca grown in Peru has fallen nearly 70 percent since 1992, according to data from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. In 1992, farmers planted 129,100 hectares. By 2015, that was down to 40,300 hectares. A hectare is the equivalent of approximately 2 1/2 acres.

But it’s debatable whether that fall is because of asparagus. The largest reductions in acreage, according to the UN data, occurred in the mid- and late 1990s, before asparagus production took off. The Peruvian government also eradicated tens of thousands of hectares in the 2010s.

From asparagus to seed

Whether it helped stop cocaine trafficking or not, Dayton residents know the plant isn’t coming back.

The white brick outline of a larger-than-life Jolly Green Giant still sits on a hillside above town, well-maintained now after some years in disrepair.

“My husband says, ‘Take it down, they’re not here anymore.’ I say, ‘We’re still the Valley of the Jolly Green Giant,’ ” Dickinson said.

The cannery was the largest private employer in Dayton at the time of its closure. But, Dickinson said, most of the jobs lost were people near retirement age. Seneca kept 10 workers on to work processing seeds, a business still going strong in the old Green Giant location.

Dayton’s culture during harvest and packing season changed right away. Dayton children used to look forward to seeing their friends, the children of migrant workers, in class each spring.

“It was kind of a domino effect,” said Brad McMasters, who was a third-grade student teacher when the plant closed, and now does economic development work for the Port. The laundromat closed, and a few bars shut down.

The workers often gathered in public spaces, sitting on downtown benches and socializing. Hearing Spanish on the street was common. Butler, the Dayton Historic Depot board member, said that sense of community was missing after the closure.

“I just felt like the fabric of Dayton was thinner,” Butler said. Some families, like Ramos’, stayed in the area, but many left for the Tri-Cites or other asparagus areas.

The economic impact of the closure would have hit harder, but wind power was booming just as Seneca moved asparagus to Peru. PacifiCorp began building the Marengo Wind Farm the same year, bringing in new construction jobs and some permanent jobs maintaining the turbines. A second farm, Hopkins Ridge, went in the following year, and a third came soon after.

Without those, “I can’t even imagine what would have happened to us,” Dickinson said.

Seneca has been expanding its seed processing operations. Plant manager Chris Shires said it employs about 50 people, half of whom are full time and half of whom work about 10 months a year. In the past six months, they’ve tripled their volume and now process 30 million pounds of pea, garbanzo and wheat seeds per year for three companies.

Because of that expansion, they’re now using the full space once occupied by the asparagus cannery.

Washington’s asparagus canning industry won’t come back, something Schreiber said he’s still bitter about. He’s worked to reinvent Washington asparagus as a fresh crop, but said hundreds of people lost money when the plants shut down: farmers who plowed under fields, businesses who sold groceries and gas to migrant workers, families that relied on the income from plant workers.

“It’s been a rough, gut-wrenching era,” he said.

Dunlap retired from Seneca in 2002 and has since been active in the Blue Mountain Heritage Society, which recently restored a one-room schoolhouse from the county’s early days and moved it into downtown Dayton. He sits on the board and did much of the painting to bring the old classroom back to life.

For Dickinson, the loss of lifelong company workers like Dunlap will be the true loss to Dayton. Wind farms provide good jobs, but the young people who take them often move up in the energy company and leave for a bigger city. Asparagus gave Dayton a supply of company men who retired, stayed in town and can give back now with community service.

But between tax revenue from wind farms, a budding local food movement and the town’s proximity to a small ski area, hiking and agrotourism, Dayton isn’t in danger of becoming a ghost town.

“We’re just not going to dry up and blow away like a lot of farm towns,” Dickinson said.

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PASCO – You might have to strain a bit, maybe stand on the back of a flatbed truck to see them, but from the Wal-Mart parking lot, you can see some of the country’s best asparagus fields.

So it particularly irked Gary Larsen last year when – at the height of Washington’s asparagus season, with harvest happening in the shadow of the retail giant – he spotted spears from Mexico in the Pasco Wal-Mart’s produce aisle.

Earlier this month, Larsen, chairman of the Washington Asparagus Commission, learned the retailer would also be buying more asparagus from Michigan, where the minimum wage is $8.90 and the cost of asparagus is less.

Not all retailers are willing to pay a premium for Washington asparagus, which costs more than the foreign-grown spears or even spears grown in California and Michigan, America’s other two top asparagus-growing states. Labor costs here drive up the price.

“Your minimum wage has gone up. Your taxes on payroll have gone up,” Larsen said. “It’s expensive.”

Asparagus is one of the most labor-intensive crops to harvest and handle. Each individual spear is cut by hand. The spears are then hand-sorted. They’re hand-packed, too.

“That’s the main problem: labor,” said Ron Granholm, a third-generation farmer who grows some 125 acres of asparagus near Harrah in the Yakima Valley.

His concerns are twofold, and they mirror those of other farmers in the industry. There’s the cost of labor, and there’s the shrinking – and undocumented – labor force.

Based on a national study, Mike Gempler, executive director of the Washington Growers League, estimates about half of Washington farm workers are undocumented. And for some certain crops, including asparagus, the numbers could be even higher.

Asparagus workers “are very exposed,” Gempler said. “The whole industry is very exposed.”

Comprehensive immigration reform could help stabilize the workforce. Workable government policy providing for legal entry for laborers willing to do some of the hardest farm work, such as cutting asparagus, is needed, he said.

“Trump has made some noises about being open to that,” Gempler said. However, the new administration also seems to “have a very negative stance on most immigration issues.”

“We’re very concerned about them creating an enforcement-only policy,” Gempler said.

Washington state’s dependence on foreign farm labor can be traced to the federal Bracero program, which brought hundreds of thousands of workers from Mexico to harvest crops from 1942 through the early 1960s. Two dozen years later, Congress passed immigration legislation that included amnesty for undocumented workers currently living in the country. Many made the U.S. their permanent home.

In the three decades since, the flow of Mexican migrants has ebbed and farm owners are experiencing the consequences.

“We do not have an adequate supply of labor that is legal to harvest our crop,” said Alan Schreiber, director of the Washington Asparagus Commission. “We cannot get people that are here legally to do this work. The pool of workers the industry has access to is finite and contracting. The situation is not going to end until we have immigration reform.”

H2A visas are temporary work permits for foreign agricultural workers with offers for seasonal farm work in the U.S.

But, Schreiber said, the H2A program isn’t a good fit for asparagus growers. The season is too short; the costs, too high to come out ahead.

“The H2A doesn’t work for us,” Schreiber said. “Asparagus only lasts 70 days. You can’t make it work for 70 days. Over 90 percent of all H2A workers are in tree fruit. You’ve got to spread out your costs, and they can generally work over nine months.”

Gempler favors revamping the H2A program as well as establishing a “blue card” visa to allow guest workers to toil at different farms for a period of up to three years. They wouldn’t be contracted to one particular farm, which would give workers and farmers more flexibility – something that’s needed for crops with short seasons, such as asparagus.

On top of that, “we also need to legalize the existing workforce, the people we have here,” Gempler said. “It gives people who have been working here an opportunity to stay. People age out of jobs. We really need a bridge to the future.”

Labor is an issue across all crops. Minimum wage is going up. But, in the asparagus industry, where so much of the work is done by hand versus automation, “we’re more exposed to the high cost of labor,” Schreiber said. “We are very, very vulnerable.”

It’s manageable if production levels are high enough, Schreiber said. One strategy is to reduce dependence on labor, but harvesting is hard work.

“I think the hardest part is bending over all the time,” Granholm said. “There’s a lot of skill to it.”

Granholm, 58, cultivates fields at the end of a road named for his family. His grandfather started farming here in 1905. His father farmed alfalfa, peppermint, spearmint and sugar beets, among other crops. Today, he farms with his daughter, Erica, 31, the fourth generation to farm. They grow grass, carrot and red clover seed along with asparagus, which makes up about 15 percent of their total crops.

Grandholm put in crowns because “there was nothing else that looked promising to pay the bills,” he said.

He planted asparagus in 1990, the same year the Andean Trade Preference Act was signed. It took effect a year later. Canneries closed and moved to Peru.

“All of a sudden, we had all of these growers trying to find a home,” he said. “It was a rat race.”

Granholm survived, but “we’re looking for another crop now.”

Farmworkers, his daughter said, “keep wanting more every year, and we’re not getting paid more.”

The Granholms bring their spears to Johnson Foods in Sunnyside for packing and processing. Gary Johnson, 49, is president of the family-owned company founded in 1949.

“I think people are nervous about planting asparagus, because it’s expensive to harvest and labor is in tight supply,” Johnson said. “There’s fewer farmers. But there’s better quality, higher yields.

“With labor costs ever-increasing in Washington, that doesn’t help the situation.

“There’s going to have to be some change. We’re going to have to rely more on machines,” Johnson added. “We’re going to have to eliminate labor, eliminate people. We just can’t compete with the prices out of Mexico or Peru.”

After the industry collapse and a new focus on fresh asparagus as well as new techniques and varieties, Larsen said, “We’re clawing our way back.

“We’re trying to fight back. We’re trying to make people aware Washington has an asparagus season. We’re here for a month, two months. And then we’re out.”

Larsen’s fields are about 15 miles northeast of the Wal-Mart in Pasco.

“I’ve had fresh asparagus from Peru,” he said. “I’ve had fresh asparagus from Mexico.

“I think the stuff from Washington is sweeter.”

He prefers it over Michigan and California, too.

He employs about 150 cutters during asparagus season and grows more than 300 acres on a farm his father started in the 1960s.

“My pledge this year was to have asparagus every day of harvest,” he said. “So far, I’ve done it.”

Eating asparagus is good for you, but it can make your pee stink.

This awareness is not new.

In 1781, Benjamin Franklin wrote, “a few stems of asparagus eaten, shall give our urine a disagreeable odour.”

No kidding, Ben.

But here’s the thing. Apparently not everyone produces this telltale sulfurous smell (at least not to the same degree), and not everyone can detect it when it is present.

With the helpful guidance of John Fellman, a professor of plant physiology at Washington State University, a survey of the asparagus urine research suggests the following broad findings.

♦Some undetermined segment of the population produces the aroma. Some segment does not.

♦Some segment is predisposed to detect the odor, while another part of the general population does not detect it.

♦There may be a connection between producing the aroma and being able to detect it.

So it comes down to a matter of production vs. perception. In any event, evidence suggests it’s all a matter of genetic differences.

But for those who can smell that smell, the molecular science does not begin to describe what the nose knows.

Yakima County asparagus farmer Ron Granholm said the offending bouquet can be breathtaking.

“It’s amazing what asparagus can do to your pee,” he said. “It really stinks.”

Amazing is certainly one word for it.

Smithsonian.com put it succinctly: “Our bodies convert asparagusic acid into sulfur-containing chemicals that stink.”

The aroma is so pronounced some have been known to consider upcoming social engagements when deciding whether to consume asparagus.

You know, “Will I be a leading source of air pollution if I eat asparagus now and use the bathroom at that party tonight?”

One asparagus-loving Spokane couple refers to the scent of the sour urine simply as “the problem.”

Onset has been noted just mere minutes after dining on the vegetable in question.

But one study found 58 percent of men and 62 percent of women were unable to smell the funky asparagus aftereffect.

To those who can detect the odor, that must seem remarkable. Because when you can smell it, you can really smell it.

WSU’s Fellman said that within the scientific community, this is largely viewed as a nonproblem. So a miracle cure likely is not in the offing, at least not anytime soon.

Meantime, some fans of asparagus will tell you the key to living in harmony with the succulent spears is a powerful bathroom fan.