Agriculture

TONASKET, Okanogan County – Ever since Eve bit the forbidden fruit, apples have held a certain mystique.

Rising beef prices helped Annabelle Schmidt to convince her grandfather that she could follow his footsteps and become the sixth generation of family to raise cattle on Green Bluff.

MOSES LAKE – It was a cloudy Wednesday afternoon as Lupe Reyna, 83, stared at an old gray building with boarded-off entrances – once a store for migrant workers.

Temporary foreign farmworkers in Washington state face wage cuts of more than $3 an hour under policy changes by the Trump administration earlier this month for those with temporary visas to work in agriculture.

Grabbing the kids and heading to Green Bluff is a tradition for Spokane families.

It might be called the beef barn, but if you wander over to the fixture at the Spokane County Interstate Fair this year, you’ll probably see two kids taking care of six dairy cows.

DEER PARK – A Spokane County farmer is facing $100,000 in fines from state regulators who allege he repeatedly irrigated 69 acres of hayfield at his family’s Wild Rose Prairie property without authorization.

RATHDRUM, Idaho – For the past decade, Don Jacklin has assembled a museum of sorts along Highway 53 that helps preserve the farming legacy of the region.

The dust stirred from the combine harvesting fields of chickpeas, charging forward like an auburn tsunami barreling across the scenic fields of the Palouse.

YAKIMA VALLEY – The challenges facing the Washington hop farmer are aplenty, mused Jeff Perrault, while staring out at several hundred acres of lush trellises on his family farm a few miles west of Toppenish.

The National Lentil Festival may be the only place in the world where a person can get a high-five from a chickpea mascot, slurp up a bowl of lentil chili straight from a 325-gallon cauldron, and peruse 100 vendors selling anything and everything related to legumes.

The number of invasive Japanese beetles trapped in Pasco and Kennewick is up significantly this year, but Washington state Department of Agriculture officials are hopeful that a new method of eradicating them will be successful. “It is quite alarming, the population increase this year,” said Camilo Acosta, the department’s beetle eradication coordinator, in an update to the Franklin County ...

Aug. 8—The potential exists for a near-record apple crop in the state this fall, but picking all those apples depends on whether enough workers are available during the upcoming harvest. Officials with the Washington State Tree Fruit Association released their forecast for the 2025 fresh apple crop, and the 142 million standard 40-pound boxes predicted would be a significant increase over last ...

LIND, Wash. – Conversations buzzed with talk of soil conservation, crop rotations and winter wheat breeding as grain trucks rolled out for the first tour of the day.

WASHINGTON – Amid a recent surge in arrests of immigrants allegedly living in the country illegally, some raids by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement have drawn quiet concern from Republicans in Congress who largely back President Donald Trump’s mass-deportation project.

Eastern Washington farmers are set to gain a more reliable water source, thanks to a $45 million state investment in a major irrigation project.

BZ CORNER, Wash. – In a remote stretch of Klickitat County in southern Washington, third-generation apple grower John Riggleman is playing a bit part in the most ambitious and highest-stakes new product rollout attempted by the United States apple industry.

May 9—A bipartisan group of lawmakers in Congress, including Rep. Dan Newhouse, reintroduced a piece of legislation this week that aims to reform immigration policy and agricultural labor. The Farm Workforce Modernization Act, which was first proposed in 2019, would give farmworkers a path to legal status and citizenship, update the foreign guest worker program and implement a nationwide ...