Hello all! I hope everyone is ready for the Big Show! Harvest is around the corner, it’s amazing how quickly this season is moving forward. I hope most of you or your employees participated in our safety meetings, conducted thorough out the year.
We just recently concluded our first Tree & Vine safety, during my presidency that is, to make sure we can help educate our members and their employees about this very stressful and busy time, on harvesting safety. We want to make sure everyone is safe throughout the harvest and the year.
As we all get busy in the next few weeks, I would advise everyone to please be on the lookout for public meetings being conducted by Madera County regarding the white area growers, as part of the new SGMA ruling. They just conducted their first one in Chowchilla on June 30th at the fairgrounds. These meetings are very important for growers to attend because if your property is not in a water district, the County will be the governing body for the groundwater sustainability plan (GSP) for your property. Grower input to them is very crucial, and the County is willing to listen and take any and all ideas back to work as one. So please attend, and if you need any info please feel free to call the MCFB office anytime to get answers as this is a very difficult thing to understand at first.
On a final note, not to get political, but after the defeat of the Ag Overtime bill (AB 2757) on the Assembly floor, the bill’s author, Assembly woman Lorena Gonzalez, gutted one of her active bills, that already passed the Assembly, currently in the State Senate (AB 1066), and included the Ag overtime language into it. So now the Ag overtime bill is alive again in the form of AB 1066. I encourage all of you to please call or write your elected officials and explain to them how this law is very detrimental to agriculture and the employees we employ. If you discuss this with your employees and explain how you will now only run an 8-hour shift, you’ll be surprised to see their reactions. Please pass those observations on to the elected. Thank you and have a happy and safe harvest!
