Both Sides of a Broken System: How Small Farmers and Latino Communities Are Losing the Same Fight

By Humberto Rodriguez

Sunnyside, WA

Dumping Ground: The Series is five-part investigative reporting from the Yakima Valley. Part Three of Five.

An independent documentary is in production.

Editor's note , this article has been updated to correct information about the organizational relationship between ELLA and Friends of Toppenish Creek. A correction has been added to the relevant section.

I grew up in this valley. I know what it looks like when a farmer shows up to a birthday party for one of his employees. I have family members who work for farmers. I have seen those relationships up close, the early mornings, the shared meals, the decades of loyalty that flow in both directions. I know that the story of farming in the Yakima Valley is not a story of villains.

So when I posted my video about the Sunnyside RNG facility and the conversation that followed turned into a debate between the farming community and the environmental justice community, I watched something happen that I have seen before and that breaks my heart every time.

Two communities that are both being failed by the same system ended up fighting each other.

This piece is about that. Not about who is right. Not about who deserves to win. But about what the data actually shows is happening to small family farmers in this valley, and why the people who are supposed to support them have largely left them to figure it out alone while the money flows somewhere else entirely.

The Numbers Tell A Story Nobody Wants To Hear

In 1993 Washington State had 2,500 dairy farms. By 2018 that number had fallen to 377 according to the Washington Farm Bureau. By 2022 only about 400 farms with milk cows still operated in the state, roughly half the number from 2007.

Read that again. Half.

In less than two decades Washington lost half its dairy farms. The USDA documented it. The Washington Farm Bureau documented it. The families who watched their neighbors sell off their herds and walk away documented it in ways that don’t show up in any database, in the conversations at church, at the feed store, at the school where their kids used to play together.

The Yakima Valley, home to a third of all milk cows in Washington State, has not been immune to this collapse. The valley had 57 dairy farms with an average herd of 1,300 cows as recently as 2018. The farms that remain are fighting on multiple fronts simultaneously with almost no institutional support designed specifically for them.

What are they fighting?

Low milk prices that for years made it economically impossible to turn a profit without significant scale. New state regulations requiring expensive lagoon liners and leak detection systems, one dairy consultant estimated initial compliance costs between $300,000 and $2 million per farm. A 40-hour overtime law implemented without the phase-in period or tax credits that other states like New York and Oregon gave their farmers. Federal litigation that has consumed millions of dollars in legal fees and compliance costs. Trade uncertainty and tariffs that threaten key export markets for dairy. Energy costs climbing with no relief in sight. And a public narrative that increasingly treats every dairy farm, regardless of size, practices, or history, as the enemy.

The result has been devastating. And it has fallen hardest on the farms that have the least, the small and mid-size family operations with no corporate parent to absorb the losses, no lobbying arm in Olympia, and no army of lawyers to navigate the regulatory labyrinth.

The Overtime Law — A Story With No Easy Villain

In 2020 the Washington State Supreme Court ruled that it was unconstitutional to deny dairy workers overtime pay. The ruling came out of a lawsuit filed by Yakima Valley dairy workers Jose Martinez-Cuevas and Patricia Aguilar against DeRuyter Brothers Dairy in Sunnyside. The court found that excluding farmworkers, a workforce that in Washington is overwhelmingly Latino, from the overtime protections available to every other worker in the state violated the equal protection clause of the state constitution. It was a historic ruling. It was also a ruling that exposed a contradiction that nobody has fully resolved.

For nearly a century agricultural workers in the United States were excluded from overtime protections under federal law. That exclusion was not an accident. The federal wage law was shaped by a deal President Roosevelt struck with Southern Democrats, and the exemption was designed explicitly to exclude the largely Black workforce that dominated farm labor at the time. Washington’s Supreme Court called this out directly. Denying overtime to farmworkers was discriminatory by design.

And so in 2021 the legislature acted. Senate Bill 5172 extended overtime protections to all agricultural workers in Washington, phased in over three years and reaching the standard 40-hour threshold in 2024. Washington became the state with the strongest overtime protections for farmworkers in the nation.

Here is where the story gets complicated.

When the law fully took effect farmers who could not afford to pay overtime did the only thing they could do to control costs, they cut hours. Workers who had been earning good wages during long harvest seasons suddenly found their hours capped at 40 per week. Some workers who had counted on 70-hour weeks during harvest to save money for the winter months found themselves with dramatically reduced annual incomes. Patricia Mendoza, one of the farmworkers NPR spoke with about the law, had been thrilled when it passed. Then her hours were cut.

The irony is almost unbearable. A law designed to protect Latino farmworkers ended up, in some cases, reducing their take-home pay, because the farms they worked for could not absorb the additional cost without cutting hours. And the farms that could absorb it were the large operations with the scale and capital to restructure. The small family farm, the one that could not afford lawyers or lobbyists or financial consultants, got squeezed from both ends.

Neither side of this debate is lying. Farmworkers deserved overtime. They had been excluded from basic labor protections for a century based on a racist policy. That is also true. Small family farms cannot absorb sudden cost increases without cutting hours or letting workers go. That is also true. And the people who designed the policy in Olympia did not provide the tax credits or gradual phase-in that other states used to cushion the transition. That is also true.

Everyone is right. Everyone is losing. And nobody in power is being held accountable for the policy gap that created this outcome.

There is one more dimension to this that belongs in any honest conversation. The laws governing farming in Washington State were largely written by people who have never watched a herd get sick overnight. Who have never lost a crop to a storm. Who have never had to make payroll after a bad year. Who have never felt the specific weight of knowing that the animals in your care and the people on your payroll are both depending on decisions you are making in the dark. That disconnect between the people who write the rules and the people who live by them is real. And it costs real people real things.

The Cow Palace — A Case Study In Everything Wrong

Adam Dolsen, Cow Palace Image by Dave Wilkins March 11, 2014 agproud.com

Last spring Cow Palace Dairy near Granger closed. The owner was Adam Dolsen, whose grandfather started the dairy in 1972. More than 120 people lost their jobs. 7,500 milking

cows were sold.

The Cow Palace had been one of three Lower Yakima Valley dairies targeted by the EPA over documented nitrate contamination of groundwater. Federal court records show the dairies had failed to report the destination of 9 million gallons of liquid manure and 80,000 tons of solid manure transported off-site in 2023 alone. A federal judge found elevated nitrate levels in drinking water posed an extreme danger to public health.

The environmental groups say the dairies contaminated the aquifer for decades and the closure was the consequence of refusing to fully comply. The Dolsen family says they spent years and millions of dollars attempting to comply and the EPA kept moving the goalposts. Both accounts are supported by documents.

What is not in dispute is the human cost. Over 120 families, overwhelmingly Latino farmworker families, lost their livelihoods when that dairy closed. Liberty Dairy closed in fall 2024 with a similar impact. These were not anonymous statistics. These were people who had worked at those farms for years, in some cases for decades. The same community that the environmental groups were fighting to protect from contaminated water also depended on those farms for their income.

This is the trap. This is the corner into which everyone in this valley has been painted. The groundwater contamination was real and it affected the same Latino community that the farms employed. The closure cost jobs that the same Latino community depended on. There is no outcome here where everyone wins. But there might have been a path, through adequate regulatory support, through investment in farm infrastructure, through incentives for compliance rather than purely punitive litigation, that did not end with 120 families losing their jobs and a multi-generational farm disappearing.

Nobody built that path. The money was not there for it. Or if it was there it went somewhere else.

Who Profits From The Fight

There is a question that deserves to be asked directly in any honest accounting of what has happened to dairy farming in this valley.

When the primary mechanism for environmental accountability is expensive litigation, who actually benefits?

The documented numbers from the Yakima Valley dairy lawsuits tell a story. Attorney fees across multiple firms related to those cases totaled approximately $2.8 million. The amount paid into the actual Clean Drinking Water project, the direct remediation that the community needed, was approximately $650,000. More money went to lawyers than to fixing the water.

The lawyers on both sides of these fights are professionals doing what professionals do. That is not a moral accusation. But it is worth understanding that a system built on litigation as its primary tool for environmental enforcement produces one reliable outcome, legal fees. The farmers lose money. The communities receive limited direct relief. The attorneys on both sides get paid. And the underlying problems, contaminated water, struggling farms, a community caught in the middle, continue.

Nobody in that dynamic has a financial incentive for the conflict to end. And that is worth sitting with.

The farmers who have watched this play out for a decade are not wrong to notice it. The question is whether there is a better way to hold polluters accountable while simultaneously keeping viable farms in business and keeping the farmworker families who depend on both employed and healthy. That question has not been seriously attempted in this valley. Instead we have spent millions on a legal battle that produced two closed dairies, hundreds of lost jobs, and a community that still has nitrates in its wells.

Who Is Actually Fighting For Small Farmers — And What That

Fight Looks Like

There are organizations that claim to be the voice of family farming in Washington State. The most prominent is Save Family Farming, founded in 2016 by a crisis communications specialist in response to environmental group campaigns against dairies. Their work is real and in some cases effective. They successfully challenged a flawed EPA nitrate study and eventually got the agency to stop using it for enforcement. They pushed back against legislation that would have imposed retroactive overtime back pay on farmers. They run podcasts, social media campaigns and earned media efforts that give farmers a public voice they otherwise would not have.

But here is what the record also shows. Save Family Farming is a communications and advocacy organization. There is no evidence in their public record of grants secured for struggling small farms, funding accessed for compliance upgrades, technical assistance provided for environmental improvements, or direct financial resources put into the hands of farmers trying to survive. They are very good at fighting the story. They are not in the business of helping farmers survive the economics.

Fighting the narrative is not the same as fixing the problem. And the problem, Washington State dead last in the nation for farm operator returns, half its dairy farms gone in two decades, has gotten worse while the fight over the narrative has continued.

The farmers of the Yakima Valley deserve both. They deserve someone willing to challenge false accusations in the media. And they deserve someone willing to sit down with them and say, here is the funding, here is the technical support, here is the path forward that does not require you to choose between compliance and survival.

Right now they are getting one without the other. And the farms keep closing.

Where The Money Actually Went

This is the part of the story that nobody is telling.

While small family dairy farms in the Yakima Valley have been closing at a pace that has cut their numbers in half over two decades, while farmers have been absorbing millions in compliance costs, litigation fees, and lost income, the public money that was supposed to support this agricultural community has been flowing in a very different direction.

The city of Sunnyside and the Port of Sunnyside committed $12 million in public infrastructure, roads, sewer lines, water mains, to make the Sunnyside RNG facility possible. The project received more than $10 million in state grants and loans. An Oregon company is set to build a $120 million industrial facility that will collect manure from local dairies and sell the resulting gas into an interstate pipeline.

The local dairy farmers who bring their manure will receive payments. Estimates from the California dairy industry, the blueprint Pacific Ag and others point to, suggest farmers can expect $150 to $200 per cow per year from digester arrangements. For a farm with 1,000 cows that is $150,000 to $200,000 annually. It sounds meaningful until you set it against millions in compliance costs, years of litigation, and the structural challenges of competing in a market increasingly dominated by large corporate operations.

The Oregon company captures the gas. The gas goes into an interstate pipeline. The pipeline sells it to energy markets far from the Yakima Valley. The revenue flows to shareholders in Hermiston. And the community that hosts the facility, that lives next to it, that breathes the air around it, that has been working this land for generations, gets 30 jobs and whatever comes out of the flares.

The question nobody is asking out loud is this, what would have happened to the small family farms of the Yakima Valley if that $22 million in public money had gone directly to them? Not to an Oregon company’s infrastructure. Not to a pilot project that serves as a profitable template for four more facilities planned across the region. But to the farmers themselves, to help them upgrade their lagoons, meet their compliance requirements, modernize their operations, and survive long enough to pass something on to the next generation.

We will never know. Because nobody offered that option. They were handed one deal, and told it was the solution.

The Relationship Nobody Talks About

Here is what I have seen with my own eyes in this valley that the debate never captures.

Farmers and their Latino employees have relationships that go back decades. Employees who have worked on the same farm for 20 years. Farmers who show up to birthday parties, who learn Spanish, who know the names of their workers’ children, who call their employees family because in many ways that is what they are.

These relationships exist alongside documented environmental harm. Both things are true at the same time. The farmer who treats his workers like family is not lying. The family whose well water contains dangerous levels of nitrates is not lying either. Both things are real and both things are happening in the same valley, sometimes within miles of each other.

The public debate forces people to choose a side. Either you support farmers and dismiss environmental concerns, or you support the environment and dismiss the farmers. But the people who actually live in this valley, the workers, the families, the multi-generational farm owners, do not have the luxury of that simplification. They are living with all of it at once.

The division between farmers and environmental advocates did not arise naturally from the facts. It was built, over decades of litigation, of media framing, of political positioning, into something that serves the people who make money off the conflict. The lawyers. The lobbyists. The outside companies who come in with proposals framed as solutions while the

farmers and the farmworkers are left to sort out the consequences.

Setting The Record Straight On ELLA

One more thing worth saying clearly because it keeps coming up in the comment sections and deserves a direct and complete answer.

ELLA, Empowering Latina Leadership and Action, has been characterized by some as antim farmer or anti-dairy. On the question of lawsuits that characterization is not supported by the record. ELLA as an organization has never filed a lawsuit against a dairy. They have never published a statement calling for dairies to close. Their involvement in the Sunnyside RNG project has been about one thing — making sure Spanish-speaking residents living closest to the proposed facility were informed about what was being built next to their homes in a language they could understand.

However transparency requires me to state something I did not include in my original version of this section.

Maria Fernandez, Executive Director of ELLA, is also listed as Vice Chair on the board of Friends of Toppenish Creek. FOTC is the organization that has pursued legal action against specific Yakima Valley dairies over documented groundwater contamination. That organizational overlap is publicly documented on the FOTC website and it is a fact readers deserve to know.

I got that part wrong in my original version. I am correcting it here.

But I want to be clear about what that connection does and does not mean because this series is not about bashing anyone. It is about painting the complete picture.

FOTC litigates. ELLA organizes. Those are different tools in service of overlapping values. Maria serving on the FOTC board means she believes in the mission of protecting water and air quality in this valley. It does not mean ELLA is a front for dairy litigation or that the two organizations are operating as one.

Think of it this way. Someone can sit on the board of the ACLU and also run a community leadership training program. Both care about civil rights. But one files lawsuits and one holds workshops. The overlap in values does not make them the same organization or give them the same methods.

Maria Fernandez is a community leader who volunteers her time for more than one organization that cares about this valley. That is worth knowing. It is also not a scandal. The actions ELLA has taken in the Sunnyside RNG fight, organizing meetings, demanding bilingual outreach, calling for a full environmental review, stand on their own record regardless of what other organizations share their values.

That is the complete picture. Readers can draw their own conclusions.

What I Know

I know that the farmer who has watched his neighbors sell off their herds one by one, who went through a blizzard that killed 1,850 cows in a single night, who has absorbed compliance costs that one consultant estimated at up to $1 million for an average-sized operation, who is watching his industry treated as the enemy in a public debate he never asked to be part of — that farmer’s exhaustion and pain are real.

I also know that the farmworker family whose well water is contaminated, who lives a mile from where an industrial facility is being proposed without a single document translated into their language, who showed up to a public hearing and heard a company representative text that they were uneducated — that family’s exhaustion and pain are equally real.

These are not competing stories. They are the same story, told from different angles, by people who have been set against each other by a system that benefits from their division.

The Yakima Valley built itself on the labor of both groups. It cannot survive the loss of either. And right now it is losing both, one closing farm at a time, one family leaving at a time, one generation deciding that the fight is not worth what it is costing them.

That is the story I came here to tell. Not the version where someone wins and someone loses. The version where everyone loses until we decide to do something different.

This valley deserves something different.

---

A Note on Use and Republication

This article may be shared freely for non-commercial purposes with full credit to the author. If you are a publication interested in republishing this piece in full or in part please contact Humberto Rodriguez directly at info@humbertor.com or through humbertor.com. This work was produced independently with no organizational funding or affiliation. The reporting, research, and editorial decisions are solely those of the author.

---

Sources:

USDA Economic Research Service — farm income and wealth statistics 2024; Washington State last in nation for farm operator returns

Washington Farm Bureau — dairy farm decline statistics

USDA Census of Agriculture — Washington State dairy farm count 2007-2022

Seattle Times — Blizzard killed 1,850 cows, Yakima Valley farmers reeling (2019)

Spokesman-Review — Washington’s constantly squeezed dairy farms (2025)

Save Family Farming — Death of Dairies; regulatory cost documentation; organizational history

Capital Press — Cow Palace dairy closure (2025)

Yakima Herald-Republic — Cow Palace closure, 100+ jobs lost (2025); H-2A wage regulation changes (2025); farmworker overtime law coverage; environmental groups and dairy farms at odds (2021)

Sunnyside Sun — Port of Sunnyside finalizes sale with Pacific Ag (2023); Sunnyside RNG grants (2023)

NPR — These farmworkers thought a new overtime law would help them. Now they want it gone (2023)

OPB / Think Out Loud — Is Washington’s farmworker overtime law working as intended? (2024)

Cascade PBS — Despite industry pushback, WA farmworkers will keep overtime pay (2024)

Civil Eats — Farmworkers Finally Won Overtime Pay. Now the Industry Wants to Repeal It (2023)

Ag Proud — 2025 State of Dairy: Pacific Northwest; Yakima Valley dairy lawsuits through producers’ eyes

Washington Policy Center — For Washington’s dairy farms, this is a year of serious threats

Brushwood Media Network / The Center Square — WA farm groups send letter to state leaders over dramatic drop in ag profitability (February 2026)

Pacific Ag Renewables — Sunnyside RNG public documents and fact sheet

Yakima Herald-Republic — proposed biomethane plant coverage, 2022-2026

ELLA — Empowering Latina Leadership and Action — organizational mission and publicrecord

& Personal observation and community reporting, Yakima Valley, Washington, March 2026

---

Humberto Rodriguez is a small business owner, a lifelong resident of the Yakima Valley, and the host of Behind the Scenes with Humberto Rodriguez. He is currently directing a documentary about the Sunnyside RNG project and its impact on the Lower Yakima Valley community. He can be reached at info@humbertor.com or at 509-305-1542.