Tired of mistreatment and not being able to afford the food they harvested, two Bellingham farmworkers left corporate agriculture to start their own berry cooperative.
Torres, 35, and Hernandez, 43, founded the organic berry farm Cooperativa Tierra y Libertad (Land and Liberty Cooperative) together after leaving jobs on corporate farms. Both had spent years farming for big companies and had grown disenchanted with it, experiencing unpaid breaks, unreliable pay (often paid by the pound rather than the hour) and a lack of flexibility that made it difficult to tend to needs outside of work.
They’d surveyed farms around Washington and said that it was difficult to find an organic farm with the working conditions they sought. For the two, owning land was the only way to ensure a better life for themselves, and a workers’ cooperative was the way to do it. The cooperative model enables them, as it one day will enable other farmers, to own and operate the land themselves.
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