The Hops Were Ripe. The Pickers Weren’t Coming.
A Snoqualmie grower reports only 400 pickers for a crop that usually needs 1,200—and at 75 cents a box, few are willing to save it.
L. Reitng, of Snoqualmie, now stopping at the Butler hotel, says that the prospects are very poor for harvesting the entire hop crop of his section. The hops are ripening fast, and there are only about 400 pickers at work, 150 of them Indians from Skagit county and British Columbia. The usual number employed in the fields is between 1,000 and 1,200. Some of the hops are overripe now and are being left standing in the yards. Snoqualmie growers pay 75 cents per box, and but very few pickers care to work at that price.
“Some of the hops are overripe now and are being left standing in the yards.”
The story is a small-scale version of a durable Washington argument: crops depend on seasonal labor, and the wage offered determines whether the harvest gets saved. The mention of Indigenous pickers from Skagit and British Columbia also hints at the layered labor networks that have long moved through Puget Sound agriculture.
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