The past two years of food supply disruption have brought greater awareness of the reality of essential workers and the challenges of supply chain woes, including the role of agriculture’s frontline workers — farmworkers.
One organization is celebrating farmworkers and inviting others in the produce industry to join them.
Equitable Food Initiative, or EFI, is a workforce development and certification organization that partners with growers, farmworkers, retailers and consumer advocacy groups. The organization will celebrate National Farmworker Awareness Week for the second year.
“EFI is celebrating by encouraging growers, agricultural associations, state agriculture agencies, food companies, retailers and consumers to share messages honoring the farmworkers who give Americans access to high-quality, fresh and safe food every day of the year,” LeAnne Ruzzamenti, director of marketing communications at EFI, said in a news release.
Farmworker Awareness Week is observed March 25 through 31. Everyone in the supply chain can participate by sharing the key messages and graphics provided in EFI’s free communications toolkit.
Grower-shippers certified by EFI have embraced the campaign. Wenatchee, Wash.-based Stemilt Growers LLC and Porterville, Calif.-based Homegrown Organic Farms are two of the companies certified by EFI that have embraced the Farmworker Awareness Week campaign.
“Last year, we highlighted our team members through a series of social posts on Stemilt’s social media channels,” said Brianna Shales, director of marketing at Stemilt. “We highlighted our EFI leadership team in the posts. They were the group that helped Stemilt earn its first EFI certification in 2019.”
This year, Shales said the company is planning to share some stories of its employees that serve on EFI leadership teams. The company wants to highlight the continuous improvement work that the teams have done since being certified.
Homegrown Organic Farms plans to do much more to celebrate the week this year than the company did last year.
“We did a few social posts last year but nothing of significance,” said Cherie France, marketing manager at Homegrown Organic Farms. “This year, we’re planning for a more robust approach, including social media awareness and educational pieces, blog posts and email blasts to our retail customer base.”
The company’s stone fruit and blueberries are the items that are EFI-certified, so it will be pushing the “celebrate farmworkers” message in the summer months.
Farmworkers deserve celebrating, especially considering the essential work they performed through the supply chain disruptions and COVID-19.
Nearly 2.5 million people work on farms, ranches, greenhouses and packing facilities across the United States, helping American farms add $136 billion to the U.S. gross domestic product, the release said.
“It’s great to remind the industry and consumers about sharing the story of farmworkers and assessing the value they bring,” Ruzzamenti said. “Over 100 organizations participated last year, including grower-shippers of fresh produce. I’m really happy with the participation for the first year. It’ll be interesting to see how it goes this year.”
Of some of the stories shared last year, Ruzzamenti said she liked how some companies showed specific tasks done by skilled hands.
Last year’s campaign had over 100 organizations download the toolkit and participate in sharing Farmworker Awareness Week messages and resources. EFI estimates the impressions of the campaign as reaching more than 100,000 people mostly on Twitter and Instagram.
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