FAMILY FARM FANTASY:  
HOW HOOD RIVER AGRITOURISM ENTERPRISES 
LEVERAGE AGRARIANISM AND EXCLUDE LATINX 
FARMWORKERS IN DIGITAL LANDSCAPES 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
by 
MASON LEAVITT 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
A THESIS 
 
Presented to the Department of Geography  
and the Robert D. Clark Honors College  
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of  
Bachelor of Arts 
 
May 2022 
 
 
 
 
An Abstract of the Thesis of 
Mason Leavitt for the degree of Bachelor of Arts  
in the Department of Geography to be taken June 2022 
 
Title:  Instagram Family Farm Fantasy: How Hood River Agritourism Enterprises 
Leverage Agrarianism and Exclude Latinx Farmworkers in Digital Landscapes 
 
 
Approved:   Laura Pulido, PhD   
      Primary Thesis Advisor 
 
Although the archetype of the Jeffersonian family farm has been around as a 
cultural icon for centuries, it rarely led to policy decisions that helped family farmers. 
Instead, in practice it has accelerated agrarian capitalism and a concentration of 
agricultural wealth in a few corporations and individuals. Nonetheless, agrarianism and 
the image of Jefferson’s yeoman farmer have remained powerful marketing and 
political tools.  
In the Pacific Northwest, the tiny but infamous Hood River Valley has been 
blending labor intensive horticulture and rural tourism by attracting tourists to farms for 
over two decades to preserve its “family farms.” At the same time, the horticultural 
industry relies on often obscured Latinx labor to maintain and harvest fruit. How do 
farm owners navigate marketing and creating leisurely, carefree experiences for tourists 
amid these circumstances?  
Through Instagram posts, tourist brochures, websites, and semi structured 
interviews with farm tourism professionals, I found that agritourism enterprises do not 
show Latinx labor, but instead, they create comfortable accommodations for tourists not 
afforded to farmworkers and centralize contributions of mainly white owners and 
service workers.   
ii 
 
 
 
Acknowledgements 
 
First and foremost, I would like to thank Dr. Laura Pulido for all of her work 
and guidance she has shared with me both as a primary thesis advisor and as a mentor in 
other research. It has been such a privilege and pleasure learning from you. Thank you. 
Also, don’t forget, I still owe you a tour of Hood River! Next, I am grateful for Dr. 
Diana Garvin, and her course that helped inspire this research, as well as her editing and 
advice on earlier drafts as a second reader. Dr. Leigh Johnson was also incredibly 
helpful with her course on qualitative methods which helped me operationalize this 
project, in addition to her help with applying for IRB approval. I also owe a great deal 
to my interviewees, who took time out of the busy 2021 summer season to meet with 
me and share their perspective. Thank you all. Lastly, thank you to Dr. Trond Jacobsen 
for serving as a CHC representative on the committee, and his time and feedback on the 
final draft. 
  
iii 
 
 
Table of Contents 
Introduction 1 
Brief Introduction to Agritourism 3 
Chapter 1 Background History on Farmworker Labor in Oregon 6 
Founding Of Oregon Through WWII 6 
Bracero Program and WWII Era 12 
U.S. Agriculture in the 21st Century 18 
Chapter 2 Literature Review 23 
Demystifying Family Farms 23 
Responses to Agribusiness & Industrialized Agriculture: Alternative Food 
Networks 30 
Agritourism for who? 35 
Chapter 3 Case Selection Hood River Oregon 44 
Chapter 4 Methods 52 
Sampling Procedure 52 
Instagram 53 
Websites 57 
Brochures 59 
Interviews 63 
Chapter 5 Results and Discussion 67 
Latinx Representation 70 
Other Notable Interview Findings 87 
Communicating Agritourism 91 
Selling Agritourism 104 
Moralizing Agritourism 122 
Chapter 6 Conclusion 132 
How could we find out more? 133 
How could we alter the status quo? 135 
Bibliography 140 
 
  
iv 
 
 
List of Figures  
Figure 1 Reference Map of Hood River County and Study Area 45 
Figure 2 The Hood River Fruit Loop 61 
Figure 3 Closed For This Weekend. 71 
Figure 4 Net Technology Novelty 72 
Figure 5 Pruning Blossoms 73 
Figure 6 Smokey Harvest 74 
Figure 7 Photos Coded Bees 76 
Figure 8 Odell Farm Mural 80 
Figure 9 Photos Coded Advertising Agricultural Products 93 
Figure 10 Photos Coded Advertising Site Manufactured Products 96 
Figure 11 Photos Coded Advertising Off-site Manufactured Products 5 97 
Figure 12 Photos Coded Customer Logistics 100 
Figure 13 Photos Coded Holiday Commemoration 102 
Figure 14 Photos Coded Farm Animals 106 
Figure 15 Photos Coded Natural Beauty 108 
Figure 16 Photos Coded Outdoor Consumption 112 
Figure 17 Photos Coded Smiling Customers 116 
Figure 18 Photos Coded Happy Employees 118 
Figure 19 Starting Points for Representation 138 
 
  
v 
 
 
 
List of Tables  
Table 1 Hood River Producers by Race 51 
Table 2 Instagram Codes and Definitions 55 
Table 3 Website Codes and Definitions 58 
Table 4 Interviewee Characteristics 68 
Table 5 Instagram Content Code Results 69 
Table 6 Website Content Code Results 70 
 
vi 
 
 
Introduction 
I am patiently making small talk with a fellow high school alumni inside a 
makeshift reception room within a fruit packing house. You can’t see it from inside the 
dimly lit windowless box, but outside, we’re surrounded by orchards of countless 
varieties of cherries, apples, pears, peaches, and the occasional wine grape vineyard. 
Someone in charge asks me, “You're the one doing a school project on family farms 
right?”  
 I have to resist the urge to laugh. What a loaded term: “family farm.” I am 
sitting in an office with no less than 10 employees, in a warehouse with no less than 30 
employees, surrounded by orchards maintained by possibly hundreds of employees. 
Family farm. Right. I think about the owners' children in college entire states away from 
Oregon, and how many individuals stemming from countless other families are 
currently working and supporting them. Albeit my rush of bitterness, sadness, and 
fascination towards the term, I take a deep breath and smile, “yes I am.” 
  My interviewee had come down with a severe case of COVID that day, but my 
visit to that enterprise captured the exact sort of linguistic dissonance that inspired me 
as a researcher to explore my hometowns economy. From that moment onwards I would 
not be able to shake the term “family farm” from my brain. It’s so seemingly innocuous, 
but does so much ideological work.  
Although it caught me slightly off guard, I had a broader set of semantically 
dissonant experiences growing up in a town struggling to reconcile US multiculturalism 
with a racialized class hierarchy. There were always power dynamics at play that I 
couldn't quite grasp and articulate as a high school student. I was keenly aware of the 
 
 
 
continually unjust-feeling outcomes stemming from systemic consequences of racism 
such as all white honors high school classrooms and zealous, “not-racist” beliefs held 
by individuals that rationalize very real harm on Latinx families, friends, and peers.  
There are many cultural, social, political, and economic layers at play within 
Hood River, Oregon regarding the complexities of race, class, and belonging. My thesis 
was an ample opportunity to poke at one of the cultural economic components over the 
summer of 2021 and ask the question: How do agritourism enterprises in Hood River 
Oregon represent Latinx farm labor?  
To answer this question, I explored Instagram pages, websites, and brochures to 
find how agritourism businesses approached the topic of labor and its relationship with 
the discourse they used to advertise their products to consumers. I also conducted semi 
structured interviews with agritourism professionals in the study area to elicit their 
understanding of their positionality and the discourse their business contributes. In 
short, I found a miniscule recognition of Latinx farmworkers in agritourism media, and 
it's very difficult and uncomfortable for professionals to reconcile why that is. The 
“family farm”, agrarianism, and many other cultural mechanisms are used to draw 
attention away from the exploitation of socially vulnerable populations and are critical 
to examine and deconstruct. Why is there a shocking lack of visibility of labor within a 
subsection of agriculture that invites the consumer to experience the farm on site?  
First, after defining agritourism, there is a dense, brief history of ethnic labor in 
Oregon with particular attention to agriculture. Readers will find this helpful to 
understand how Oregonian agriculture came to depend on substantially undocumented 
Latinx labor after previously relying on East Asian labor for development and 
2 
 
 
agricultural work. Next, a literature review will focus on demystifying family farms, 
how migrant labor fits into socio-economic responses to industrialized agribusiness, and 
what agritourism has to offer for farmers and potentially farmworkers. After situating 
the intellectual terrain of this study, readers will be introduced to the geographic case 
selection, Hood River Valley, an agritourism hot spot 40 miles east of Portland, Oregon. 
Then the methodology will be detailed before immersing ourselves into the results and 
discussion of Instagram, website, and interview discourse. 
Brief Introduction to Agritourism 
Agricultural tourism, or agritourism, is the blend of agriculture and tourist 
activities. Academics have variably defined what type of businesses and activities 
comprise agritourism spanning disciplines involving tourism, economics, agriculture, 
and very occasionally social representations of labor. Some include farmers markets and 
other off-farm agricultural activities to be agritourism, others define it as any on-farm 
activity or visit, while the remaining argue that consumers must participate or witness 
activities with a high degree of authenticity relative to the normal operations of a farm (
Arroyo et. al., 2012, p. 40-41). While the jury is still out on what the term universally 
represents, a definition by Barbieri et. al. (2016) captures the elements that best describe 
Hood River’s local version of Agritourism: 
“Recreation on farms, either for a fee or seeking other types of indirect 
economic benefits (e.g., increased market share), can be delivered 
through a diversity of activities. Examples of these activities include the 
direct (e.g., self-harvest) and indirect (e.g., hay- rides) enjoyment of farm 
activities; the observation of the farmscape and on-site processes (e.g., 
orchard tours, wineries); educational opportunities (e.g., culinary 
classes); extractive (e.g., hunting) and non extractive (e.g., hiking) 
outdoor recreation activities, including those requiring motorized 
vehicles or special equipment; and hospitality services, including events, 
3 
 
 
lodging, and food services. For some, the on-site direct sale of farm 
products, through farm stands and gift shops, for example, also 
represents a type of on-farm recreation” (p. 1094) 
 
 It’s worth noting that I am folding wine tourism into agritourism in this analysis 
because the enterprise characteristics do not differ outside of what product they are 
focusing on. Some researchers prefer to study wine tourism on its own (Robinson, 2021, 
p. 3). I will detail more about agritourism in the literature review, but there is one 
important thing to note immediately.  The public is disconnected from our globalized 
food system. We are accustomed to seeing our produce on grocery store shelves or 
freshly placed in front of us by a service employee, and not its journey on the farm 
through planting, harvest, and transport. Private landholders who run agritourism 
businesses have the responsibility and privilege of deciding how to shape farm 
experiences for the visitor. They determine how consumers are educated on agricultural 
spaces, operations, and decision making, and people will believe their agricultural 
experience is more or less an accurate representation of farm life. As we will find out, 
farmers go to lengths to hide Latinx labor both in the agritourism landscape and their 
media, and consequently consumers do not understand how the US food system relies 
on exploited socially vulnerable populations to maintain and harvest crops.  
Hood River is known for its horticulture, which includes many varietals of 
apples, pears, cherries, peaches, blueberries, strawberries, and wine grapes. These fruits 
are labor intensive to grow, and more so to harvest. No such technology exists to 
harvest them mechanically. Hence, the reliance on cheap labor, which combined with 
active tourism on the farms means a tricky balance of running an agricultural operation 
while catering to consumer expectations. While agritourism is the primary economic 
4 
 
 
model of interest in this analysis, the history of Oregonian agriculture and its modern 
dependence on invisible Latinx labor are all critical for understanding the modern 
functioning of Hood River’s “Family Farms.”  We will delve through this history in 
three parts. One, the founding of Oregon through World War II. Two, the Post World 
War II Era, and finally US migrant labor in the 21st century. 
5 
 
 
Chapter 1 Background History on Farmworker Labor in Oregon 
Founding Of Oregon Through WWII 
The tale of Oregonian agriculture begins with the founding of Oregon itself. 
Indigenous Peoples had long been present in the Pacific Northwest (PNW), and over 
thousands of years set up elaborate systems of hunting, gathering, and trading 
dependent on holistic relationships between manifold tribes (Yamhill, Chinook, 
Clatsop, Tillamook, and Nehalem to name a few) in conjunction with the various 
ecosystems now comprising the modern state (Byram, 2008, p. 359; Barber, 2019, p. 
384). British trappers eventually established the Fort Vancouver Trading Post in current 
Vancouver, WA, and began establishing control over the extraction of local resources. 
They met any semblance of pushback from tribes with calculated terrorism, rape, and 
unfettered massacres narrated under concepts of justice, paternalism, and entitlement to 
natural resources (Lewis & Connolly, 2019; Deur, 2016; Barber 2019; Byram, 2008). 
Along with the fur trappers' presence came disease, devastation, and societal collapse of 
many tribes. 
White supremacist settler violence only increased as rumors circulated that the 
US federal government would start giving out “free” land to settlers on the frontier. 
From the 1830s through the 1860s, despite no substance backing the rumors, a mass 
movement of White settlers began pouring into the region negotiating treaties with 
Native Tribes, claiming tracts of land, and forming provisional governments all without 
the US federal governments backing or permission (Coleman, 2019, p. 414). Using 
narratives such as Manifest Destiny, perfidy, and Anglo Saxonism, settlers justified 
their institutionalized violence, dispossession, and forced removal of Indigenous Tribes 
6 
 
 
in order to make way for their agrarian White supremacist state (Barber, 2019; 
Carpenter, 2020). Eventually the Donation Land Claim Act was ratified by congress in 
1850, which exclusively gave tracts of land to White people. Coleman (2019) 
characterized it as “An affirmative action program exclusively for White people” which 
“resulted in a massive economic head start for White cultivators and initiated a long-
standing pattern in which access to real estate became an instrument of White 
supremacy and social control” (p. 415). At about this point in time the first horticultural 
operations began to be established at the mouth of the Hood River where it spills the 
glacial silt of Mount Hood into the Columbia River.  
 Eventually, the territorial government gathered representatives to draft a 
constitution and form order out of what had been a chaotic unilateral land grab by 
White settlers. White men drafted into the founding document of Oregon “white 
equality” through the exclusion of both free Black people and those enslaved in addition 
to forbidding Native Americans from property rights (Thoennes & Landau, 2019, p. 
468). Ironically, the White egalitarian economy demanded an exploitable labor force to 
construct its railroads, irrigation canals, and other vital infrastructure for capital 
accumulation and exportation of natural resources (Lee, 2010; Karuka, 2019).  
Between the 1860s and 1940s Asian Americans and Indigenous Peoples would 
be the only non-white groups in Oregon that was conceptualized as a threat to the 
hierarchical order of White Supremacy. Indigenous tribes faced more devastation and 
loss of land relatively unopposed. Albeit practicing many forms of resistance amidst 
harrowing challenges, tribal traditions, power, and life faced a mostly steady decline. 
(Lewis & Kentta, 2010; Deur, 2016). On the other hand, White settlers would oscillate 
7 
 
 
between limited inclusion and outright exclusion of Asian Americans in the economic 
and cultural fabric of the state. 
Initially, Oregonians recruited Chinese laborers to construct the state’s 
infrastructure, which is critical for an economy based on resource extraction such as 
agriculture, fishing, forestry, and mining. Canals supplied needed irrigation water, 
railroads connected settlement to global markets, and canneries and manufacturers 
added value by refining raw goods. Whites feared any sort of economic power achieved 
by minority groups and included a provision in the 1857 State constitution explicitly 
outlawing any new claims to real estate or mining rights by those of Chinese nationality 
(Allerfeldt, 2003, p. 72). After an initial railroad construction boom ended, White 
employers hired cheap Chinese laborers to work in mines, fisheries, lumberyards, and 
more. White settlers gathered to violently terrorize migrants in the face of perceived 
possible job displacement all over the PNW. White mobs employed acts of terror 
including arson, rioting, setting off explosives, and outright expelling Chinese living in 
their localities all over the West Coast, from Seattle to San Francisco (Allerfeldt, 2003, 
p. 57).  In 1882, Oregon along with California and many other US states, succeeded in 
passing the Chinese Exclusion Act.  
Within a decade White Portland railroad construction recruiters turned to 
Japanese immigrants for cheap labor to work the lowest rungs of the racialized labor 
hierarchy. Eventually, Japanese people were employed in a variety of sectors including 
agriculture, canning, and lumber processing. When Japanese workers were perceived as 
a threat to White employment or wages, White workers stood in “solidarity” with each 
other to force employers to not hire Japanese people or fire existing workers (Aoki, 
8 
 
 
1998, p.55). Whites perceived Japanese people as stealing jobs and diluting the 
American standard of living (Allerfeldt, 2003, p. 59).  
In spite of these difficulties, Japanese people began to establish families and 
purchase land through second generation Nisei, Japanese people who were born in the 
US and had thus obtained citizenship through the right of soil after a supreme court case 
in 1898 (Aoki, 1998, p. 52). Simultaneously, swaths of white Americans grew 
increasingly neurotic, anxious, fearful, angry, and entitled because any non-White 
person purchasing a tract of land was actively “robbing” a White person’s right to that 
land. Whites conceptualized the combination of growing land ownership and families 
by Japanese individuals as a direct threat to their vision of a White, homogenized and 
united nation (Lee, 2010, p. 253). It’s noteworthy that citizenship and access to 
becoming a citizen was premised on being white during this time period. Whites 
formulated purchasing and owning private property as an exclusively “American” right 
that should not be extended to those perceived as not fitting in the ideal nation. 
Allerfeldt (2003) includes an instructive excerpt originally from the Portland Telegram 
published in October 1919: 
“Japanese farmers have swarmed into the Hood River Valley like an 
army of conquest . . . The Japanese have peacefully run out dozens of 
small ranchers who sought to make the Hood River Valley their 
permanent home . . . Noting that the beautiful valley was becoming so 
thickly settled with Orientals [it was feared] that before long no white 
family could live in it, [so] a number of Hood River citizens recently 
organized the anti-Asiatic club.” (p. 68) 
Immigrant anxiety was prolific among the American political establishment in 
the Progressive Era. The East Coast focused on Irish, Italian, and Greek people (who 
were also deemed nonwhite at the time), and the West Coast focused on Japanese 
9 
 
 
people. Eugenics and regulating fertility of the “right” people grew into national 
political issues (Leonard, 2003). Fears of “Race Suicide”, AKA replacement theory, is 
the notion that people of color would outbreed White people and slowly take over the 
nation state stoked nativist panic further (Allerfeldt, 2003, p. 65). Rumors that Japan 
wanted to invade the Western US circulated as early as 1897, and Japanese Americans 
were perceived as loyal to the emperor of Japan.  
The shifting narration surrounding different minority groups is important to 
notice here. As, “During the height of Chinese immigration, Japan and its subjects were 
characterized as superior to China and its people," but now they constituted a threat to 
the White nation just as the Chinese had 50 years earlier (Lee, 2010, p. 260). This first 
culminated in Oregon in 1923 with the passage of the state’s Alien Land Law 
forbidding the purchasing of land by non-citizens and people in-eligible for 
naturalization (citizenship), which Aoki (1998) argues systematically removed the 
ability for Japanese individuals to ascend the agricultural class ladder (p. 63). 
Additionally, US congress passed the Johnson Reed Act in 1924 and established the 
beginning of US immigration quotas, which at the time were explicitly aimed at keeping 
immigrants from “undesirable” nations, including Japan, from entering the US. More 
dangerously, the scaffolding for Japanese internment was all in place due to extreme 
nativist fears and an insatiable White entitlement to Japanese American land and wealth 
(Aoki, 1998, p.68). 
During World War II the White Oregonian political establishment embraced 
Japanese Internment, which resulted in enormous dispossession of land and wealth, and 
exploitation of prisoners for labor across the state, including farm work, the very 
10 
 
 
livelihood many were robbed of by White prospectors (Young, 2013). Although 
internment was supposedly a temporary relocation, it had far more permanent effects 
ranging from total dispossession of property, to increased anti Japanese organizations, 
and substantial life-long setbacks of income (Chin, 2005; Aoki, 1998, p. 64). This in 
particular impacted Hood River. In 1940, the region had a proportional concentration of 
Japanese people on par with the Willamette Valley and Portland (Sifuentez, 2016, p. 
37). However as the US got involved in the war, Oregon included Hood River as part of 
two zones covering the state’s western half that Japanese were forcefully relocated 
from. Locals defaced Japanese Veterans names on a city monument to soldiers, started 
an active campaign to starve Japanese farmers of necessary resources, and participated 
in a statewide movement, the Japanese Exclusion League, to prevent any internees from 
returning to town (Sifuentez, 2016, p. 40; National Park Service, 2019; Tamura, 2020).  
 At this point growers across Oregon and the wider United States purported a 
national labor shortage and dire warnings of rotting food in their fields. While some 
Japanese internment camps were leveraged for agriculture, this alone could not 
compensate for a shortage of labor willing to work at rates farmers could pay (Young, 
2013). This commenced the start of the Bracero Program and the reliance on Latinx 
labor to maintain and harvest crops. 
The above history demonstrates the following adoption of the Bracero program 
constitutes a transition to Latinx labor, rather than it being a phenomenon that appeared 
out of nowhere. Farmers and many more individuals long relied on the infrastructure 
necessary to export natural resources created by East Asian labor. They also capitalized 
on paying Asian American agricultural and manufacturing laborers lower wages 
11 
 
 
justified by racialization, which further increased their profits through the privilege of 
having control over private property won through genocide, dispossession, and White 
supremacist ideology (Aoki, 1998). 
Bracero Program and WWII Era 
The US and Mexico agreed to start the Bracero Program in 1942 due to US nationwide 
anxiety about the food system and harvesting logistics, which enabled US farmers to 
recruit Mexican men for agricultural labor. The PNW capitalized on the program, 
despite the expenses of transporting workers from and to Mexico, due to an intense 
labor shortage created by military recruitment and better wage opportunities in urban 
areas with defense industry contracts (Sifuentez, 2016, Chapter 1).  
Although bilateral provisions were created to provide for and protect Mexican 
workers from exploitation and abuse, struggles between growers, governing institutions, 
local communities and Braceros flashed regularly. Braceros faced discrimination and 
dehumanizing practices. However, the acuteness of the labor shortage, distance from the 
border, regional pro Bracero consulates, and the practice of other industries 
“bootlegging” Bracero labor by offering more competitive wages, all provided Mexican 
Nationals with a strong bargaining position in the PNW. Braceros fought for better 
wages, living conditions, and against discrimination by leveraging growers’ dependence 
on them to maintain and harvest crops (Sifuentez, 2016, Chapter 1).  
Technically, Braceros could only be legally hired to perform farm work and 
railroad work, however, smaller farmers, who could rarely get approval to hire Braceros 
by the Department of Labor, began offering better wages and incentivized migrants to 
“skip out” on their legal contracts in favor of better paying work. Soon canneries and 
12 
 
 
other industries capitalized on the practice of bootlegging, which enabled them to pay 
less in wages than they would in order to compete with defense industries for White 
workers. Hood River County employed Braceros not just in farm work, but even 
household work, canneries, construction of basements and roads, and in the lumber 
industry (Sifuentez, 2016, p. 25). 
 This labor dynamic did not last forever, and upon the conclusion of World War 
II, several factors upended Bracero power in the PNW. Policy changes to the financing 
of the program made it unviable for regional growers to pay for transportation costs of 
workers from Mexico to the US. Combined with a less competitive labor market due to 
returning soldiers, a strong desire to re-homogenize the state to whiteness, and other 
pertinent factors, all led to a steep decline in the number of Bracero workers within the 
State of Oregon. Finally, the program formally ended nationally in 1964, however a 
number of Braceros settled permanently in the PNW and started families and 
communities (Sifuentez, 2016, Chapters 1&2).  The end of the Bracero program did not 
result in the end of agricultural reliance on Latinx labor, as this phenomenon continued 
under the naming convention of H2 visas.  
Ultimately, even with the return of soldiers, and a strong desire to exclude 
nonwhite people from making Oregon their home, the 1950s-70s only saw more 
migration to Oregon (Tichenor, 2021, p. 62). While the new terms of the Bracero 
program and H2 visa system were unviable for growers, networks of migration were 
formed through kinship links, laborer contractors, and even sometimes overlapping 
dynamics between the two. Mechanization of farming in Texas meant a substantial 
number of Tejanos could no longer find enough work within the region to support their 
13 
 
 
families, and many chose to seasonally migrate every year to Oregon during spring, 
summer and fall months when labor demand peaked (Sifuentez, 2016, Chapter 2).  
Many for a myriad of individual, nuanced, economic, familial, and political-
cultural reasons decided to make Oregon their home. While Tejanos, which were 
typically US citizens and spoke English, comprised the majority of Latinx migrants 
coming to the state of Oregon, a substantial number of Mexican Nationals did as well, 
both documented and undocumented. Some of them were former Braceros who found 
more permanent employment at previous contract locations (Tichenor, 2021, p. 62; 
Sifuentez, 2016, Chapter 2). Unlike the Bracero period in the 1940s, in which migrant 
laborers were exclusively young, single men, many families migrated during this 
period, and found more permanent communities and settlements. Women also worked 
in fields and in industrial manufacturing like canneries and packing houses.  
Nisei offered more year-round employment opportunities with better pay for 
Latinx migrant laborers. Additionally, there are cases where Nisei provided access to 
improved housing, and in some cases financial resources to Latinx migrant workers. 
While there are cases of kindness from Nisei directed towards Latinx people, there was 
still plenty of racial tension and discrimination too. Additionally, even as Nisei owned 
farms and ascended the labor hierarchy, they frequently faced discrimination by White 
owned food packaging facilities through paying worse rates for goods, in addition to 
still being viciously excluded in White spaces. As White anxiety increased about 
growing rates of Latinx individuals moving to Oregon, newspapers shifted to narrating 
Japanese people as “industrious, clean, and sober” and Mexican migrants became 
“shiftless, violence-prone gamblers and drunks” (Sifuentez, 2016, p. 48).  
14 
 
 
The racial-class hierarchy of Oregon shifted, and thus transformed who could 
move into the space of whiteness. In some part, this hinged on Latinx individuals taking 
the place of the Japanese at the bottom rung. Just 50 years earlier White newspapers and 
political organizations referred to the Japanese “as bestial and fundamentally immoral. 
They were accused of living in squalid conditions and encouraging disease, dealing in 
narcotics and, during Prohibition, their soda fountains were viewed as outlets for 
bootleg booze…Japanese men were often portrayed as pimps, and the women were 
frequently accused of being prostitutes” (Allerfeldt, 2003, p. 64). Which races and 
genders could have access to which jobs with what privileges underwent drastic change 
over the course of the time period, and social conceptualizations of race essentialisms 
closely tracked class changes. Slowly, Tejano migrants gradually moved up the class 
hierarchy into other professions, which once again left an unquenched desire for cheap 
farmhands (Sifuentez, 2016, Chapter 2). 
The politics of the late 70s through 90s only cemented growers’ reliance on 
Latinx labor, which grew more undocumented as time passed and coincided with a 
growing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE- Immigration and Naturalization 
Service at the time). Previously, there was comparatively little care or anxiety dedicated 
to the legal status of Latinx people living in Oregon. Simply put, it wasn't a source of 
concern for migrants or authorities (Sifuentez, 2016, p. 50). Politicians, media 
enterprises, and others began to sound immigration alarms, and overtime increasing 
importance and visibility around documentation status became a huge political issue. 
Oregon’s White establishment gate kept access to adequate housing, financial tools like 
loans, and state resources (Sifuentez, 2016, Chapter 2; Tichenor, 2021, p. 62). This 
15 
 
 
practice grew increasingly unacceptable and harder to justify as color blindness became 
a political expectation and norm following the Civil Rights Movement, and citizenship 
status became fair ground for legal, economic, and social exclusion.  
The fusion of ICE’s interest in deportation, the economic dependency of 
growers on undocumented labor, and increasing interest in farmworker justice created a 
cocktail of competing political interests facilitating an increasing fixation on legal 
status. Oregon also admitted many non-white individuals under refugee status during 
the 1970s and onwards further diversifying the state of Oregon (Tichenor, 2021, 
Chapter 4.). This is critical in examining why an emphasis on racial composition slowly 
declined and morphed into preoccupation on documentation. Not only did color 
blindness become a political norm, but other nonwhite groups were welcomed to settle 
in Oregon as refugees and eventually become citizens. Over the same time period, 
undocumented Latinx workers not only came to dominate farm work, but also 
replanting operations in the state’s plethora of temperate rainforests, along with a 
slowly expanding presence in other manufacturing and plant nursery work. 
Stakeholders in immigration laws and practices diversified and grew. Organizations 
such as the Willamette Valley Immigration Project (WVIP) began focusing on 
undocumented rights as demographics of migrant workers shifted.  
In 1982, Congress passed the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), 
which separated the H2 visas into H2-A for agriculture and H2-B for other industries. 
There was no established limit to the number of H2-A visas that could be distributed 
within a given year, unlike other US immigration quotas, which meant that farmers 
have access to an unlimited supply of labor. IRCA also established an employer 
16 
 
 
sanctions system intended to hold growers accountable for violations of immigration 
policy such as employing a substantial undocumented workforce. However, the system 
rarely moves beyond a wrist-slap-warning, much less a significant fine (Sifuentez, 
2016, p. 103). 
In the 1990s, hyper fixation on documentation status grew into a contentious 
issue that informed statewide politics, although not yet along the partisan lines we are 
familiar with today (Tichenor, 2021, p. 63-65). Additionally, Globalization through 
financialization and trade agreements such as NAFTA dramatically changed the 
economic landscape for both indigenous farmers in Mexico and Central America and 
growers in the United States causing both national industries to struggle to keep profits 
amidst a more economically competitive world (Stephen, 2004, p. 97; Puyana & 
Murillo, 2012, p. 711; Browning, 2013, p.86). Declining viability of rural economies 
and rural agriculture in Mexico have been tied to increased migration to the US and 
Mexican urban centers (Browning, 2013). Over the 2000’s clear partisan lines were 
drawn in the US, with immigration growing into an even more outsized political 
spectacle with too many competing interests and divisions to pass meaningful 
legislation. The election of Donald Trump saw increasing embodiment of White 
Supremacist rhetoric, movements, and ideology. The economic reality of the nation's 
reliance on immigrants, especially undocumented labor, became sidelined by the 
spectacle of the US-Mexico border, racist stereotypes, and the politics of deterrence.  
This brings us to the present. The above history underscores that our modern 
reliance on cheap, exploitable labor for the effect of making White proprietors rich and 
our grocery produce artificially cheap for consumers did not happen randomly. This is a 
17 
 
 
system, which started with slavery and evolved over space and time according to White 
political, cultural, and economic interests resulting in systemic violence and exploitation 
of non-white people. 
U.S. Agriculture in the 21st Century 
Today, the system of migrant labor work continues to impose various forms of 
deep structuralized violence onto people who perform such jobs. The structural violence 
stems from a lack of an effective regulation system. The US is caught up with an 
infatuation with violent deterrence, an idea that causes substantial harm on 
farmworkers, but also requires that growers take advantage of their political and 
economic power over workers in the forms of coercion and deprivation. Not only would 
it be undesirable to endure the hardships of migrant farm work in the US today, it would 
certainly not be an envious position to be facilitating such harm onto workers, but our 
current political economic system nonetheless grumbles on. The consumer has the 
potential benefit of ignorance which allows them to be the furthest removed from the 
consequences. 
Migrant labor work in horticulture is grueling, hazardous, and physiologically 
and psychologically detrimental to the human body. Individuals are constantly exposed 
to excess heat and other dangerous weather, wildfire smoke, carcinogenic pesticides, 
and degrading, dehumanizing language (Castillo et. al., 2021). Picking fruit entails 
bending over blueberry or strawberry plants for hours without a break in order to make 
quotas leading to knee, back, and hand injuries (Holmes, 2013, Chapter 3). Some are 
permanent, others are shorter lived. Pears, apples, and cherries involve climbing 
dangerously tall ladders while collecting 40 plus pounds of fruit to shoulder at the same 
18 
 
 
time. Shifts are 8-12 or more hours, and harvest season comes all at once. Day after day, 
migrants pick fruit during the incredibly short harvest season, before the sun or other 
weather ailments ruin growers’ precious products (Jarvis, 2020). Furthermore, health 
afflictions are compounded because many migrant workers are structurally deprived of 
healthcare due to federal and state US legislative policies and more complex 
circumstances like language barriers, lack of access to transportation, and 
monetary/time poverty. (Holmes, 2013, Chapter 5; Weiler et al., 2016).  
Additionally, the constant feeling of surveillance and corresponding risk of 
deportation is psychologically overwhelming, and a frequent form of coercion used 
against individuals to force them into compliance by a variety of actors (Stephen, 2004; 
Holmes, 2013). No one would desire to endure these conditions, much less for 
minimum wage or worse, but nonetheless every year, family and corporate owned farms 
are able to recruit millions of migrant laborers to process several rapid and intensely 
dense harvests (Jarvis, 2020).  
There are two inextricable issues, neoliberal economics and the deterrence 
paradigm, that collide together and uphold this labor system today. First, is the brutal 
financial reality of farming in the United States. Global neoliberalism, economies of 
scale, and powerful agricultural competition have been reshaping farming for decades, 
pushing food prices down, input costs up, and forcing fewer and fewer individuals to 
operate larger and larger farms to maintain profitability (Vogeler, 1981, Chapters 6&7). 
Although increased efficiency has led to greater yields, farmers themselves don’t 
achieve the economic benefits from this (Holmes, 2013, Chapter 3; Stephen, 2004, p. 
97; Robinson, 2021, p. 2).  
19 
 
 
The structural forces of economic competition have steadily erased smaller scale 
farms that embody the American archetype of the “family farm,” which still becomes 
more financially unviable by the year. Most importantly it makes the demand that 
remaining farms keep labor costs as low as possible. Depriving farmworkers of 
adequate wages and safe working and living conditions are frequently positioned as 
solutions to, or results of neoliberal economics, despite the long historical arc that tells 
us these have always been ways to squeeze more profits into property owners and 
corporate pockets (Vogeler, 1981, Chapter 11). 
The rhetoric and financialization of the agricultural squeeze pushes farm owners 
to keep labor costs low, which means that competitive wages and safety standards for 
physically demanding work isn’t an easy option. Instead, owners find a labor market 
they can afford to exploit in these conditions (Shattuck & Xiuhtecutli, 2021, p. 81; 
Voleger, 1981, p. 291). As mentioned, its pervasive for farms to be working with 
undocumented labor outside the regulatory apparatus of the state, which has the side 
effect of pitting the entire agricultural labor market within the current spectacle of the 
US immigration debate (Fisher & Knutson, 2012). In 2004, Stephen claimed that of 
100,000 Oregon farmworkers 98% are Latinx, of which 50-80% are estimated to be 
undocumented (Stephen, 2004, p. 97-98). More recently, Castillo et. al. (2021) 
estimates that within the entire US, 75% of farm laborers are born in Latin America, 
and an estimated 50 % OF ALL farmworkers don't have legal permission to work in the 
nation.  
All migrant workers are stuck in the political spectacle of immigration, which 
currently has been embroiled in a paradigmatic fight over the idea of State sanctioned 
20 
 
 
violence as deterrence. The immigration spectacle has the effect of flipping who is 
dependent on who when it comes to immigration. Instead of the US being dependent on 
exploitable labor to work lower rungs of its class hierarchy, current political rhetoric 
positions the migrant as dependent on the United States’ economic vastness. This 
widens the structural gaps resulting in violent outcomes to transnational laborers upheld 
as righteous and rationalized by racist stereotypes of Latinx people. 
US policies of deterrence have included militarizing the border, increased 
funding of ICE, substantial increases in ICE raids and non-judicial deportations, family 
separation, and countless other acts of structuralized violence. The prevailing idea 
behind deterrence is a notion that heightened brutality and punishment will ward off any 
immigrants seeking to enter developed countries (Gammeltoft-Hansen & Tan, 2017, p. 
28-40). This spectacle of the militarized border tends to focus on undocumented 
crossings for work or asylum as opposed to individuals who remain in the US after their 
H2A visa expires. The lines between these differing situations are blurred because of 
the monolithic-ization of the criminal Mexican migrant in American political discourse 
combined with a lack of nuance in the immigration debate. Even those Latinx 
individuals who are legally residing within the US become subject to violent outcomes 
by profiling and an indiscriminate lens of racism and White supremacy-based exclusion. 
Deterrence is positioned as a righteous policy framework that prevents 
undesirable individuals from entering the US and stealing American jobs or becoming 
welfare dependents. These ideas do enormous ideological work in rationalizing violent 
outcomes, despite having extremely limited truth to them (Hernández, 2018; Ryo, 
2021). In addition to deterrence policies not actually achieving their espoused purpose, 
21 
 
 
they impart harm on every individual in US agriculture. Specifically, they not only 
harm foreign pickers looking for economic sustenance, but also growers and middlemen 
who must co-facilitate the horrific system of abuse and exploitation through piecemeal 
wages, threatening deportation and/or job loss, and providing substandard working and 
living conditions all in order to sustain their own economic livelihoods (Holmes, 2013).  
The structure of the deterrence paradigm enables this behavior, while the 
demands of neoliberal economics conditions the financial viability of agricultural 
operations by taking advantage of the cracks in the system. In conclusion, relying on 
Latinx labor in conjunction with deterrence policies undermines human rights, creates 
xenophobic conceptions of migrants, leaves the US food system precariously 
dependent, and forces individuals to impart structural harm onto other human beings. 
Latinx farmworkers are currently indispensable to the US agricultural system, and 
farmers fight tooth and nail to ensure they have uninterrupted access to that labor 
market without having to pay living wages or provide humane working conditions. The 
family farm is frequently positioned as a fragile vase to be protected from economic 
disturbance resulting from substantive policy changes to this system. Here we enter the 
literature review where first, we must deconstruct the politically weaponized myth of 
family farmers, and then understand how farmworkers fit in alternative food networks 
and agritourism. 
 
  
22 
 
 
Chapter 2 Literature Review 
Demystifying Family Farms 
There’s an odd dissonance between the way our culture understands agriculture 
and the way it operates. Specifically, property owning individuals are worshiped for 
their food contributions to American society. They do work extraordinarily hard year 
after year, however, migrant laborers often perform the day-to-day work of pruning, 
weeding, pesticide application, and harvesting. 
Jefferson famously desired the US to be an agrarian democracy of farmers that 
provided their own labor in addition to having control over land and capital. Supposedly 
this would guarantee an economic and consequently political independence (Vogeler, 
1981, Chapter 1). Of course, Jefferson's own political and economic “independence” 
relied on his own capital consisting of property and enslaved people doing the labor to 
create his wealth. Nonetheless, an agrarian democracy and its family farmers remained 
a powerful idea that would influence policy for centuries to come. Today, myths of the 
yeoman farmer, extremely fertile land, and democratic agrarianism enable the American 
public to be ignorant of, or conveniently deny and ignore, the reality that agriculture in 
the modern United States is almost entirely dependent on Latinx labor (Castillo et. al., 
2021, p. 258). These cultural narratives provide substantial political and cultural clout to 
individuals who can dress themselves in the yeoman and agrarian based archetype of 
the Jeffersonian family farm.  
North American conceptualizations like the yeoman farmer and agrarianism, 
which “depict farmers as inherently honest, politically stable, morally upright and 
independent” allow farmers to be depicted as infallible heroes that provide our country 
23 
 
 
with an abundance of food while sidelining Latinx labor. (Hutchison, 2013, p. 977; 
Weiler et. al., 2016, p. 1143 for quote). The Willamette Valley in Oregon, and the 
Central San Joaquin Valley in California have been historically portrayed as “Edenic” 
and so rich in soil nutrients that plants practically grow and harvest themselves 
(Hutchison, 2013, p. 974; Korsunsky, 2020, p. 425).  
While these ideas seem odd, harmless, or even humorous on the surface, they 
actually perform ideological work in masking the amount of manual labor put into 
producing food. Korsunsky (2020) argues the Edenic conceptualization combined with 
a desire for family farmers to appear aristocratic helped inform a “discourse of bounty,” 
which informed the values of the mapmakers of regional atlases (p. 426). Notably, labor 
was never an attribute to be mapped despite its importance for harvesting logistics. On 
the other hand, crop acreages, precipitation rates, and goods produced were in farming 
atlases. Hutchison (2013) points out these early ideas perpetuated by settlers shaped the 
discourse of agriculture and have been perpetuated through advertising, which seeks to 
portray food as effortlessly available to the consumer and of wholesome origins (p. 974-
980). 
Jefferson’s high-minded ideals of agrarian democracy and his cognitive 
dissonance to the exploitation it relied on serves as an instructive metaphor for how the 
idea of the yeoman farmer would be implemented in US policy. Yes, economic 
independence is a lofty egalitarian ideal, however, it's far from it given it rested, and 
still does, on robbing another group of people of that right through institutionalized 
slavery and structurally exploiting citizenship status —the latter continues to this day. 
Ingolf Vogeler argues that the idealized agrarian democracy, in retrospect, served more 
24 
 
 
as a rhetorical tool to beget agrarian capitalism, which enriches a select few at the 
expense of the rest, including true family farms (Vogeler, 1981, Chapter 1). The “Myth 
of the Family Farm” would be invoked to support land distribution policies (such as 
Oregon’s Donation Land Claim Act), Land grant colleges, federally funded 
technological innovation, migrant labor laws, as well as tax breaks and agricultural 
subsidies. All of these policy tools were espoused to create and support a strong farming 
class of politically active citizens, but instead helped funnel the wealth of land and 
agriculture into agribusiness firms and a land-owning elite (Vogeler, 1981, Chapters 3-
9). 
 In addition to demythologizing the legacy of the federal government's historical 
role in concentrating agricultural development and wealth, Vogeler additionally comes 
to two critical conclusions. The first of which is, family farms mostly don't exist. 
Vogeler asserts that a true family farm that follows the Jeffersonian agrarian ideals 
provides its own land, labor, and capital. This proves to not be the case for most 
individuals who are typically considered family farmers. In actuality, wealthy, large 
scale agribusinesses and banks dominate control over these elements to the detriment of 
“family” farmers. Many farmers are dependent on agribusiness, employ great amounts 
of non-family labor, are owned by agribusiness corporations, are precariously 
financially dependent on outside institutions, and/or many more circumstances that fall 
short of the ideals of Jeffersonian agrarianism (Vogeler, 1981). This pattern has only 
grown and cemented further since his work in the 1980s. Vogeler (1981) even 
deconstructs why the USDA’s own data misleads the American public, and potentially 
25 
 
 
more astute professionals, to believe that family farmers are the dominant archetype of 
farms (Chapter 2). 
One of the reasons family farms arguably don't exist is because they are not in 
fact economically independent because of oligopolies and oligopsonies formed by 
powerful corporations. Vogeler found an oligopolistic control over farm inputs such as 
seeds, land, pesticides, fertilizers, mechanical equipment, and even capital which has to 
be sought from banks. Farmers have little ability to influence the costs of necessary 
materials for their livelihoods. On the other side of production, there is an oligopsonistic 
control over the food marketing system, which transports food from farms to 
consumers. Here, again, farmers are unable to change the price they are paid for the 
goods they produce. Interestingly, agritourism serves as an effective escape from 
oligopsony, which will be discussed later. This means that growers are exposed to rising 
input costs and falling output costs, which is termed the price cost squeeze, a 
phenomenon only accelerating under neoliberal economics. This has disastrous 
consequences for the “family farm” including consolidation or bankruptcy, required 
access to substantial capital to pay for land and inputs, and virtually no ability to make 
decisions independent of corporate restrictions (Vogeler, 1981, Chapter 7; Che et. al., 
2005, p. 226).  
The above leads us to the second conclusion, farmers are in fact subcontracted 
workers precariously dependent on state and agribusiness decision making albeit 
disguised as independent property owners. This is like the first conclusion in that the 
causes are the same. As established, growers have limited freedom when it comes to 
business decision making due to capital intensive inputs, annual variability in harvests, 
26 
 
 
and virtually no control over prices of produced goods. Despite this, farmers think of 
themselves as an independent class, but they are hamstrung by corporate and state 
collaborations upholding agrarian capitalism. Vogeler argues this leaves them in a 
rather unique position where the state is both the enemy and the farmers’ only economic 
lifeline, which causes farmers to use their precious cultural clout to advocate for 
policies that exploit them and others: “Small-scale farmers, in particular, can pretend 
that farmers are being treated equally and fairly. Ironically, the very farmers who as a 
result of the farm programs face unfair competition from heavily subsidized large-scale 
farmers support the politicians whose legislation furthers the demise of family farms.” 
(p 183-84). Vogeler further explains how this pattern unfolds in additional areas, other 
than agricultural subsidies: 
“Although they [farmers] control the basic ingredients of land and labor, 
their lack of control over capital, technology, and innovations renders 
them powerless as capitalists and landlords. Their dependence on input 
and purchasing agrifirms makes them essentially workers with the 
appearance of being owners… American farmers have been, in the 
words of political economist James Iron, ‘squeezed, bled, and induced to 
work hard for little'' Instead of believing what was actually happening to 
them and rebelling against it, farmers reacted to their impoverishment by 
redoubling their efforts and working harder…Today the state plays such 
a vital role in agriculture that farmers can blame the government for their 
problems and at the same time demand protection from agribusiness. 
Conveniently for agribusiness, the state is blamed for problems 
originating in the market itself, and federal Band-Aid solutions soften the 
consequences of agribusiness” (Vogeler, 1981, p. 289.) 
 
I wouldn’t say farmers have a substantial degree of control over labor either at 
least, not in Oregon. A recent instructive example is Oregon’s House Bill 4002, which 
would incrementally introduce overtime wages for farmworkers in the state. 
Unsurprisingly, many Oregonian farmers claimed that such a requirement would 
27 
 
 
bankrupt their businesses, force them to move to different states, or switch to less labor-
intensive crops (Lynne, 2022; McCarty, 2022). This style of conflict and rhetoric is 
hardly a historical anomaly. During an Oregonian labor shortage scare in 1987, growers 
discursively positioned the issue as an existential threat to their business model and 
made similar threats, even attempting to facilitate importing Chinese workers as an 
alternative to Latinx labor (Sifuentez, 2016, p. 107).  
In 2022, farm owners claimed that HB 4002 would hurt farmworkers, despite 
farmworker testimonies saying otherwise. Republican state legislators responded by 
advocating for an overtime threshold at 50-60 hours, but no overtime at all during peak 
harvest season of summer and fall, which they argued would benefit farmworkers more 
(Lynne, 2022). This is because growers would theoretically stop requiring laborers to 
work more than 40 hours a week if an overtime threshold were implemented. One critic 
of those who oppose farmworker overtime pay on economic grounds, points out that 
such arguments were employed in response to a similar Californian bill but don’t bear 
out according to the data. A Hood River fruit grower retorted that “California is the 
origin of mega farming. We have family farms in Oregon so any comments he had 
about the effects of overtime in California is totally unrelated to what would happen 
here.” (Lynne, 2022).  
Given that we don't have an accurate understanding of what constitutes a family 
farm in the US and a lack of veracious metrics to measure their existence, the growers 
claim is hard to verify (Voleger, 1981, Chapter 1&2). However, the invocation of 
family farms remains a powerful rhetorical tool (McCarty, 2022; Lynne, 2022). 
Interestingly, others point to Washington and California, which have their own overtime 
28 
 
 
bills already in the process of implementation and warn that Oregon will no longer be 
able to economically compete for regional workers (Hernandez, 2022). Nonetheless, 
farmers believe they need to leverage their political and cultural power to situate a 
family farmers vs farm workers argument in order to assert control over labor policies 
that exploit people all in the name of maintaining their slice of the pie. The Oregon 
Farm Bureau, a political interest group for growers, has extensive rhetoric on their 
website about how HB 4002 will “kill” family farms (Oregon Farm Bureau, 2022).  
Both proponents and opponents of HB 4002 claim they will benefit 
farmworkers, however, organizations that have historically supported migrant workers, 
such as the Pineros y Campesinos Unidos del Noroeste (PCUN), advocate for the 
passage of the bill along with farmworkers themselves (Sifuentez, 2016; Lynn, 2022). 
Occasionally, there will be the farmer that points out “family” farms don’t set prices for 
agricultural goods due to oligopsonistic control, which is true, and it explains why 
farmers don’t have the ability to economically reconcile the effects of higher labor costs 
on their own. However, rarely is anyone pointing to federal policies and agribusiness 
collusion for having constructed the market in such a way to make small scale farms 
financially unviable, and instead, farmers and farmworkers are blaming and fighting the 
state of Oregon for whatever economic consequences arise from the bill. 
Family farms are a myth, but the idea of them still holds influence over the 
discourse of our politics, economics, and culture. While perhaps well intentioned, its 
invocation over the centuries has done little to preserve its lived status and has in fact 
steadily led to its decline. The “family farm” rationalizes the continued deprivation of 
farmworkers from economic entitlements allowed to every other industry and serves as 
29 
 
 
an inoculation for marketing discourse aimed at consumers. As we will explore next, 
the “family farm” also works to permit farmers and swaths of the broader public intent 
on reforming industrialized agricultural consequences to ignore the question of how to 
include farmworkers in the process. 
Responses to Agribusiness & Industrialized Agriculture: Alternative Food 
Networks 
While agribusiness and industrialized agriculture are critical to the functioning 
of our modern world and burgeoning human population, they are without a doubt not 
consequence free. The socio-economic costs to small scale farmers and farmworkers 
have been elaborated, but it's also noteworthy that our global economic system 
socializes the environmental costs of intensive agriculture such as reliance on 
petroleum-based pesticides and fertilizers, loss of scale and diversity of ecological 
habitats, methane emissions, algae blooms, and much more.  
Food studies scholars and industry based Alternative Food Networks (AFNs) 
have been a response to the detrimental consequences, however, they tend to focus 
more on environmental repercussions and economic problems of farmers. Responses 
such as the Organic farming movement, agroecological movements, Local Food 
Movements (LFMs), Community Supported Agriculture (CSA), and more are all 
considered under the umbrella of AFNs. Often, they tend to sideline farmworker 
contributions, rights, and justice while focusing on other impacts. (Weiler et. al., 2016; 
Lozanski & Baumgartner, 2020). A few academics have broached this topic with 
specificity to agritourism. 
30 
 
 
Lozanski and Baumgartner (2020) position the region Niagara on the Lake, 
Canada (NOTL), which, like Hood River, specializes in high labor intensity fruit and 
wine production. Canada also has a long history of exploiting people of color to create 
White wealth, and additionally has a transnational federal farmworker program called 
the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program (SAWP). NOTL is a tourist destination for 
gastro tourism and agritourism, and much of the town's culture is centered around an 
agrarian heritage. Their methods consisted of interviews with farmworkers, multiple 
visits to local farms and cultural events, as well as a discourse analysis. 
The authors position the town's farm-to-consumer discourse that emphasizes a 
rural farming historical heritage and local agricultural economic system as having the 
effect of completely obscuring the region's reliance on SAWP workers from the 
Caribbean and Mexico. Exclusive pay-to-enter celebrations of harvests centered on 
lavish dinners of local food and wine of course do not include transnational workers or 
any mention of them. They noted how restaurants emphasize the wholesome origins of 
their food by focusing on the localness of their sourcing which detracts from how the 
food was harvested. This is noteworthy, because it conveys that not only farms are 
dependent on transnational labor, but local restaurants and caterers are as well. They 
can mark up their prices for having local, fresh food, which does not financially benefit 
farmworkers. 
Lozanski and Baumgartner (2020) also argue that the presence of transnational 
labor working on farmscapes is conceptualized as disruptive to the tourist gaze and 
shatters the romanticism of rurality (p. 10). They position the extremes farmers employ 
to obscure labor as a result, which also has the effect of hiding living and working 
31 
 
 
conditions of transnational workers from locals of the region (p. 12). Notably, 
Korsunsky (2020) points out hiding labor in the landscape has been a longstanding 
pattern with labor camps, which not only obscures farms dependency on labor to 
tourists but to locals as well (p. 427). Local people and businesses may not be aware 
that they are supporting precarious transnational labor schemes through buying from 
local family farms. 
Weiler et. al. (2016) explores the way AFN farmers and organizations in British 
Columbia (BC), Canada uses moral authority derived from agrarianism to distract from 
exploitative transnational labor practices in relation to agritourism. It’s important to 
understand how enterprises seek to position themselves as participating in food 
movements in order to attract more consumers and maintain a beneficial public image. 
Additionally, it’s critical to see how enterprises portraying themselves in such a light 
enhances cultural and political clout of farmers while simultaneously sidelining 
unsustainable, exploitative labor practices. Locals may be unable to properly 
differentiate between specific farmers' practices and promote all farmers as completely 
unproblematic, local heroes. Tourists in turn may take on this conception, which lacks 
nuance and veracious understanding. There are three themes to examine in their 
research that will assist in interpreting agritourism discourse in Hood River Valley: 
Persisting agrarianism, the impoverished farmer, and “Rock Stars & Bad Apples.”  
Firstly, agrarianism, the idea that farmers inherently possess sound judgment 
and superior moral characteristics, places the family farm on a societal pedestal. Weiler 
et. al. (2016) found “sustainable food initiatives often gloss over oppressive aspects of 
farm labor by promoting a romanticized agrarian ideology,” and that “the idealized 
32 
 
 
family farm typically portrays a white farmer drawing on some support from family 
labor.” (p. 1141) This conceptualization completely erases Latinx labor. While “Critical 
food studies scholars have problematized neo-populist AFN depictions of family farms 
as the ‘repository of community moral values’,” the average American and tourist rarely 
share the same nuanced understanding (Weiler et. al., 2016, p.1141; Goodman et. al. 
2012, p. 141). Both Canada, and the US, struggle to let go of agrarian cultural myths. 
People might know that family farms are steadily declining, or that the food system 
depends on exploited labor (though my results say otherwise), however the family 
farmer remains a powerful icon regularly invoked to continue exploiting Latinx workers 
and simultaneously downplaying their integral contributions to the system. 
Furthermore, they assert that agrarianism depictions lead to “agricultural 
exceptionalism; that is, agriculture should receive exemptions from labor, 
environmental and other regulations, along with high-cost state interventions like US 
and EU crop subsidies” (Weiler et. al., 2016, p.1143). I would also assert that 
transnational labor schemes like SAWP, H2A Visa system, and others in western 
Europe all constitute manifestations of agricultural exceptionalism. Notably, while 
farmers are supposedly deserving of agricultural exceptionalism because of agrarianism, 
they are excused from accountability of the associated social and environmental costs. 
This leads us to the second two themes found by Weiler et. al. (2016). First is 
the common conceptualization of the impoverished family farmer. This idea has truth to 
it given the context of the cost-price squeeze and the steady disappearance of small-
scale farms. Farmers do struggle and having one's financial reality tied to a bountiful 
harvest is nerve wracking. What this fails to capture is how much wealth exists through 
33 
 
 
land ownership, infrastructure assets, and business and marketing networks, etc. It also 
assists in rationalizing the existence of precarious labor regimes created by agricultural 
exceptionalism. This really benefits food marketing companies which can buy 
structurally labor-subsidized farm products and profit enormously by selling to the 
American consumer, who is allowed to have cheaper groceries. The espoused pain of 
“family farmers” is used to fight against creating more socially sustainable forms of 
labor. Furthermore, because “family farms are portrayed as an antidote to agribusiness 
concentration of farmland and other resources” they are seen as distinct from the social 
problems typically attributed to agricultural corporations (Weiler et. al., 2016, p. 1145). 
Thus, they benefit from precarious labor regimes, but are not accountable for them. 
Finally, Weiler et. al. (2016) offers the idea of “Rock Stars and Bad Apples,” the 
namesake of their study. They explain it best in the following excerpt: 
“Idealization of farmers as inherently moral and honest (especially 
small-scale, local and organic farmers) can stymie critical discussions 
about flexible and precarious farm work regimes. Elevating local farmers 
to the status of “rock stars” perpetuates the idea that problematic 
farmworker employment merely reflects inevitable and anomalous cases 
of individual “bad apple” farmers with insufficient moral fiber. 
Idealizing farmers or fixating on high-profile cases of migrant abuse, 
which tend to evoke public and media attention, both elide systemic 
issues at hand: precarious farmworker regimes involve weak 
accountability mechanisms and unreliable channels for farmworkers to 
assert their own interests.” (p. 1155) 
 
This is so critical to understanding why family farms aren't socially accountable 
to the very labor practices they depend on. Because they are elevated to the status of 
“rock stars” they are morally infallible, and incapable of perpetuating exploitative labor 
regimes until they are and become one of a few “bad apples”. This is instructive when 
put together with Sifuentez’s claim that farmers are rarely actually fined or punished for 
34 
 
 
breaking the already exploitative rules of precarious transnational labor regimes. When 
examining the testimony of migrant laborers, “bad apples” are everywhere, but 
according to farmers and the public, they are simultaneously nowhere in sight (Holmes, 
2013, Chapters 2-4; Weiler et. al., 2016; Lozanski & Baumgartner, 2020). These 
depictions leave family farms with the enormous benefit of cultural and political clout 
without any accountability for the very system they advocate(d) for with agrarian 
exceptionalism. Not only that, but many of these farmers are supposedly taking a stance 
against agribusiness and practices of industrialized agriculture but don’t want to address 
industrialized labor. 
Agritourism for who? 
What is going wrong here? AFNs are supposed to solve problems of 
industrialized agriculture and agribusiness, not perpetrate them and make them 
invisible. London et. al. (2021) puts forward a helpful metaphor in their literature 
review for urban agriculture (UA) movements. UA movements are also AFNs, but they 
are specifically situated in an urban setting. Their metaphor situates two parts of a 
system, taproots and soil matrix:  
“We use the metaphor of the ‘taproot’ to characterize key elements of the 
UA movement, and the metaphor of the ‘soil matrix’ to refer to the 
underlying substrate of racial capitalism where these roots grow. 
Accordingly, a taproot represents the ways that UA projects are 
organized around a central set of values, ideologies and political 
commitments.” (London et. al., 2021, p. 206).  
 
Racial capitalism is a concept that situates racism as historically and presently 
inseparable from capitalism. White profits have long depended on exploiting people of 
color; a pattern we explored a bit in the context of Oregonian agriculture. They go on to 
35 
 
 
elaborate three taproots, market oriented, health oriented, and justice oriented. Market 
oriented taproots are concerned with the injustice of the economic organization of 
agribusiness and the concentration of wealth in agriculture. Health oriented taproots 
focus on reducing physiological and environmental harms of the agricultural system 
such as pesticides, ecological destruction, and access to fresh produce. Justice oriented 
taproots take an explicit stance on the environmental racism endemic in capitalism and 
desire to reform the agricultural system to be more equitable for both producers and 
consumers of all racial-ethnic backgrounds. Movements don’t have to be restricted to 
one taproot. They do however argue that market and health-oriented taproots are 
particularly inept at reforming the racialized nature of the soil matrix that the roots are 
stuck in. In fact, they find that unless an UA movement has environmental justice and 
anti-racist values at its core mission, it will be doomed to leave those issues of the 
underlying soil matrix of racial capitalism unaddressed (London et. al., 2021, p. 208). 
None of the farm operators examined in Canada had an explicit stance on 
reforming labor to our knowledge, but they do have stances on market-based reforms 
like farm to table, or localism, and environmental reforms such as organic or 
biodynamic farming. Is it surprising then that these farmers and communities hide their 
labor practices? BC farmers know they can use the image of being a rockstar in order to 
elevate their social status and economically benefit from their community image. They 
wouldn't want to risk being perceived as a bad apple, so why even talk about 
transnational labor?  
Similarly, NOTL locals and farmers know they will benefit by marketing their 
local historical social justice moments as the site in which Canadians took the first step 
36 
 
 
to abolish slavery and as a destination of the underground railroad. However, get less 
historical and more present, and suddenly the locals and farmers are much more 
apprehensive to discuss the realities and consequences of precarious transnational labor 
regimes. The town has no problem bragging about its social justice record of the 18th & 
19th centuries but goes to great lengths to make farmworkers from Latin America 
invisible to tourists, so as to not disrupt the “romanticism” of rural landscapes while still 
capitalizing on the economic benefits of SAWP.  
These enterprises are partaking in a market-oriented taproots. They are creating 
value by emphasizing bypassing corporate and agribusiness interference in post-
production phases by selling to local markets and tourists. The farm to table rhetoric 
emphasizes less middlemen between the farmer and consumer, which on its surface 
sounds powerful: by buying from me, we are sticking it to the corporate middleman and 
supporting local community members! With depth however, its deeply xenophobic and 
classist: let’s not acknowledge the Latinx workers living in and supporting our 
community for both large scale and small scale producers. Some of them emphasize 
organic and health-oriented benefits, but none of them make the claim of labor 
exploitation free goods.  
Agritourism is therefore best understood as a market-based reform for farms. 
Enterprises can bypass selling their products to food suppliers, contractors, and food 
manufacturers by instead attracting the consumer to the farm. When one buys fresh 
produce from the supermarket, a percentage of its value goes to the farmer, but when 
the farmer directly sells to a tourist, all the value is retained for the farmer. Robinson 
(2021) aptly situates this phenomenon as “a commitment to small-scale capitalism, in 
37 
 
 
which tourism supports local agriculture directly and indirectly” (p. 8). This doesn't free 
farmers from the rising cost of inputs, increasingly extreme climate variability, or 
dependency on precarious labor regimes, but it does provide them with more profits 
which can help offset unexpected costs. Indeed, a commitment to a smaller scale 
capitalism.  
Agritourism is purported to have great advantages such as preserving rural 
cultural heritage, stimulating local economies, and many income benefits for farmers 
themselves in regions where it’s viable (Barbieri & Tew, 2012, p. 216; Che et. al., 2005, 
p. 227). All these benefits are tied to the increased amounts of revenue generated by 
bringing tourists to farms. For example, authors claim that agritourism allows rural 
towns to thrive through increased local spending and taxation, which helps with both 
economic stimulation and preserving rural cultural heritage. Tourists might stay at a 
basement Airbnb, eat at the local bistro, and shop at the tourist trap boutiques. 
Restaurants might sell peach burrata salads using locally produced basil, peaches, and 
tomatoes thus tying their image to the local agricultural system. The revenue of such 
allows small towns to remain financially viable and preserve the architectural and 
demographic characteristics of the place. Farms that have increased revenue can stay in 
business and also maintain their contributions to the rural landscape aesthetic. All of 
these inform the cultural heritage of the town, and tourist revenue supports it. All of it 
rests on the backs of farmworkers. 
Farmers, who might take pleasure and pride in preserving cultural heritage and 
family businesses, also economically benefit from agritourism in a few ways. As 
mentioned, they manage to avoid oligopsonistic control of consumer food purchases by 
38 
 
 
attracting customers to the farm instead of their neighborhood supermarket. Agritourism 
also might require property and asset investment, which increases the land value of 
farms. The revenue additionally diversifies the income of farms and financially 
insulates farmers from seasonal variation of crop harvests and demand fluctuation.  
Even more critically, it allows farms to bring in more family members from 
descendant generations into the business at a sustainable pay rate, which has enormous 
implications for the viability of continuing to keep farms within families (Barbieri et. 
al., 2016; Barbieri & Tew, 2012) . Family members are able to be hired with livable 
wages, which allows an opportunity for subsequent generations to be involved in a 
family business and get experience in it before the current owner dies. Notably, the 
extra revenue isn’t used, to our knowledge, to increase wages for existing farmworkers. 
Recall, Vogeler asserts that farms that employ more than 1.5 man years of labor are not 
in fact family farms. They are larger-than-family-farms. Agritourism is enabling the 
sustenance of a harmful archetypal business that thrives on having a (likely) white 
family on a societal pedestal while keeping Latinx farmworkers that also contribute to 
the farms success completely excluded. I understand that many of these farmers take 
their family heritage seriously, and aspire to continue a legacy they deem important to 
them, but we have to ask: Is this worth it? If not, can we make a system that is worth it? 
There is no question: agritourism is highly beneficial to local farmers who can 
manage to capture tourist interest. It’s not available to all farmers. Proximity to urban 
population centers, local cooperation, existing tourist infrastructure, and are all tied to 
increased viability of the business model. There are substantial barriers to entry and 
beginning to create a reliable tourist-customer base is critical. Che et. al. (2003) notes 
39 
 
 
the strategy of combined marketing campaigns with different farmers can increase the 
size of the market. They use the examples of brochures and state websites, which drove 
customers from inside and outside the state of Michigan to participate in agritourism (p. 
228-229). They also point out that farmers can create networks and refer customers to 
each other depending on the tourists’ specific needs. As we will see, these word-of-
mouth forms of advertising are powerful for pushing tourists to visit agritourism 
locations. As discussed, this market-oriented rhetoric is prone to ignore the racialized 
economic inequality of agriculture, and leave Latinx farmworkers out of local 
conversations and broader research of stakeholder benefits from agritourism. 
Migrant workers are almost entirely sidelined in the academic literature 
examining agritourism’s benefits. I make no claim to have read all the literature on 
agritourism. However, I find it notable that after reading two dozen plus articles on 
agritourism mostly in the Journal of Travel Research, that farmworkers were not 
mentioned once. A more comprehensive literature review might reveal more veracious 
patterns and themes regarding this. The rhetoric of researchers, governments, and 
farmers prefer to gloss over this aspect of current agriculture, and dedicate little 
attention to how agritourism could be leveraged to improve the lives of farmworkers in 
addition to farmers and local communities.  
This is discursively noteworthy. When articles and agencies purport to serve 
local communities through marketing research and agritourism investments, they are 
making a claim to who is part of the community and who isn’t. Evidently, farmworkers 
are not part of the section of the population who benefits from agritourism, and in fact, 
as we discovered in the Canadian studies, they are perceived as a threat to the cultural 
40 
 
 
image and scenic landscapes of the economic model. The soil matrix of racial 
capitalism isn’t being reformed by these market oriented taproots, and worse yet the 
taproots are feeding off of its exploited nutrients and producing yet more fruit for 
privileged private property owners.  
There is potential room for agritourism to be leveraged to benefit farmworkers 
through education, experiences, connections, and exposure. Kim et al. (2019, p. 145) 
and Brune et al. (2022, p. 2) are two examples of studies which seek to find evidence of 
shifting consumer preferences after participating in agritourism experiences. Both of the 
studies situate the power of experiencing place in its full capacity, and that farmers have 
the power to educate customers on what it means to work and live in agriculture. First 
hand experiences have the potency to shape perspective, beliefs, and values. Kim et al. 
(2019, p. 150) established positive agritourism experiences can lead consumers to 
purchase more of an associated agriproduct. Brune et al. (2022, p. 9) found that place 
based holistic experiences have the ability to shape consumer values to pay more 
attention to sourcing local food and supporting local agriculture. These studies both beg 
the question to be asked, could an agritourism experience centered around labor 
thematics have the capacity to shape consumer preferences around agricultural labor 
practices? At minimum surely these types of experiences would educate consumers on 
the reality of the food system? 
Weiler et. al. (2016) situated another potential structural solution to farmworker 
representation: the proposal of a food label for ethical labor practices by a small 
Okanagan, BC  social movement, Radical Action with Migrants in Agriculture 
(RAMA) (p. 1157). The idea here is to develop a regulatory framework like Organic or 
41 
 
 
Biodynamic that allows a farmer to be certified after adhering to set labor sustainability 
guidelines with inspections and enforcement. RAMA proposed that the regulatory 
framework would have to offer economic benefits to farmers who enrolled and followed 
guidelines. RAMA voiced concerns that it would be too burdensome to ask them to 
develop those guidelines with their resource capacity and conflict of interests with 
pushing benefits to farmers as an organization concerned with migrant farmworker 
rights. Indeed, surely a more powerful regulator such as the state would be needed to 
effectively patrol ethical labor practices.  
Alternatively, farmers and others suggested that consumers ought to be 
responsible for monitoring labor conditions on farms (p. 1157). This is unrealistic for a 
few reasons. One, as we have reviewed, farmers have been obscuring farmworker labor 
and living conditions for centuries. This continues through the present: “Farm business 
owners also maintain a great deal of gatekeeping power in shaping information that is 
presented to the public through venues like social media and farmers’ market 
conversations.” (Weiler et. al., 2016, p. 1157). People can surely get to know the person 
who runs the business that grows their food, but that person can be dishonest, be 
misleadingly positive about farmworker living and working conditions, or just not talk 
about them at all. Can we honestly expect all consumers to take the time to get to know 
their local farmer and all the farmworkers they hire? 
The authors then point out that even if a select farmers were completely honest 
about labor conditions to their customers this would be difficult to scale up in an 
impactful way. Hence, we need a regulatory framework to do it, which is frequently 
fought against by small scale farmers decrying the evils of a state regulated “one size 
42 
 
 
fits all” farm labor regulation. This leads us back in a circle to the current predicament 
of agriculture regarding rock stars and bad apples: “A moral economy framing is thus 
used as an anti-political ideology to legitimize the neoliberal status quo of agricultural 
exceptionalism for farm labor in BC: leave it all to individuals and hope for the best.” 
(Weiler et. al., 2016, p. 1157). 
Agritourism arguably provides the single best possible venue for facilitating 
consumer-farmer connections, and we are here to investigate that possibility. 
Consumers are literally visiting the very spaces that produce food, but as we are going 
to find out, the agritourism experience is largely a facade. Its advertising schema sets 
the consumer up to interpret agritourism venues as places of beauty, relaxation, and 
moral purity not as spaces of stress, economic pressure, and structural violence. 
Additionally, farmers are concerned that accurate media of agricultural labor would be 
detrimental to their agritourism business models. Thus, they have a financial stake in 
hiding race and class conditions from tourists.  
  
43 
 
 
Chapter 3 Case Selection Hood River Oregon  
 Hood River was selected as a candidate for research for a variety of reasons. 
Most importantly, I have lived in the region since the age of 10, and while I now live in 
Eugene, I have returned every summer and winter break for work. My mother also grew 
up in the town. This provided me with access to already existing knowledge and 
relationships, which allowed a more targeted and efficient research process. 
Additionally, Hood River is a hotspot for agritourism due to its historical economy and 
geographical character. 
My analysis is limited to the Hood River Valley, which in terms of the local 
agritourism landscape is an arbitrary line. There are agritourism enterprises spanning 
the Mosier valley and in The Dalles 5 and 20 miles east of Hood River respectively. 
Similarly, right across from the Columbia River, in Washington State, dozens of 
wineries and U-pick operations are also located less than a mile from my study area 
within Klickitat and Skamania Counties. Furthermore, Agritourism spans to eastern 
Washington, the Willamette Valley, and the Rogue Valley in southern Oregon. I suspect 
it is likely themes found in this study might hold true across these geographical regions. 
44 
 
 
Figure 1 Reference Map of Hood River County and Study Area 
 
45 
 
 
The Columbia National Scenic Area tracts the Columbia River- also the border of 
Oregon and Washington – from the edge of the Portland metro area to The Dalles. All 
Hood River County farmland is in the study area except for one small parcel in the 
urban footprint of Cascade Locks. Agritourism spans from Hood River through Mosier 
and The Dalles to the Columbia Valley to the East. The pattern holds true on the 
Washington side as well. Underwood, WA is the only place with a concentration of 
agritourism on par with the Hood River Valley, although it’s nowhere near as large. 
 
Hood River Valley had long been home to Native American Tribes like the 
Clackamas, Wishram, Wasco, and more. Early fur trappers became interested in the 
region, which soon became known as Dog River supposedly after the trappers were 
forced to eat their own hunting dogs due to becoming trapped during a grueling winter. 
As Oregon experienced a land rush by White settlers looking to set up a White 
egalitarian agrarian paradise, desired regions like the Willamette valley quickly filled up 
with Donation Land Claims and other fertile regions rapidly followed. The 2021 Hood 
River Fruit Loop, an agritourism brochure we'll dissect later, romantically spins this 
history:  
“It didn't take long for early settlers to realize they had found an 
agricultural paradise with mineral rich soil, temperate climates, and 
glacial streams. Nathaniel Coe, and two other families were the first 
permanent settlers in the Dog River Area. Coe filed a donation land 
claim of 319 acres near the mouth of the Dog River (now Hood River) in 
1854, planting the first fruit trees the following spring.” 
 
Like many Oregonian settlements, the regional economy centralized around 
control of land and natural resources for extraction. Soon logging and horticultural 
agriculture dominated the valley. Breakthroughs in refrigeration, canning, and irrigation 
46 
 
 
only encouraged the viability of the fruit industry, which formulated fruit-based 
cooperatives and packing houses. 
During the 1980s and 90s, two key events impacted the local economy and 
transformed the region into an international tourist destination. First, in 1986 Congress 
established the Columbia River Gorge as a National Scenic Area spanning from the 
edges of the Portland Metropolitan area (the city of Troutdale) to the Dalles Oregon 108 
miles to the east. National Scenic Areas are like National Parks except industrial 
settlements are allowed within them, albeit under strict development and land use laws. 
Simultaneously, the world was embroiled in another period of expanding globalization 
of the economy. Proximity to Portland International Airport, less than an hour away 
from Hood River, and 20 minutes from the edge of the scenic area border meant the 
region could be easily accessed by the globe. As logging and agriculture contracted, 
Hood River began “importing” people and relying on rural, scenic, and recreational 
tourism (Robinson, 2021, p. 3). 
Growing interest in Scenic Recreation like hiking, windsurfing, kiteboarding, 
mountain biking, skiing, snowboarding, snowshoeing, and much more slowly 
transformed Hood River into the Scenic Area’s capital for tourism and overnight stays. 
Tourism thus became a key economic engine. There has been some diversification into 
viniculture, brewing, distilling, and Uncrewed Aerial Vehicle (UAV) drone technology 
companies, but the region to this day is anchored by agriculture and tourism.  
During the late 1990s and 2000s a few agricultural enterprises began to 
experiment with U-pick operations, when customers go to the farm and pick fruit 
themselves, and tasting rooms for wine. The Hood River Fruit Loop, a collective 
47 
 
 
brochure for agritourism businesses in the valley began in 1992. Soon agritourism 
proved a successful business model and by the late 2010s, the region transformed into a 
hotbed for agricultural tourism by blending farms, scenic landscapes, and previously 
existing tourist infrastructure. Farming enterprises that had existed for nearly 100 years 
joined alongside newer businesses in transforming their economic models to begin 
catering more towards Hood River’s many visitors. Each year more are added to the list, 
and its popularity continues to grow. In my conversations with workers and business 
owners, it was evident demand was so extreme, many places struggled to find enough 
staffing or product to keep up even in the summer of 2021 characterized by the Delta 
variant of COVID 19. 
Hood River is a prime example of strong agritourism viability. It’s proximal to 
the Portland Urban area, which has 2.5 million people living in its combined statistical 
area. The Portland International Airport also connects the region to the broader nation 
and world. Notably, the region was an already growing tourist destination for scenic 
recreation, which meant the rural towns had already invested in tourist infrastructure 
such as lodging, shopping, and dining venues. A family that already had plans to take a 
day trip to see Tamanawas falls and Mount Hood might be excited to see a farm-bakery 
off the highway where they can stop for “farm fresh” baked goods for a pleasant snack. 
A couple’s favorite vacation destination for hiking and windsurfing also has stunning 
wedding venues planted in aesthetic orchards with breathtaking views of Mount Hood 
they might consider for their special day down the line.  
Similar to other tourist destinations covered in the literature review, Hood River 
has a strong presence of CSA, farmers markets, Organic growers, LFMs like Gorge 
48 
 
 
Grown, biodynamic farmers, and non-mechanized farmers. These overlap with 
agritourism enterprises. However, I did not look for any concrete numbers or patterns 
on how much they overlap. Either way, these local movements are an important cultural 
component of the town. There is serious consideration for local, family-owned 
businesses, and locals make sure others know that they support those businesses 
(Jaworski, 2016, p. 31). Not just because everyone knows the owner and their family by 
name, but also because there’s some flashiness to that type of consumerism. People can 
exhibit excitement, pride, clout, and compassion through their local purchases. 
Additionally, many restaurants and caterers in town work with local farmers to secure 
fresh produce, which are heavily marketed to tourists and locals alike to add value and 
uniqueness to a meal. Sourcing locally makes the food seem of higher quality, more 
unique, and can transform dinner into an experience of local flavor.  
Many of these industries work in tandem forming close business partnerships 
and incredibly profitable endeavors. A 200-person wedding out in an orchard venue 
creates value not just for the farm its located on, but also the hotels guests rent rooms 
from, the caterers serving chicken and Hood River Local vegetables produced by 
another farmer, and let’s not forget the photographer, DJ, the bachelorette party at 
another agritourism winery the day before, and shopping at boutique stores downtown 
for memorabilia. Many businesses and individuals are economically benefiting from the 
farmworkers who oversee maintaining plants to produce apples, cherries, and pears, 
who also happen to create a scenic wedding venue at the same time.   
Lastly, Hood River’s demographics are instructive and important to situate in 
relation to the outlined history in the literature review. The county is relatively more 
49 
 
 
diverse than Oregon as a whole, which is overall a comparatively white, homogenous 
state among the US. Hood River County has just under 24 thousand individuals as of 
April 2020. Sixty three percent of whom identify as non-Hispanic White and 31.9% 
identify as Hispanic or Latino. One point eight percent identify as Asian alone, 1.3% as 
Native American or Native Alaskan, 0.8% African American, 0.2% as Native Hawaiian 
or Pacific Islander, and a remaining 2.8% identifies as two or more races.  
We can observe the county has an outsized Latinx presence when examining the 
overall state composition of White alone, non-Hispanic at 75.1%, and a Hispanic or 
Latinx population of 13.4%. This of course is informed by the county's long history as 
Oregon’s leading producer of fruit, which has contributed to a permanent Latinx 
presence in the county. When examining voter registration data and past election 
history, the rural county is surprisingly Democratic. In fact, it's one of the most reliably 
Democratic voting counties in the entire state: “Data from presidential elections dating 
back to 1988 show Multnomah, Lane, Lincoln, Benton, and Hood River counties have 
remained steadfastly blue, while the rest have bounced back and forth.” (Arden, 2020). 
The other demographic characteristic worth noting is the racial composition of 
farm operators, also called producers, in the region. Producers are key decision makers 
on farms designated by the census. One does not have to own the land, labor, or capital 
of a farm to be a producer, they just have to call the shots for planting and harvesting in 
addition to deriving >50% of their income from farming (Legal Information Institute). 
Also, there can be more than one producer per farm.  
The high rate of white producers in Hood River is a direct product of the White 
supremacist laced history of Oregon laid out in the background history from Indigenous 
50 
 
 
American dispossession to gatekeeping subsequent minorities from equal access to 
opportunities to ascend the agricultural economic ladder. Decades of racialized policies 
have accumulated to an enormous disparity of primarily White owners of agricultural 
enterprises. 
Table 1 Hood River Producers by Race 
Total Producers 1,099 
White Producers 1,001 (91.1%) 
Asian Producers 62 (5.6%) 
Black Producers 1 (0%) 
American Indian and Alaskan Native 2 (0%) 
Producers 
Producers of one or more races 11 (1%) 
Producers that Identify as Hispanic 109 (9.9%) 
Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish origin are not considered “races” according to US census 
policies and are thus a separate category. Someone who identifies with any of those 
labels, is also simultaneously White, Black, etc.  
  
51 
 
 
Chapter 4 Methods 
I took a multi method approach to address my research question. The primary 
method is a content and discourse analysis of digital advertising materials aimed at 
tourists and potential visitors to enterprises. Materials include Instagram posts, tourist 
brochures, and websites. 
Sampling Procedure 
For the purposes of my sampling procedure, I took Barbieri et. al. 's (2016) 
definition of agritourism enterprises and searched for businesses that had both some 
form of dedicated crop production, which ranged from 5 acres to hundreds, as well as 
an on-site facility aimed at attracting tourists to the space. In terms of the enterprises 
examined in this study, facilities included the following: various alcohol tasting rooms, 
restaurants, fruit stands, u-pick activities, wedding venues, or other methods of creating 
experiences, education, and aesthetic consumption of agricultural landscapes (Lavender 
fields, sunflower mazes, apple tastings etc.).  
My sampling methodology sought to capture every business in the geographic 
Hood River Valley study area that qualified. To accomplish this, I used a priori 
knowledge from living in the region for ten years, google, local advertising materials, 
and sightseeing by driving through the valley looking for businesses that qualified. I 
found 25 enterprises to analyze that met the criteria above in addition to being open at 
least 3 months a year and having a website and an Instagram presence. I have since 
found out I missed one newer business; however, my sample is still more than qualified 
to capture the region's agritourism discourse surrounding labor.  
52 
 
 
There is a discrepancy between the count of enterprise I examine in this study 
and the count of producers given by the USDA. First, as mentioned, there can be 
multiple producers for a single farm. Second, not all farms in the region are tourist 
enterprises. Many for one reason or another have stuck with traditional farming. Third, 
not all businesses that have agritourism elements are fully committed to them. A few I 
chose not to examine were only open for 2 weeks to a month in the fall, which fell 
outside of my time in Hood River. They were exclusively apple and pear U-pick 
operations, hence the extremely seasonal operation. Additionally, many including all 
the highly seasonal enterprises I just mentioned don't have a social media or website 
presence. It likely isn’t worthwhile for these u-pick operations to invest in those 
marketing tactics currently. 
Instagram 
As both a researcher and a member of the local community, business owners 
have a growing understanding that having a social media presence can positively impact 
business traffic. Many individuals I talked to hold this belief, and study interviewees 
also expressed the sentiment. Instagram provides a venue for businesses to market an 
idea of the experience they are offering to tourists using sight, text, and sometimes 
sound. It provides a preconception of what the farm is, who is welcome there, and why 
one should visit there. Albeit a common understanding that Instagram isn't reality, it has 
a potent capacity to persuade individuals, or at the least disarm them from thinking 
beyond what’s conveniently placed in front of their eyes. Instagram posts aren’t primary 
source footage. They are cultural products tailored to social norms and expectations that 
hold substantial power in shaping consumer conceptions and expectations. 
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Of the 25 agritourism enterprises, 22 had Instagram pages with adequate content 
to analyze. A couple of pages were clearly unused or the owner's personal account 
aimed towards friends and acquaintances. My intent was to pull 30 posts from each and 
code them all (660 in total) and see if by that time I had reached saturation, the point at 
which coding becomes repetitive and yields no new noteworthy results. This did prove 
to be an effective saturation point. For each enterprise, I started on July 1st, 2021 and 
moved back in time until I had collected 30 posts from that page.  
After collecting the repository of materials to analyze, I examined all the posts 
in summary to see what codes emerged from the data. I tried to pay particular attention 
to anything that might touch on labor, however, it quickly became clear that very little, 
if any, of the posts included that theme. After compiling a list of eleven codes that I felt 
captured the discourse of the Instagram posts, I moved through each photo and caption, 
and coded them separately. So, a photo might feature fresh raspberries, which would be 
coded Advertising Agricultural Products. The caption for that photo might explain U-
pick seasonal availability to potential customers while having a sentence celebrating the 
merits of fresh produce, which would be separately coded from the photo as both 
Advertising Agricultural Products (AAP) and Customer Logistics (CL). This means that 
660 photos and 660 captions were all individually coded. Photos and captions could 
each carry multiple codes. The most codes a post or caption received were four.  
 
 
 
 
54 
 
 
Table 2 Instagram Codes and Definitions 
Code  Description 
Customer Logistics Customer logistics captures attempts by enterprises to 
(CL) inform consumers of changing business practices, surprise 
announcements, or how to show up prepared. 
Natural Beauty (NB) Natural Beauty is a code that represents scenarios in which 
the photo and/or captions had the user focus on vistas and 
natural scenery that can be consumed on site.  
Outdoor Consumption This is for content highlighting outdoor space for 
(OC) consumption or experience.  
Advertising Advertising Agricultural Products was used in instances 
Agricultural Products where the enterprise highlights fruit or other minimally 
(AAP) processed agricultural goods.  
Advertising Site This code captures businesses advertising products that they 
Manufactured produce on site. This is different from AAP in the sense that 
Products (ASMP) these items are not fresh agricultural products, but rather 
entail some form of manufacturing from cooking, canning, 
brewing, or other processing. 
55 
 
 
Advertising Off-site This code is very similar to ASMP, except that these are 
manufactured products products that cannot be produced on site, or they are 
(AOMP) produced by another brand. If I could not verify a product 
was produced off site, I preferred ASMP.  
Farm Animals (FA) Farm Animals, from dogs, cats, pigs, goats, cows, and even 
Alpacas are great consumer draws and emblematic of farm 
life.  
Smiling Consumers Posts had to draw attention to positive emotions such as 
(SC) happiness or joy, which could be experienced by visiting the 
enterprise.  
Happy Employees This code is for instances in which photos or captions 
(HE)  highlight employees of enterprises. They can’t just feature 
an employee in the background, they must be emphasized in 
the photo or caption. 
Holiday Memorial day, July 4th, Fathers Day, Mothers Day, Easter. 
Commemoration (HC) These posts are for purely celebrating the holiday and not 
necessarily a special event at the location, although there are 
a few of those. 
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Bees Since this study explicitly focuses on labor, I couldn't help 
but notice just how frequently bees were credited as hard 
workers or integral parts of the farm.  
 
Websites 
All 25 enterprises had websites with ample content for a discourse analysis. I 
moved through each website and searched for content that was tailored towards 
informing how a consumer should understand a business. Mostly, this involved “about” 
pages which had various terms like “our story,” “our history,” “our mission,” etc. I also 
wanted to see if any chose to speak about labor within the business, so pages titled “Our 
Team” or “Meet {insert name}” etc. also qualified. I scraped each page of each website 
and collected anything that interpreted an agritourism business in relation to themes of 
labor, logistics, history, family farming, and professed business objectives.  
Once I amassed a corpus of website content, I analyzed each business as a single 
unit for coding. Like the Instagram posts, I read through content and generated a list of 
nine codes that I felt touched on critical themes of the data. Each website could receive 
a code one time, but not any more than that. I did this to avoid the messiness of 
quantifying a theme's presence in qualitative materials. Some websites did play into 
themes more than others. My goal was to capture an overall narration of how farms 
should be understood within the consumer gaze, rather than capturing similarities or 
differences between enterprises’ narrations.  
 
 
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Table 3 Website Codes and Definitions 
Code Description 
Localism Locally made, locally farmed, and supporting the local 
economy, are just a few examples of the ways websites embed 
added value into their agritourism experiences or products. 
Heritage Many Hood River farms are handed down generationally and 
another handful are run by individuals who have a generational 
history of farming outside of Hood River. Some also 
emphasized architectural heritages. 
Geography/Terroir This code is common for vineyard operations where the term 
terroir signifies the climate, soil, and environment which are all 
critical to informing the qualities of a grape and eventually the 
wine made from them. Many enterprises made similar claims 
outside of vineyards.  
Aesthetics For a website to receive an aesthetic code, there had to be one or 
more statements geared towards advertising scenic beauty.  
Experience This code captures website content that positions the farm as an 
experience.  
Hedonism/ This is similar to experience, however, in order for a website to 
Relaxation be coded as such, the content must portray the farm as a space 
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for relaxation and consumption of food or alcohol. This is 
different from asking customers to come witness the farm and 
experience it, in the sense that it takes on a more hospitality-
oriented tone.  
Family Values This code demarcates discourse that highlights the familial 
qualities of a farm.  
Farm to Consumer Farm to consumer rhetoric emphasizes the freshness of 
agricultural products while localism highlights the merits of 
local consumption. For example, a U-pick operation might 
highlight the superior taste and quality of picking fruit on site. It 
could also simultaneously encourage supporting local farmers; 
thus it would receive both codes. 
Sustainable Websites had to make some claim to farming sustainably, which 
was always environmental. 
 Brochures 
Since I worked as a waiter in a hotel, I noticed several customers carrying 
brochures of the enterprises I was analyzing. So, I went around to a few of the larger 
hotels in Hood River and collected as many brochures as I could find. At this point in 
the summer, I had conducted both discourse analysis of websites and Instagram posts. 
After reading the brochures through, I knew I would be wasting my time by developing 
another code system. Some enterprises even directly copied content from websites into 
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a paper format. The goal of the brochures is to catch the attention of hotel guests and 
entice/ guide them from their place of stay to the agritourism venue. This is useful to 
capture non-internet audiences. There is one notable exception, which holds substantial 
influence within the regional agritourism economy: The Hood River Fruit Loop. 
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Figure 2 The Hood River Fruit Loop 
 
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The Hood River Fruit Loop is a collective brochure, which businesses can opt in 
with a small fee to cover printing and maintenance costs. It started in 1992 and in the 
year 2021 it featured 26 businesses, 19 of which qualified in my sampling procedure. 
The other 7 did not because the enterprises did not have on-site crop production. Two of 
those were purely retail locations, one for fruit products such as jam syrup, pies, etc. 
The other was, oddly enough, an antique business? I would be interested to see what 
image of rural heritage they might present, but unfortunately, it did not qualify.  
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It’s not of utility to detail too much of the brochure’s content, but I will offer a 
summary for reference. The first page features a map with numbered stops following a 
suggested scenic highway route. The brochure opens with a romantic agrarian view of 
history that pedestals the first settler of Hood River to establish an orchard, which I 
quoted in the historical background. It then offers a litany of information seeking to 
answer frequently asked questions for tourists ranging from how to ripen a pear and 
seasonality of certain fruits to COVID 19 and smoking policies of enterprises. It then 
offers a paragraph on each business that purchased a spot in the brochure. Enterprise 
content is repetitive, if not directly copy and pasted from websites, hence the reason I 
am not detailing too much about the content. Other notable features include a paragraph 
highlighting women, as owners and other professional roles, in agriculture and 
advertisements by local restaurants, hotels, and other agritourism businesses not 
featured in the Fruit Loop. 
The brochure is incredibly successful and attracts tourists to Hood River 
explicitly for the purpose of “doing the Fruit Loop.’’ Others in the region have recently 
replicated the Fruit Loop brochure by creating their own. Examples include the East 
Gorge Food Trail and Gorge Wine. The East Gorge Food Trail had enterprises that were 
outside the boundaries of the study area. Gorge Wine had some businesses that qualified 
as samples and others outside of the geographic study area.   
Interviews 
Interviews were semi-structured and conducted with individuals who had 
significant experience in agritourism. The method proved difficult to operationalize in 
the context of the COVID 19 pandemic. The dual combination of normal tourism traffic 
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volume combined with an acute staffing shortage across service industries meant 
individuals whom I wanted to speak to were frequently overwhelmed or too busy to 
even respond to outreach. I suspect there were other circumstances that could have 
contributed to lack of enthusiasm such as a general distrust towards universities and 
especially the University of Oregon. Multiple times I initially encountered a receptionist 
or service staff who enthusiastically passed on their manager's phone number with the 
quick warning, “maybe don’t say you're from the University of Oregon”.  
Thus, I was only able to conduct 4 interviews given the unfortunate overlap of 
these events. Interviews therefore serve as an added element to the discourse analyses 
and are not the primary focus of this study. This section of methodology does qualify as 
Human Subjects research and is approved by the University of Oregon's Institutional 
Review Board. Interviewees will remain anonymous along with the enterprises they are 
associated with. While interviews were semi-structured to provide room for 
conversational flow, they did follow a general format of starting with learning the 
subject's history and relationship with agritourism before moving into how they 
understood the industry. Finally, it concluded with direct questions on media 
representations of farm labor. Below is the outline I brought with me to each interview 
as a checklist to help keep track of research intentions and conversational flow. 
 
1. How did you come into agriculture and farm work?  
- How long have you been working in it?  
- Has your role changed over time?  
- What keeps you working in it?  
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2. Visiting farms, doing U-pick, and being able to buy produce on site has been 
something I’ve been doing since I was a kid here in Hood River. Is this something that’s 
always existed? Has it grown or changed overtime? 
- How important is that to the operations and revenue of the farm  
- Has it changed how things operate? How about business priorities?  
3. What priorities are at the heart of [agritourism thing we are talking about]? 
- Why do you think it works and generates revenue?  
- Have you found any particular strategies work well, what hasn't?  
- What’s in it personally for you?  
How does your business contribute to the community?  
4. Where are agricultural goods produced for consumption where?  
- What goods are produced onsite vs elsewhere?  
- Where is the furthest offsite location located at?  
- What does your clientele seem like? Are there any patterns you notice?  
5. What do you think draws tourists to your farm? Where and how do you advertise? 
- Does city or government support play a role?  
- How about brochure media like The Hood River Fruit Loop?  
- Does word of mouth, or local residents’ recommendations bring a lot of 
business?  
6. (What are some of the) or (Are there) difficulties in agritourism ventures?  
- Are there areas of conflicting priorities or practices between agricultural 
production and facilitating tourist/consumer experiences?  
- How do you navigate and overcome those difficulties?  
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7. Are there significant differences between the idea of a farm when it gets presented to 
consumers that might differ from how it actually functions?  
- Are there topics that typically don't come up with tourists that are a big part of 
agricultural production?  
- Why do you think those differences exist? How do you navigate them? 
8. A lot of pictures and media I see shows the landscape of the farm, like trees with Mt 
Hood or Adams in the background. I also see a lot of pictures of final products in bins, 
processed goods, or fruit still on the plants. When I lived in Odell, the scenes of day-to-
day orchard work were a lot more diverse and less aestheticized. Why is there not 
usually media of pickers or other day to day labor involved in maintaining trees/plants? 
- Do you think it might be more related to what you think is going to be exciting 
for tourists? Alternatively, were there moments that demonstrated to you that 
that is what tourists/consumers want to see?  
- Why do you think the media doesn’t highlight much of the actual labor, and 
the people doing it? 
  
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Chapter 5 Results and Discussion 
The discussion is organized into five parts. First, I will address the miniscule 
number of media pieces showing farmworker labor, as well as the Instagram code, 
Bees. We will also dissect the interview results that touch on why farmers think Latinx 
labor isn’t represented on their business’s media pages. 
In the second part, other notable interview findings, we will detail interview 
results that touch on agritourism’s potential as a financial tool for familial inheritance, 
agritourism as an opportunity for upward mobility, and the confirmed validity of 
Instagram and brochures as vital advertising materials for tourists. 
The proceeding three parts focus on Instagram and website coding results, and 
they are ordered by increasing discourse richness. This will start with situating the 
codes under the umbrella of what I am referring to as communicating agritourism. 
Content here does not signal any overt values and focuses on simply conveying basic 
information and situating the products an enterprise offers. However, it is worth noting 
the content and who conveys that communication sits in a privileged position relative to 
farmworkers, and thus shaping marketing decisions. This section will detail the codes 
Customer Logistics, Holiday Commemoration, and all three Advertising Agricultural 
Products, Advertising Site Manufactured Products, and Advertising Offsite 
Manufactured Products from Instagram content. It will also elaborate on the Geography 
& Terroir theme from websites. 
The fourth theme for dissection is discourse aimed at selling agritourism, which 
actively fetishizes and emphasizes the agritourism experience and products. This banner 
captures instances in which content is actively shaping consumer expectations and 
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understandings of what it means to visit a farm. What will it feel like? Why would I 
want to go? What will I get by spending my time and money to be here and get here? 
This content answers those questions, according to the creators of these enterprises’ 
web and social media presence. The consumer experience will of course substantially 
differ from a farmworkers experience of an agritourism facility. This section will 
feature the results of the Instagram codes Farm Animals, Natural Beauty, Outdoor 
Consumption, Smiling Customers, and Happy Employees. It will also feature content 
from Aesthetics, Experience, and Hedonism & Relaxation of the website codes. 
The last results banner, moralizing agritourism, will detail the content most 
explicitly leveraging discourse tools that emphasize the agrarian family farm and AFN 
economic ideals. Here we will dissect the last of the website codes: Localism, Farm to 
Consumer, Sustainable, Heritage, and Family values.  
I am keeping my interviewees non gendered by using they/them pronouns when 
writing as an added layer of anonymity. Sometimes I will not name which interviewee 
is speaking if their background isn’t pertinent to the content. I also redacted some words 
in direct quotes also to preserve anonymity. The words are replaced with something 
more generic in brackets such as [last name]. Before jumping in, here are the overall 
counts for both Instagram and website coding as well as some background information 
on the interviewees. 
 
Table 4 Interviewee Characteristics  
 Interviewee Positionality  Heritage 
Interviewee A Manager Parents are owners 
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Interviewee B Main service staff with some managerial Parents are 
responsibilities farmworkers 
Interviewee C Owner Parent was owner 
Interviewee D Manager Parents are owners 
 
Table 5 Instagram Content Code Results 
Code Count of Count of Total % Of Total 
Images Captions Content Pieces 
(n= 1320) 
Advertising Site 235 217 452 34.2% 
Manufactured Products 
(ASMP) 
Natural Beauty (NB) 262 62 324 24.6% 
Advertising Agricultural 197 125 322 24.4% 
Products (AAP) 
Customer Logistics (CL) 57 152 209 15.8% 
Outdoor Consumption (OC) 103 57 160 12.1% 
Advertising Other 56 41 97 7.4% 
manufactured products 
(AOMP) 
Smiling Consumers (SC) 66 29 95 7.2% 
Holiday Commemoration 32 48 80 6.1% 
(HC) 
    2.9%  
Happy Employees (HE)     
34 4 38 
Farm Animals (FA) 14 20 34 2.6% 
Bees 11 11 22 1.6% 
To refresh, there are 660 total images and 660 total captions for a grand total of 1320 
pieces of Instagram content.  
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Table 6 Website Content Code Results 
Code  Count % Of Total Websites (n=25) 
Experience 20 80% 
Farm to Consumer 19 76% 
Hedonism/ Relaxation 18 72% 
Heritage 17 68% 
Geography/Terroir 15 60% 
Family Values 15 60% 
Aesthetics 12 48% 
Localism 11 44% 
Sustainable 4 16% 
 
Latinx Representation 
Of 660 Instagram posts, 4 showed Latinx farmworkers (0.006%). Of 660 
captions, zero mentioned any presence, gratitude, celebration, appreciation, or bare 
minimum of acknowledging labor done by farm workers. That means, of 1320 pieces of 
content from social media, 0.003% showed the workers producing the fruit that the 
entirety of Hood River’s food, wine, agricultural, and gastro tourism economy 
completely depends on. There is some website content that mentions Latinx labor we 
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will discuss later, however, it is for winemaking and not agricultural production. 
Brochures don’t touch the topic. To call these content pieces representation, is 
misleading. As we will see, the gap of quantity and quality representation between 
white workers and Latinx Farmworkers is enormous. I personally cringe at the idea of 
equating the two. However, we need to compare them to understand the gap and the 
injustice occurring in media that purports to represent farms.  
Figure 3 Closed For This Weekend. 
 
The caption reads “Sorry but our tasting room will be CLOSED this weekend. Stay 
Healthy!”  
Both the photo and caption of figure 13 were coded customer logistics. The bar 
for photos representing Latinx labor is extremely low.  
  
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Figure 4 Net Technology Novelty 
 
The caption reads “Now that there is fruit on the trees, we are putting up netting to 
protect them from hail. Last year was the first year we used the netting, and just 4 days 
after installing it we had a major hailstorm. The fruit survived! @drapenetna [the net 
company’s Instagram page]”  
I originally coded both the caption and photo of figure 14 as advertising 
agricultural products because they are emphasizing the fruit. It’s extremely rare for 
content to focus this much on production logistics. Notice how the fruit trees and nets 
are foregrounded in the content and workers are in the background. 
  
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Figure 5 Pruning Blossoms 
 
The caption reads “We have begun blossom thinning the Pink Pearls. By thinning 50-
70% of blossoms this year, it allows the tree to return bloom and fruit next year.”  
The post of figure 15 was originally coded natural beauty because it contained 
many more photos of just blossoms and views of Mt Adams. This photo, and the next, 
are the closest to representing farm worker labor in the entire sample. It will be 
discussed more in the conclusion. 
 
 
 
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Figure 6 Smokey Harvest 
 
The caption reads “Welcome Harvest 2020. Today we picked Chardonnay and Pinot 
Noir for our sparkling wines. Grapes for sparkling wines are harvested first to ensure 
lower sugar levels than when the same varieties are picked for table wines.” Below that 
someone comments: “Will these be affected by the smoke?” 
Figure 16 does show the people who performed the work of harvesting. It’s 
more common to see a white family standing in front of a bountiful harvest. None of 
these pieces of content draw substantial attention to workers. Instead, farmworkers are 
just background props or side pieces to the focus of the content. It begs the question, 
from the digital landscapes, how would people know who produces their food? No 
wonder the “family farm” still seems like a predominant archetype despite its 
endangerment. No wonder customers repeatedly asked interviewee B how the fruit is 
harvested and assumed it was machinery. This is not to mention the established fact that 
Latinx workers aren’t typically visible in the physical landscape either. 
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Upon going through Instagram footage, I noticed that Bees (and a ladybug) were 
receiving more credit for farm labor than Latinx workers. Yes. Bees, which numbered 
22 photos and captions for 1.6 % of content. In these instances, farmers directly thanked 
Bees, cherished them, worshiped them as integral parts of farming. In photos and 
captions bees are the center of attention in the frame, and not some background prop.  
1. “We found this guy buzzing around our apple blossoms” 
2. “Nature doing its job on a red Anjou pear. The ladybug is probably 
scavenging for aphids and those insect nymphs.” 
3. “We love our bees! Stop by and hear them hum around our lavender! 
#bees #lavenderfarm #savethebees” 
4. “We [heart emoji] our pollinators Bees make our world go round & our 
flowers become fruit” 
5. “Bees are our best friends at Lavender Valley. Without them we wouldn't 
have this magical palace to explore.” 
6. “Thankful for the bees. What’s something you couldn't live without?” 
  
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Figure 7 Photos Coded Bees 
 
Notice how photos are centered around bees. It is featuring the work they do, but there 
is more attention on the bees themselves, and this is emphasized through captions. 
The gap between Bees and Latinx Farmworkers is enormous in of itself, without 
referring to the fact that the code Bees only captured a very small percent of content 
(1.6%). This is interesting to compare with Happy Employees which captured (%) of 
content. These are both nowhere near the top code, Advertising Agricultural Products.  
Why are farms being blatantly misrepresented? Here, I turn to our interviewees 
for answers. The topic came up naturally with Interviewee A: 
Researcher (R): Are there significant dissonances in the way a farm 
functions vs the way it's presented to tourists? 
Interviewee (I): Yes. Yes. So, the whole goal of a farm, I think at least, is 
that no one should see all the work that goes into it. All the blood sweat 
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and tears that makes it work. Like people just come in here and say oh it 
looks so nice, and I am like we fertilized every single bush with a 
shotgun shell. That’s like 3500 plants. Like scooting along a tarp trying 
to get our arms in the soil for 3500 plants. It’s so pretty like yeah, it's 
great. There is a huge disconnect from how a farm likes to present and 
how it operates. It’s supposed to look effortless, like that’s the thing right 
now, effortless beauty. It’s insane. 
R: Why do you think people are disinterested in seeing that side of 
things?  
I: I think they are interested a little bit, but at the same time it's not 
convenient when people are here. So, like we need tractors and heavy 
machinery and sharp knives and stuff. So yes, they would be interested, 
but also want to touch everything. We gotta do that in the morning. No 
one really cares about the months and months of irrigation work done. 
They may be interested in watching us use all the heavy machinery and 
cut all the stuff, but no one wants to see us lay pipes. Or like they want to 
see the ladies lay vines, but when they realize they do that for weeks and 
weeks they're like yeah not interested. It’s not like something that's super 
engaging. It's like Disneyland, you go and it's magic, but you don't see 
all the stuff that happens behind the scenes. You don't get to see the 
sweaty princesses.  
R: It sounds like you have a strong belief that no one is interested in this 
type of stuff, so I am curious, have you tried to put this stuff onto the 
media and has there been an experience that validates those beliefs? 
I: I only think it's boring because I have done it. [referring to hard work, 
not putting the media of it out there]. I try to put out things about the 
distillation and the harvest, especially for the [crop type], and people are 
interested but my uncle jokes that everyone is interested enough to 
harvest lavender once. After that they're like we're good, I am done, no 
desire to do that again. So that’s why I think it's boring, I do it every year 
for days and days and days. So, I think you're right, it’s novel for 
someone who has never been exposed to it but when you're exposed to it 
all the time, you're like alright this is boring lets go inside now.  
R: So, do you think that guides your decision process to not post 
materials about that because you think it’s mundane?  
I: Yeah probably. I just don’t have that eye. Idk we used to have this 
marketing director from southern CA that used to be like oh that's so 
cool and get a picture. For me I am like oh my god I got up at 5 am had 
coffee and a donut, didn't shower, and now I am gonna work till 3. I just 
don’t think that’s exciting, but like you're right, it is exciting, but when 
you've done it for so long it's just like ehhhhhh ok.  
 
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Quickly, there is no harvest content on their Instagram page, so that is a 
misleading claim. To summarize, Interviewee A claims that these realities of farming 
are mundane and of no interest to consumers without verifying those beliefs through 
testing and tracking engagement metrics of likes, comments, and shares. I too would 
share the assumption that less people would be interested in that stuff, however, I do 
also think that a portion of consumers would be. I also found it significant that during 
much of our time together, interviewee A repeatedly complained about how little people 
understand about agriculture because they as consumers are spatially disconnected from 
it. Despite these issues, they chose not to use Instagram as an opportunity to better 
educate people. In retrospect, I could have asked why they didn’t see Instagram as a 
possible venue for education, but they did make sure to emphasize they seek to educate 
people about agricultural production while they visit the enterprise.  
Lastly, Interviewee A does not view this lack of representation as a social justice 
issue. They purely make these decisions centered around their personal experiences of 
the farm as a white manager poised to continue the family legacy. Their perspective 
alone is informing media decisions. This pattern will continue as we examine 
interviewees C and D. Here is my conversation with interviewee C: 
 
R: ….. Why don't they show a lot of the work and manual labor that goes 
into farming? 
I: I don’t know why they do that. You know pears right now are a really 
favorite object of artists cause they're really pretty with all the colors that 
they can get. So you see a lot of pear art, but yeah you don't see all the 
workers who do all the work and understand how it actually happens. I 
don't know why that happened, but you know if you've been to Hood 
River recently by diamond fruit, they have big murals on their cold 
storages of the people that are actually… you know…. The work….. The 
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worker bees that are out in the orchard actually doing the work and we 
couldn't do this without them. 
R: I did see the mural. Why do you think the person curating the media 
made that decision? Is it because tourists are uninterested? Is there a 
particular reason why it gets presented that way? 
I: Well I think sometimes people want to remain anonymous and not 
have their face plastered all over social media. I think that's some of it. 
Not shyness, but not wanting to be a movie star of the orchard.  
R: I agree with that in regards to specific people, but generally why do 
you think labor is not shown? 
I: It’s ummm a cultural thing. Everybody knows it happened, but you 
don't want to know about it. You know you go to the hospital and you 
tend to thank the doctor more than the nurse sometimes, and the nurse is 
the one who does all the work. 
R: I am a dinner server, and I think a lot about that with the chefs in the 
kitchen. 
I: Yeah. 
 
Interviewee C holds an interesting viewpoint. Later, we will see through other 
interviews that it's misleading to say that everybody knows Latinx farmworkers are 
doing the manual labor in horticultural operations. I suspect they hold that viewpoint 
given their long history in that occupation and positionality. I have no doubt that most 
people who work in farms, and several locals, especially Latinx locals, know that just 
because we don't see farmworkers, doesn't mean they don’t exist. Their citation of the 
mural is also fascinating, which I see as a step in the right direction. However, I had 
asked them about their social media representation and in response, they chose to shift 
the conversation to local artwork they have no influence over. It’s worth noting that 
interviewee two has never been on Instagram and their tasting room manager handles 
the enterprises social media presence. 
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Figure 8 Odell Farm Mural 
 
Located on the side of a fruit packing facility, the mural emphasizes the many different 
crops and ethnic identities tied to farm work in the valley. 
Their explanation of the cause being “a cultural thing” is a valid and important 
interpretation to dissect. The job of a farmworker lacks status for a couple of reasons. 
First, it's conceptualized as centralized around physical rather than emotional or 
intellectual labor. All jobs require a mixture of the three and many farmworkers have 
valuable intellectual expertise and emotional resilience, but our society tends to focus 
on the physical part and thus devalue the job position. Second, like the example 
provided by the interviewee, jobs associated with specific minority characteristics, such 
as female nurses vs male doctors, have been historically devalued which informs 
present understandings of the job positions. Korsunsky (2020) pointed out that Oregon’s 
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landholding farmers have historically portrayed themselves as aristocrats that passively 
accumulate wealth from the fertility of the land, often ignoring the labor going into it (p. 
426). Hutchinson (2013) also demonstrated how advertising has hidden labor (p. 974-
980). Not only is farmworker labor undervalued by culture, but its existence is also 
barely recognized.  
However, let’s not forget everyone has the power and responsibility of creating 
and reenacting culture every day. Interviewee C’s answer positions the lack of Latinx 
representation as if everyone else decided to do that. This is true on some level, and 
they alone can’t solve the problem, however everyone can do more to make incremental 
changes to the ways they enact culture. Interviewee C’s explanation conveyed an 
acknowledgement that this cultural practice overemphasizing white farmers is wrong, 
but they did not reflect their contributions to that system. It raises the question how 
could they make the changes necessary to credit farm workers more? Again, another 
question I wish I had asked, but we will talk more about that in the conclusion. In their 
response, interviewee D presented not showing farm work in digital media as a simple 
technical marketing decision: 
R: … I am curious why do you think there is not a whole lot of media 
out there highlighting the labor aspect of agritourism? 
I: I think you get a little bit of it when it comes time for harvest and 
things. Like, you’ll get a lot of pictures and videos of the crush and the 
juice flowing and of the barreling process. When it comes down to it, I 
think it’s just not as romantic as uhh the you know beautiful landscapes, 
finished bottles, or people cheers-ing at the table. You know, mostly the 
social media accounts are there to kind of drum up business and sell the 
final product. I think you don't necessarily see the harvest and you know 
the spraying and agricultural part because it's not umm necessarily 
visually appealing or even as important to your average customer you're 
trying to go after. 
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There’s actually I think, Wine Enthusiast is doing a special right 
now where they hired a photographer to go around to different wineries 
and capture every aspect of the wine industry and they're posting a photo 
series of basically the people doing just that the agricultural part, the 
crush part, the cellar part. Trying to do what you’re talking about and 
give people a look behind the scenes and all the little different nuances 
that go into the vine to harvest, and grape to wine, and wine to glass, and 
into a person's hand.  
I think for your typical winery or tasting room, their social media 
accounts are there to sell the experience, sell the product, and that's why 
you see those shots of the tasting rooms, of the landscapes, the views, the 
bottles, people enjoying themselves on the patio because that’s what 
they're trying to convey more so than kind of the overall agricultural part 
of things. 
R: Would it be correct to articulate that you don't think people would be 
interested in those things? 
I: I think some people would be interested but your casual person that 
you're trying to market to in that sector probably wouldn't be interested 
in it, but umm. I do think it is a place where some people are definitely 
interested. As I said when you get to harvest you see a lot more people 
posting photos that are of the actual physical harvest at the end and the 
crush, kind of the pressing of the wine, the bottling process and stuff like 
that. But just your random May day where they're out there spraying the 
vines or whatever or just kind of tending to things, you don't want to see 
as much I don’t think that’s as interesting to people but the end result the 
harvest that’s umm I think you do see you will see a lot of things pop up 
on social media whether it just be simple stories or full on posts of the 
actual physical harvest will pop up more and more here. I say start 
looking at winery accounts in the next 2-6 weeks and you'll see a lot 
more of that stuff come into play.  
R: I don't know. I still see that as kind of a final product thing. You're 
right, they've still got to go through the fermentation, but the grapes all 
collected and going into the crusher still seems kind of like it’s skipping 
over the actual agricultural process. 
I: yeah it definitely is for sure. Like I said, most wineries are using their 
accounts to sell the wine less so the farming aspect, so that's why I think 
you see that get glazed over a little bit. People want to see the exciting 
stuff: the harvest, the crush, the bottling, and what they can expect when 
they get to the winery as far as scenery and tasting rooms things like that. 
I do think the agricultural part does get swept under the rug a little bit.  
R: I am curious, it sounds like you have like a pretty well-founded belief 
here and rationale. I am curious what experiences have informed that? 
I: As far as what? 
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R: You seem to have a pretty strong idea that people will not be 
interested in the agricultural part and that it's not a good marketing 
strategy. I am curious if this is an assumption, or a well-tested and 
verified belief that you have found through experiences? 
I: I guess kind of in the middle. A bit of an assumption, I haven't actually 
gone out and taken videos and pictures of our day-to-day farm work and 
things and posted it and seen what the results would be. I just think you 
know visually it's not as appealing as kind of the you know just like 
a  watching some guys like you know cut you know tendrils off the vines 
as they go kind of isn't visually appealing online as opposed to you know 
a full cluster of red grapes or you know a view of the valley down the 
way or even of just of the actual harvest and finished product grapes 
going into a crusher. I just think that’s kind of where we focus our 
attention as far as things go, but it's not something I have physically 
tested myself or kind of tried to theory out. I’ll have to try it one of these 
years and get you a real case study on it, but yeah definitely more of an 
assumption of what I think I find visually appealing and what I think our 
clientele will find visually appealing. 
 
The interviewee painted a dichotomy in their response. There’s the beautiful 
side of agriculture such as views of the vineyard and bushels of red grapes. Then there’s 
the “less romantic” side of agriculture such as laying vines, pruning, and pesticide 
application. This is an unhelpful and limited view. I could be moved to agree that it’s 
harder to strike a balance between representing labor and aestheticizing it. However, the 
suggestion that a business must choose one over the other is wrong. They literally cited 
Wine Magazine as an example. I don’t know what the magazine issue will look like, 
and I would certainly bet it’s not going to expose some of the worst aspects of 
agricultural farm work, but it can still acknowledge labor contributions!! Now, this is a 
tricky balance. I wouldn’t want anyone to sugar coat farmworker labor conditions. 
However, I do think that there is a dignified way to present the work and the people 
who do it. 
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Lastly, we have interviewee B, which as you might recall from table 4, comes 
from a family of farmworkers. As you can imagine, our conversation went a bit 
differently. First, media representations of farmworker working and living conditions 
came up naturally: 
 R: This question might not feel like a new question, but are there any significant 
differences between the image of a farm that gets shown to consumers versus the way it 
actually functions? 
I: yeah probably. I feel like they glam it up so much like the working 
conditions are not… the best, even though they say they are. My mom 
has to make sure, because she’s a sorter and she also does some of the 
pruning and planting fruit trees. After a day of work, she's knocked out. 
Like she is done. Being in that sorting room with the big fluorescent 
lights it gets really warm in there and there in this little room and when 
they open up you're going into the straight cold and you can get really 
sick from that so she wears big glasses so she can’t get air in her eyes.  
R: I noticed you said they do glamorize it, and I am curious exactly how? 
I: I just feel like whenever I see people talk about agriculture or like 
maybe like in movies or when people are talking about on the news or 
whatever. They make it seem like yes, it’s heavy work but they never 
really go like too far into detail about it. I don’t know how to explain it, 
but I don't know. It’s just. I’ve lived in the orchard for so long that I am 
able to pick up on those things that people normally wouldn’t pick up 
on.  
R: Can you think of any demonstrative examples? Like has advertising 
portrayed something like housing differently, health, pay, access to 
sanitation? 
I: I think all of those are good. Like I’ve been living in the housing 
forever. Uhhh definitely not up to date on like everything, but people are 
definitely trying to get on top of that which is really nice but also very 
very very sad it’s taking them so long to update everything.  
 
After this exchange, the interviewee went on to explain how they optimistically 
hope the owners of the enterprise will begin to improve working conditions, housing 
accommodations, and wages with increased agritourism revenue. I also hope for such an 
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outcome, but I am skeptical given these issues are typically conceptualized as added, 
unnecessary costs for farm owners. In the conclusion I will speak to the limits of 
agritourism social media representation. I would posit these are one of them. First, 
obviously farms are unlikely to expose their internal dysfunction and structural 
violence. Even if farms were to ignore those issues and present media that 
acknowledges the importance of farmworkers to the agritourism business, I don’t think 
more adequate social media coverage will on its own lead to just working conditions, 
wages, and housing. I do think it's an important step forward, but not a cure all. Unions 
and greater social pressure for effective government oversight are unlikely to be 
replaced by honest media. Later in our interview, I asked: 
R: Why don't they show a lot of the work and manual labor that goes into 
farming? 
I: It is so funny that you bring it up cause they did a post yesterday about 
the bartlett pears and the guy who was driving the forklift was not a 
Latinx worker and I am pretty sure it was someone who was white. I 
couldn't make out who exactly it was. Yes. Super funny. 
R: Why do you think they made that decision? 
I: Oh gosh like come on. People know that brown people are picking 
their fruit, but They don't really wanna like know like brown people are 
picking my fruit.  
R: Is it the owner's discomfort? 
I: Oh no it's definitely the peoples’. 
R: like for tourists? To make it easier for them without the discomfort. 
I: yeah. Yeah. yeah. Cause like how I was saying earlier, when I tell 
people everything is picked by hand, they immediately think oh my gosh 
the workers…. Cause I don’t think they would be ok leaving after they 
saw the people working like they usually do. I mean people are 
exhausted after picking a little bucket and I mean imagine like picking 
by the bin for hours, cause you get paid by the bin not the hour. It’s 
usually about 40 lbs and it's big on your shoulders and back and you're 
climbing up and down 12-foot ladders trying to make the days’ worth of 
however much you do.  
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 Interviewee B explicitly called out how the enterprise whitewashed their media 
posts. I went and confirmed their claim. Indeed, the post they mentioned shows a white 
man on a tractor and suggests they are out in the field doing maintenance work on fruit 
plants. Moreover, Interviewee B has a well-founded understanding that if enterprises 
were honest about working conditions for farmworkers, they would be hard pressed to 
find an abundance of consumers that are willing to financially support such practices.   
Interviewees A & D also suggested a similar understanding but emphasized that 
consumers should not be burdened or bored by the day-to-day chores of the farm. 
Interviewee C posited these realities as expected and normal. However, I would suspect 
they aren’t on the same page as interviewee B. Interviewee B has a much more personal 
experience with watching their parents, family, and friends endure the consequences of 
farmworker living conditions. They have not witnessed the farm in the same way as the 
other interviewees and have had a very different lived experience. Thus, representing 
Latinx labor likely means something more comprehensive to them than what I think 
interviewees A & D understood from my question.  
Experiences are individual and relative, so a monolith isn’t helpful here, but 
there is a stark contrast to these different race and class positions that ought to be 
considered. These sharp jumps in positionality surely inform these interviewees’ 
perspectives and understanding of what I asked them to talk and think about when it 
comes to representing farm work on social media. While interviewee A & D both have 
some experience with enduring labor, they are both white, and do not deal with the 
same realities as documented or undocumented Latinx farmworkers. They have more 
power to say no to performing the labor, better incomes, and more forceful social 
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statuses. To them, field work is uncomfortable, cumbersome, and boring. Based on 
reading, and not my own experiences, I suspect that Latinx Farmworker experiences fall 
more along the lines of backbreaking, risky, hazardous, demoralizing, and occasionally 
deadly (Holmes, 2013). 
 I wonder how this informed the way people chose to respond in interviews. 
Interviewees A & D both suggested consumers would find that content boring because 
they find that work boring. Interviewee B suggested that consumers would find that 
content horrific perhaps because they find that work horrific. Interviewee C thought this 
pattern is to be expected but did not relate it to the power of different identities to make 
their perspective heard, understood, and valued by the collective. 
Other Notable Interview Findings 
There are three additional noteworthy results from interviews to elaborate on 
before we dive into more media content: Familial inheritance, opportunities of 
agritourism for workers, and validation of choses materials for analysis.  
One, as hinted at in the literature review, agritourism is a key financial asset for 
families to be able to hire more family members and maintain continuity of a “family 
farm” in the lineage. Interviewee C inherited their position from their father, and 
directly credited agritourism success as the reason they could hire a descendant family 
member and pass the business to him in the next generation:  
“I was thinking as we closed here, I wouldn't really mention numbers but 
umm, so we have [acres of crop type] and with all the production 
facilities and all the [product] that we make, the two businesses are 
separate corporations, and they are about equal in gross revenue every 
year. So, [acres of crop type] and the [acres of crop type] and tasting 
room both have about the same annual revenue. We have grown that part 
of the business dramatically. My [descendant family member] now 
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works for me and he's been here about [over a decade], and this has 
enabled my generation to pass this onto the next generation. With only 
the [crop type], it wasn't enough to bring anyone in until I keeled over 
dead, and someone had to come in.” 
 
In a similar vein, interviewee A expressed: 
“So, I started in the [crop type] farm business when I was in high school. 
It was my summer job. So, I worked the summer before my freshman 
year all the way up until my freshman year in college, and then I left for 
college and when covid hit my mom said she needed help to work on it 
as covid had been kinda a horrible thing. So, I said Yes! What started out 
as two weeks of me coming home to help turned into 3 months which 
turned into 6 months and now, I have been here for over a year now. So 
how long have I been in it? A long time.”  
 
When I asked interviewee A if they intended on continuing to work on the farm, 
they responded: “I’m carrying out a legacy, I guess. Like I think there is a lot of 
satisfaction in doing that. Being able to tell people I am a fifth-generation farmer.” 
Notably, they were the only interviewee to directly express agritourism benefits outside 
of finances. They were ecstatic about how agritourism allowed an opportunity to better 
educate people on how food is produced, preserve rural cultural heritage, provide a 
vendor location to local artists, and more. 
Interviewee D also started out working as a service staff at their father’s 
agritourism business. Slowly they worked their way up to managing employees, 
finances, and other business matters. They also expressed the desire to keep working in 
the industry and eventually takeover. Interviewee B does not come from the same 
privileged background as the others. Their grandparents were Braceros, and their 
parents immigrated in the 90s to Hood River and have found year-round positions as 
farmworkers. The interviewee had worked the agritourism portion of the same business 
88 
 
 
for several years, and for now returns every summer to do so. Their history and 
expertise merited an interview, and I was especially grateful to have their perspective. 
While they were not poised to inherit a business, they did mention that the current 
owners had recently inherited the family business and intended to increase their 
agritourism investments due to its financial success. 
Now, let’s venture a bit into the second topic of interview results and examine 
how interviewees positioned benefits of agritourism regarding employees. I didn’t ask 
any direct questions on this topic, but it came up with three out of four of them. When I 
asked Interviewee A why they wanted to continue working in agritourism, they 
expressed that they enjoyed how the farm “brings people together,” their role helping 
high schoolers with their first job (as front of house service staff) and helping facilitate 
their upward mobility up to college, providing a location for other local vendors to sell 
goods, and incorporating the farm as a venue for developing career skills with the local 
high school’s teachers. These examples show how agritourism can be leveraged to 
benefit rural communities, or at least certain members such as those who already have a 
small business and can sell goods on the farm, entry level service work for high 
schoolers to have job exposure and creating relationships with teachers to facilitate local 
educational and career development curriculum.  
I found it noteworthy how excited Interviewee A was about helping high 
schoolers with upward mobility but did not mention any opportunities for their more 
permanent, already existing farmworkers. I was led to believe they did not have direct 
oversight over the enterprise's farmworkers, which they referred to as “the three ladies”. 
So, it’s not wholly their decision on how to invest in them and treat them. Nonetheless, 
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I found the divergent words and understanding of how their different employees fit in 
and potentially benefit from the business as indicative of the interviewees perceptions of 
possible opportunities upward mobility for certain people in the industry.  
Interestingly, interviewee C positioned workers as benefiting from their 
agritourism model through having a longer working season. By adding wine grapes to 
their crop profile, they extended their growing season and expanded the seasonal 
workload for pruning, thinning, and harvesting. Grapes are treated with these methods 
in succession after their other crops. In their words “it gets a longer season for our 
workers, and the grapes are a totally different experience.” More consistent employment 
is without a doubt an important benefit for workers, which is a win-win for the farm 
owner and farmworkers, however, I want to reinforce that farmworkers merit many 
other improvements to their lives. Not to mention it’s a far larger win for the farm 
owner, who gets to decide how to spend all the extra revenue from their agritourism 
business. Interviewee D mentioned they had one farmworker who had been working for 
their business since its conception, and we didn’t broach this topic. Their business is 
much more centered around tourism than agricultural production, and they import the 
majority of their grapes to make wine with. S 
This can be contrasted with interviewee B, who wanted to focus on how the 
farm they worked for could treat their Latinx farmworkers better. They criticized the 
living conditions provided by employers as “definitely not up to date”, working 
conditions as exhausting and physiologically uncomfortable/ harmful, a lack of an end-
of-season bonus, and bare minimum piece rate wages. They emphasized that 
agritourism activities like U-pick and special events were bringing in a lot of revenue, 
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and optimistically hoped the owners would leverage that funding to help improve farm 
workers' jobs and living conditions. 
The third important result from interviews is the confirmed validity of 
Instagram, websites, and the Hood River Fruit Loop brochure as important pieces of 
media to attract consumers. Interviewees A, B, and C all named the brochure as their 
first answer to the question “what do you think draws tourists specifically to your 
farm?”. Interviewee D named reputation/ word of mouth followed by the Fruit Loop 
Brochure. Interviewee A spent a lot of time referring to the importance of Instagram, 
especially for attracting younger audiences. Interviewee C had never once been on 
Instagram but mentioned that their manager for the agritourism side of business thought 
it was important and ran the business’s account. Interviewee B expressed they thought 
the new business owners were smart to start investing in creating Instagram and 
suggested it had probably increased business for them over 2019, 2020, and 2021. 
Interviewee D pegged it as the third biggest draw after word of mouth and the Fruit 
Loop. 
Communicating Agritourism  
Originally, I toyed with the idea of terming this section privileged 
communication because someone has the extraordinary privilege of being able to detach 
the marketing scheme of an apple from its production and harvesting practices. 
Hutchison (2013) points this out quite clearly with the example of the Sun-Maid Raisin 
maiden. We all know the iconography of the white maiden dressed up in a white shirt 
and red bonnet. The grapes must have effortlessly fell into her basket so that her white 
shirt didn’t touch the soil of the earth! This is not to mention the whitewashing and 
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sexualization of such advertisement icons. It’s not an isolated example, and many other 
fruit companies used women as an advertisement icon, reminiscent of Eve from the 
Garden of Eden (Hutchison, 2013, p. 977-980)  
I ended up terming this section communicating agritourism, however, I will 
continue to elaborate on why class privilege is important to consider when interpreting 
these materials. Here, farmers, or their marketing person(s), show consumers what type 
of products they should expect to be able to purchase as well as how and when to enjoy 
them. The code advertising agricultural products captured instances in which businesses 
emphasized farm produce (n=322, 24.4% of content). While none of the Instagram 
footage directly advertising fruit went as far as Sun Maiden, we can examine how fruit 
is advertised without touching on the harvesting practices: 
1. “Finally we have some fresh Oregon Strawberries! We have flats, half 
flats, and pints available!” 
2. “The crips, delicious apples and melt-in-your mouth pears are signaling 
the arrival of Fall on the horizon! Isn't it funny how these fruits have 
become such a clear indicator of before the weather transitions 
sometimes? Before you know it, we'll be burning apple cider scented 
candles and crunching leaves underfoot. Until then, why not start baking 
or canning some of the yummy fruits we've got??” 
3. “It’s officially Summer so head to our link in bio to get some Healthy & 
Fresh Summer Fruit inspo!” 
 
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Figure 9 Photos Coded Advertising Agricultural Products 
 
Alas, much of the fruit hasn't left the bush! Some of this can be explained by the 
fact many enterprises engage with U-pick as an agritourism draw. There are a couple 
businesses that exclusively do U-pick, and thus perhaps likely don’t rely on 
farmworkers for harvest, however the majority of agritourism operations merge both 
traditional production and U-pick together or don’t do U-pick at all. Some sections are 
roped off for tourists, while the farm still harvests a substantial amount of fruit with 
Latinx labor, which can then be sold in a fruit stand, or manufactured into a different 
product. Not everyone thinks picking fruit in 80+ degrees is a fun activity, and many 
prefer the fruits of labor over the actual labor. In fact, Interviewee B shed some light on 
this from their experiences with talking to customers: 
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“I feel like in general, it's really sad, but tourists don’t really know a 
whole lot about how agriculture- like how it works. It’s a stupid question 
but at the same time it’s really frustrating. They are always asking: how 
the fruit is picked? Like do we have special machines to pick it and 
stuff? And I am always like, it’s handpicked. And the weather right now, 
there are workers there in 100-degree weather picking all your fruit, and 
they do not know that. So, a lot of them walked out with a greater 
appreciation for that. I wish that people would know that a whole lot 
more.” 
 
What these lines don’t capture is the way the interviewees' voice dropped into a 
solemn mixture of frustration and sadness. Most consumers have the conceptualization 
that U-pick is a fun activity that people do on vacation with their kids, and they 
frequently misunderstand that people do this work for 40 hours, if not more, a week in 
more hazardous conditions. Returning to the main point, when businesses advertise 
their agricultural products, they don’t document the labor and instead emphasize 
wholesome origins on the tree before harvest, or what it looks like when it's available to 
the consumer at a farmstand neatly stacked into a bin. Even if some of this is done to 
emphasize the fact that fruit is on the bush and ready to be picked by a tourist, we know 
most fruit is not picked by tourists. Thus, this photography practice does more to 
obscure farmworker labor than it does to portray an honest reality of agritourism 
enterprises.  
Additionally, most of these businesses distribute manufactured products that rely 
on cheap agricultural inputs. The code advertising site manufactured products referred 
to content selling products produced and sold by the agritourism facility requiring some 
sort of processing. This was the most frequent code for Instagram content with 452 total 
instances comprising 34.2% of the total sample. Some of the raw ingredients are 
sourced from onsite, while much more of it comes from the Willamette Valley, 
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Columbia Valley, and all over the world. Tourism demand exceeding local supply for 
certain products was a frequent subject of my off-the-record discussions with locals in 
the industry. I also found out through an interview that several agritourism businesses 
were competing among each other to purchase cherries to resell under their business 
name to tourists. The interviewee claimed one of them went as far as to buy non-organic 
cherries from one business and sell them as organic under their name. 
A substantial amount of the food is untraceable with my resources in terms of its 
origins. One of the obvious dissonances I witnessed happened while sitting on one farm 
in my sample that offered “farm fresh” food. I watched a Franz Bread delivery truck 
drop off hamburger buns and bread for their burgers and sandwiches. A low bar for 
“farm fresh” huh? This isn’t to mention they couldn’t possibly be raising all the cattle, 
pigs, and chickens for their food cart.  
That enterprise also offered wines and ciders that they did not have the capacity 
to produce themselves, which is not unusual from my understanding of other businesses 
in the region. I also found out they use a different farm’s manufacturing facility to bottle 
and produce it. We will examine more of these dissonances later, but someone had to 
harvest all the wine grapes, apples, blueberries, raspberries, pears, and much more for 
their wines and ciders. I can tell you it wasn’t a tourist; they were busy getting buzzed 
and eating pizza while taking in the wonderful view of Mount Hood.  
95 
 
 
Figure 10 Photos Coded Advertising Site Manufactured Products 
 
Many of these products contain ingredients that can’t be produced by a farm in 
Hood River. Limes and cilantro for tacos or jalapenos for cheesy bread aren’t grown in 
the PNW. The grapes for some featured wines can’t grow in the Hood River Valley, and 
the Gonzales Berry Farm strawberries used to produce ice cream on site, is based in the 
Willamette Valley. I still coded these items as advertising site manufactured products 
because I was concerned with how my assumptions about production logistics could 
influence the results, so I stuck with using the code advertising off-site manufactured 
products (n=97, 7.4%) for specific instances in which I could confirm the facility buys 
already manufactured items from another business or produces it outside of Hood River: 
1. “So excited about these beautiful chocolates from @bssweetshoodriver” 
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2. “Durant Olive Oils add the perfect touch to any dish! One of our favorite 
recipes to take home and cook is Irish Mashed Potatoes. These potatoes 
are absolutely decadent and finish perfectly with a splash of olive oil and 
a dash of finishing salt!” 
3. “Pearl’s Place blend GRANOLA Created by @eastforkbakingco just for 
Pear’s! We have 2 sizes of bags & thought they would be PERFECT 
stocking stuffers!!” 
 
Figure 11 Photos Coded Advertising Off-site Manufactured Products 5  
 
Many farms used their business, brand and image to sell products from other 
enterprises. Tillamook Cheese is based in Tillamook, Oregon. Durant Olive Oil Mill in 
Dayton, Oregon, Royal Riverside near Albany, Oregon, and Steele Family Farm is 
based all the way in Oklahoma City! Buying these products and marking them up 
constitutes retail practices. Hood River’s agritourism enterprises can sell them under the 
highly elastic “local” label or as an extension of their business name despite their 
97 
 
 
production location. This merits a closer critique on how helpful agritourism can be for 
farmers. If Tillamook Cheese among other companies rely on purchasing cheap 
agricultural inputs, aren't farmers financially supporting food distribution oligopsonies 
by reselling their products? Will this ultimately help small scale farmers, or is it fueling 
one of the causes of their disappearance? Is agritourism creating another set of winners 
and losers? This isn’t to mention all the sugar, oils, meat, and many other input 
ingredients required to make site manufactured products. 
On another note, one interviewee detailed how the owners of an enterprise were 
friends with one of these offsite businesses and decided to sell their products at their 
agritourism business. While hardly unexpected or anomalous, this illustrates how 
business owners can collaborate within class lines to benefit each other and use 
agrarianism marketing to enrich them both. What a lucrative deal and exchange! These 
networks and relationships are valuable and should not be overlooked when 
conceptualizing the wealth of agritourism farmers.  
All these pictures emphasize the final agricultural and/ or the manufactured 
product itself rather than the process. There are some photos that occasionally touch on 
the growing stages of fruit, such as blossom season. However, those photos are more 
aimed at showing the natural beauty of an orchard than emphasizing the growing stages. 
This can be affirmed by the Hood River Fruit Loop Brochure, which has the frequently 
asked question “When are fruit tree blossoms the best?” Moreover, the photos don’t 
show pruning or winter maintenance, which are key manual labor processes for 
ensuring healthy blossoms and bountiful harvests. It’s safe to conclude these photos 
serve to emphasize the beauty of a farm, not the natural growing cycle of fruit.  
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One other production process that is very occasionally emphasized is the wine 
“crush” at the end of a harvest. After wine grapes have been plucked from the vines, 
they are all gathered and smashed into juice before the fermentation process begins. 
One of my interviewees cited it as evidence that Instagram does feature labor processes, 
but after some pushback on my part, they agreed that it doesn’t constitute actual labor. 
The forklift and machine crusher are doing the work and it’s occurring post-harvest, so 
it constitutes manufacturing, not agriculture. There are also a couple of pieces of 
footage featuring bottling lines, which require human labor to run it. Another 
interviewee detailed how the bottling line provided some year-round positions at their 
enterprise for Latinx workers, and how the workers were “sometimes spoiled” because 
the interviewee allowed them each a bottle of wine as a bonus. Again, this constitutes 
food processing. Additionally, no photos of bottling lines showed any workers, so yet 
again, the emphasis is on the technological machinery, not the people.  
The next two codes from Instagram are focused on encouraging efficient 
consumption of the above products by tourists. Customer Logistics (n=209, 15.8%) 
sought to inform customers what, when, and how to consume agricultural products in 
farming spaces:  
1. “Be a green, money saving machine by simply bringing us your growlers 
and growlettes (& their lids) to refill with your favorite [enterprise name] 
Hard Cider”  
2. “One. More. Day. We have cherries on their way & some exciting new 
products we can’t WAIT for you to see! Be on the lookout for a BIG 
reveal here on our socials in the next few days”.  
3. “Blueberries are joining the available for U-Pick List! We have 
raspberries, strawberries, & blueberries ready for U-Pick and we have 
fresh (picked this morning) cherries in our Fruit Stand. There’s nothing 
like a ripe, juicy, summer fruit to cool ya down. Open 10-7” 
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Figure 12 Photos Coded Customer Logistics 
 
Along a very similar vein, Holiday Commemoration (n=80, 6.1%) posts served 
the function of just wishing a happy holiday or signaling to consumers that the 
enterprise would be open during the holiday. Some went as far as to claim that people 
should celebrate the summertime holidays such as Mother’s Day, Memorial Day, the 
Fourth of July, etc. through agritourism. Example captions read along the lines of:   
1. “Celebrate the moms in your life this weekend with some hard cider!! 6 
flavors on tap all weekend @[enterprise name] and 4 flavors on tap 
Saturday at the PSU farmers market!”  
2. “Book your reservations now for the upcoming Memorial Day Weekend! 
We’d like to thank the brave men and women who have served our 
country with a complimentary tasting, and 10% off bottle purchases. 
Reservations can be made online at [website link]”. These would often 
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be paired with images that exalt holiday themes or fruits arranged in such 
a way that emphasize Holiday themes.  
3. “While we enjoy this Memorial Day with family and friends, let's be sure 
to take a moment to acknowledge those who made the ultimate sacrifice 
for our Country. Thank you for your service.” 
4. “Happy Father’s Day from our family to yours!” 
 
Some enterprises hosted special events like easter egg hunts or a Mother’s Day 
tea party in order to draw in extra consumers. Both Customer Logistics and Holiday 
Commemoration are privileged forms of communicating agritourism for two reasons. 
One, they are marketing strategies aimed at the same goals of increasing agritourism 
participation, which enterprises can then profit from, especially the special events. 
Second, these codes also decouple the final agricultural and manufactured products 
from their production processes. Just like Sun Maid uses the clean, white maiden to 
push its dried grapes, they could also use US holidays as reasons to increase raisin 
consumption or communicate to customers about an upcoming sale through customer 
logistics. 
  
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Figure 13 Photos Coded Holiday Commemoration  
 
The last content item under communicating agritourism, geography and terroir, 
is present in 60% (n=15) of enterprise websites. It emphasizes the inherent qualities of 
place that make a product exceptional. This is most common for wine, hence the use of 
the term terroir, which posits that the flavor and structure of a wine is directly 
expressive of a vineyard's physical geographic characteristics. Soil qualities, mineral 
content, elevation, aspect, climate, irrigation practices, and much more impact wine 
grapes, and consequently how they will taste after fermentation. Thus, many wineries 
emphasize these qualities in relation to their viniculture: 
 
“Our estate is located in the lower Hood River Valley, our vines grow 
atop the gravely soil of the Rockford Reach and feed on the ancient 
waters of Mt. Hood’s Eliot Glacier, which produce a flinty crispness 
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always high in minerals and deep in flavor for our grapes. The Columbia 
Gorge, the ultimate signature of a mighty river, is home to the ridge and 
valley topography created by some millennia of volcanic activity. The 
resulting basalt flows, rich soil and microclimates have rendered an 
outstanding venue for world class vineyards from which we forge our 
own history of award winning wines.” 
  
Very occasionally farms that weren’t winery operations emphasized geography 
and terroir themes by extolling the merits of having access to glacial streams fed by the 
ice of Mount Hood, or the valley’s superior volcanic soil:  
“The fertile soils found at the base of Mt. Hood and rarified, glacier-fed 
water sources create a unique growing environment allowing us to offer 
over 150 distinct varieties of apples, pears, asian pears, cherries and 
stone fruit.”  
 
These are privileged forms of communicating agritourism because owning 
private property is an extremely valuable resource and form of wealth. It can be handed 
down through generations as an inheritance. In fact, a handful of farms in the valley 
proudly refer to themselves as century farms because their land deeds have been handed 
down through a single familial lineage for at least a century. These instances of century 
farms were not coded as Geography and Terroir, but rather Heritage, which will be 
detailed later.  
It's a privilege to be able to extoll the merits of one’s private land, and it is once 
again a way of distracting from how fruit is produced by focusing on where it’s 
produced. No enterprise would say “and we can offer you this bottle of wine at an 
affordable price because we hire undocumented labor to maintain the vineyards on the 
slopes of Mount Hood”. No enterprises highlights who maintains plants, and how the 
person's qualifications or expertise with fruit trees enhance a consumer experience, 
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although, I did see some content emphasizing that each vine gets attention from human 
hands which contribute to their quality products:  
“The [family last name] recognize that most of the quality in the glass 
happens in the vineyard.  Management of the vineyard is meticulous, 
with extra time spent to adjust to challenging growing conditions when 
they occur.  We do not cut corners and will pick quality over quantity 
every time. Harvest is all done by hand, and each bin of grapes is hand 
inspected and sorted. Likewise, in the winery, we maintain a soft touch, 
allowing the fruit to shine.” 
 
 Some might say this shows acknowledgement of labor. However, they did not 
say who does this, which could lead someone to think the family themselves do it. This 
type of rhetoric serves to reproduce the cultural status of the family farm. Additionally, 
later we are going to examine how the code happy employees makes owners and service 
workers visible by naming them and their lifestyle or hobbies and voicing how 
important that employee is to the business. Communicating agritourism captures media 
that is curated and monitored by individuals in advantageous socio-economic positions, 
and the forms of communication deliberately leave out industry dependence on 
precarious labor regimes while working to attract a tourist consumer base.  
Selling Agritourism  
So far, we know what products Hood River agritourism enterprises offer as well 
as how and when to consume them, but we haven't detailed why visiting a farm 
enhances the experience of consumption in a way that your local grocer can’t. 
Agritourism enterprises have a varying combination of agricultural production, retail, 
and hospitality. The codes Farm Animals, Natural Beauty, Outdoor Consumption, 
Smiling Customers, Happy Employees, Aesthetics & Experience, and Hedonism & 
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Relaxation all capture the techniques enterprise media uses in order to demonstrate the 
value of agritourism to potential tourists. Some of these codes emphasize the experience 
of the consumer, which is substantially different than a farmworker’s albeit both 
occurring at the same spatial location. Money talks. A lot. It incentivizes farmers to 
create shaded and cool spaces for tourists to not overheat, invest in landscaping, and 
draw attention to dining in the scenic beauty of the region with the best of service staff a 
request away from providing a more comfortable experience.  
First off are Farm Animals. This wasn’t an enormously abundant code (n=34, 
2.6%), but nonetheless an important factor for attracting a subset of consumers to a farm 
who wanted to be able to see, pet, and feed animals as part of their experience. Usually, 
captions included information about the animal and a ploy to come buy something 
while seeing it:  
1. “The Alpacas got shorn yesterday, and got some fun hair cuts! They are 
much happier without their heavy coats in these hot temps. Come visit us 
and sip your favorite [enterprise name] wine and see the new looks!”  
Sometimes the animals were just a merit on their own:  
2. “We have some new additions to the farm! THIRTEEN baby goats were 
born this week!!! Swipe for lots of cuteness!”  
Animals are a huge draw for humans, especially for urban dwellers that comprise most 
tourists. They do not experience seeing these types of animals in their everyday life. 
This turns feeding or petting these fluffy creatures into a novel experience that tourists 
would normally find difficult to access in their typical environment. It’s also 
noteworthy all the animals are not ones we are accustomed to seeing in industrialized 
feedlots such as cattle or chickens. The presence of llamas, alpacas, goats, dogs, and 
cats enhances the authenticity and feeling of the farm and agricultural experience.  
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Figure 14 Photos Coded Farm Animals 
 
This code serves as a nice teaser to how enterprises sell agritourism and 
construct the tone of their space for tourists. Farms are magical according to Instagram. 
A place where we relax, gather with friends and family, and of course pet adorable 
animals.  
The farm aesthetic doesn’t end with cute fuzzy animals. It’s just the beginning, 
especially with Hood River’s location within the Columbia River Gorge, nestled 
between two snowcapped volcanoes, Hood in Oregon, and Adams in Washington. The 
Hood Rivers’ multiple forks of streams slowly eroded the surrounding Cascade 
mountains into a valley over the course of thousands of years, which creates a beautiful 
valley floor of orchards surrounded by mountains covered in temperate rainforests. Add 
picturesque fruit blossoms, seasonal flowers, and stunning fall foliage, and you have the 
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perfect environment for hospitality with a view and a backdrop for the tourist photos 
and later posts to social media to show their friends. As one interviewee put it: 
“There is a strong Instagram culture, so I am trying to make my farm 
instagram-able regardless of the time of year. A lot of people come in 
just for that photo. Even if there’s not the U-pick they just come in here 
like I gotta get that photo for Instagram. I am trying to create other draws 
that cater to the current culture.” 
 
They went on to detail how the farms aesthetic was so important to peak tourist 
season, that they had made the decision to invest in planting various kinds of flowers 
around their agritourism space, so something was always in bloom for peoples’ photos 
and experiences. This could be likened to the presence of farm animals, which also help 
the farms aesthetic appearance. These agritourism spaces need to present in a certain 
way for tourist consumption. It’s no wonder farms push the ability to witness natural 
beauty and dine outdoors at their enterprises so much. It’s a key demand for 
consumers. The Instagram code natural beauty had the second highest count at 324 
instances or 24.6 % of content. 
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Figure 15 Photos Coded Natural Beauty 
 
This push to highlight stunning vistas and perfect photo backdrops extends to 
websites as well. The code aesthetics (n=12, 48%) captured instances in which an 
enterprise sought to position these possibilities to tourists. Some of them are a bit more 
subtle and focus on the scenery itself:  
1. "Tucked deep in our family’s pear farm, you’ll find a lush secret garden 
with a meadow-like wedding lawn and reception barn with views of the 
scenic Hood River Valley’s pear orchards, snow capped Mt. Hood and 
Mt. Adams, and the East Hills"  
2. “ Our garden is full of gorgeous blooms throughout the season including 
lavender, hydrangeas, roses, hollyhocks and hops, with cafe string lights 
overhead.” 
Other quotes emphasize the direct opportunity for photography:  
3. “A casual atmosphere that doesn't require a reservation or dress code, 
The [enterprise] is proud to provide artisanal farm fresh food from the 
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Food Cart, award winning Hard Ciders & Wines and to top off your 
visit, enjoy your afternoon in the beautifully maintained fields of U-Pick 
Fruits and Flowers with photo opportunities at every turn.” 
 
Photography and Instagram are lucrative for agritourism businesses in a couple 
of regards. It’s no question people enjoy seeing natural beauty, aesthetic landscape 
architecture, and enjoying the outdoors. These are powerful incentives for tourists on 
their own and comprise an excellent strategy to attract more consumers who will 
purchase lunch, a drink, and memorabilia. Second, after the customer gets their ideal 
photography shoot with stunning vistas and carefully selected outfits, they will more 
than likely go on to post such photos for their other friends and loved ones. This in turn 
comprises free advertising for the enterprise they just visited. People will want to know 
when, where, and how they found such a lovely spot!?  
In this scenario, farmworkers also end up serving as landscapers for 
photography in practice. This almost certainly exceeds the original arguments for 
agrarian exceptionalism, which focused on national food security and enabling 
harvesting labor logistics for farm owners. I have already established how problematic 
that system is but adding cheap landscaping for photography purposes to the mix feels 
especially excessive. What do farmworkers think of this? 
The migrant farmworker experience of PNW scenery is not the same. Seth 
Holmes (2013) employed ethnography in his medical anthropology study of migrant 
labor on Washington State Farms. He introduces the Tanaka Farm, in the Skagit Valley 
in Western Washington north of Seattle. Holmes describes the breathtaking beauty of 
the Cascade Mountains, San Juan Islands out in the ocean, the luscious surrounding 
forests, and the snowcapped volcano, of Mt Baker. Sound similar? As part of the 
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ethnography, Holmes lives and works as a migrant farmworker, with some added 
benefits given he is white and doing this for research. Nonetheless, he describes how the 
beauty of the area took on a vastly different meaning as he worked in the fields: 
“In fact, even the vistas that were so sublime and beautiful to me had 
come to mean ugliness, pain, and work to the pickers. On multiple 
occasions, my Triqui companions responded with confusion to my 
exclamations about the area’s beauty and explained that the fields were 
“pure work” (puro trabajo).” (Holmes, 2013, p. 88) 
Website content, adapted from an interview with the owner, seems to posit otherwise: 
“We also have a full-time, year-round crew that enjoys the change of 
scenery from the ladders and pruning trees to no ladders and pruning 
grape vines.”  
 
Holmes (2013) points out how farm owners have a very different labor 
experience, such as working indoors more frequently than farmworkers, due to their 
positions of power (Chapter 3). While we don’t know how this owner arrived at such an 
opinion, it’s a rather rose-colored interpretation of farm work labor, and the discourse 
romanticizes working conditions in a more deceptive than honest way. 
Scenic beauty is so much more magical when you're relaxing in the shade with a 
cool drink, knowing when it grows too hot for comfort, you can easily escape the 
elements. However, once it's attached to exhaustion, endless work, overheating, 
dehydration, knee and back pain etc. surrounding landscapes become meaningful in an 
entirely different way. The consequences are graver than not being able to take pleasure 
in natural beauty. In June 2022 the PNW heatwave, and inadequate protection and 
oversight from farmers, killed Sebastian Perez (among many others), an immigrant 
farmworker from Guatemala. The night before his death, he had assured his mother that 
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he would be safe: “ ‘Sebastian, are you going to be okay? Are you sure you’re going to 
be okay?’ And he said ‘ Yes, I will be okay.’ ” (OPB Staff, 2021). Jeff Goodell, a 
journalist, framed this as murder due to the long running understanding of climate 
change and dangers of environmental exposure in farm work (Goodell, 2021). On the 
other hand, our agritourism enterprises want to advise their precious tourists:  
1. “This weekend, take it slow. Rest quietly. Find the shade and breath 
easy. Heat Stroke is no joke. Wine garden is open (family-friendly) 12-6 
daily”  
During less climactically apocalyptic conditions, it’s simple to romanticize the weather  
2. “We see you all out there soaking up this sweet taste of sunshine & 
dreaming of ALL the many outdoor hang outs on the horizon”. 
The code outdoor consumption captured Instagram content that calls attention to 
the outside accommodations with natural scenery and comfortable levels of exposure to 
the natural elements (n=160, 12.1%). Both of the above and below quotes were all 
coded outdoor consumption. 
3. “It’s Summertime at last - Time for some refreshment at Grateful. We 
created a community gathering space for everyone to enjoy our farm to 
glass goodness in our vineyard meadow.” 
4. “The snow is melting, and we have added more heaters to keep you 
warm! Escape from the cold and come enjoy the comfort and safety of 
our covered patio. It’s like a trip to the sunny hills of Piemonte for your 
mind and palate!” 
  
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Figure 16 Photos Coded Outdoor Consumption 
 
Farm owners are perfectly capable of providing comfortable, outdoor 
arrangements for consumers. Why not farmworkers? Perhaps, outdoor cooling 
accommodations are conceptualized as an added cost for labor, and for tourists it's 
regarded as an investment. What would the impacts be to an enterprise if a white tourist 
died of heatstroke? What about a Latinx farmworker? Another way enterprises sell 
tourists on agritourism is website material constructed to highlight the joy, fun, and 
carefree nature of farms. The most frequent website code experiences (n=20, 80%) 
captures instances in which the farm is constructed as a unique destination that offers 
authentic and exceptional farm education, activities, and memory making. U-pick is a 
big highlight in terms of this code:  
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1. “Today, the [last name] Family offers an opportunity for ‘U-pick 
Cherries’ right from the [last name] Family Farm Property in Hood 
River, Oregon”  
Photography, education, and memories comprise a substantial amount of content that 
highlights the merits of agritourism:  
2. “Bring a picnic and take memorable photos while enjoying the majestic 
view of Mt Hood! Learn how we harvest 11 different varieties of 
lavender, distill essential oil, and make botanical products right on the 
farm. Create unforgettable memories with your loved ones while 
enjoying the color, splendor and aroma of Lavender!”  
The term experience is a powerful form of enticement that makes visiting an 
agritourism location a unique opportunity. You’re not just inviting your family out to 
dine, you also get to  
3. “Treat your guests to a true-farm-to-table experience with deliciously 
prepared food sourced just miles from where it will be enjoyed.”  
 
 Exclusivity creates value. Sharing a meal is turned into a novel, elite experience 
that you can only access on a farm in the one and only Hood River Valley. Picking fruit 
is converted from a job to an exceptional occasion to make memories with one’s family 
or friends. The novelty becomes the focus of the advertisement, and consumers need to 
know nothing more except that they are missing out by just having a regular burger 
from McDonalds.  
Like Experience, Hedonism & Relaxation (n=18, 72%), grounds consumers 
expectations for how to participate in an agritourism experience and what to expect 
from it. In this case the content prepares them for hospitality, hedonism, and leisure. 
Many enterprises folded in restaurants and tasting rooms on their farms in order to 
attract consumers. Like their more urban counterparts, the main purpose of visiting a 
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space like this is to pursue pleasure through tasty food and palate piquing wine, cider, 
etc. Frequently, enterprises design their indoor and outdoor dining to capitalize on the 
rural and natural landscapes such as rows of orchards, vines, or Mount Hood. This code 
captures the instances in which websites highlight delectable opportunities or just to 
kick your feet back and take a load off: 
1. “To us, this historic home and century-old farm have the perfect 
combination of paradise: amazing orchards that produce our famous pear 
wine and hard ciders, fields of flowers that make delicate wedding 
bouquets, melt-in-your-mouth fresh fruit, double mountain views, a beer 
and cider tasting room to enjoy with a snack hot off the grill, and local 
micro-brewed beers on tap. We also feature our own award winning 
wines. Our family spends our days sharing this place with you, and with 
each other.” 
2. “Enjoy a glass of one of our award winning wines while you take in the 
view from inside our cozy tasting room or out on our covered patio 
surrounded by our estate vineyard with views of Mt. Adams and the 
valley beyond.” 
3. “Cool off with our Lavender Lemonade available daily throughout the 
summer. Relax with the amazing scent of lavender while making 
amazing memories with the whole family!”  
4. “We invite you to relax and enjoy the fresh country air”.  
 
Once again, it’s useful to contrast this advertising with some of Holmes’ (2013) 
observations on the Tanaka Farm in Skagit Valley, WA. Holmes states that 
farmworkers are paid effectively in piece-rate wages, which means that laborers are 
compensated on a per unit basis rather than a per hour. Washington state, at the time, 
demanded that farmworkers would be paid $7.16 an hour. For farm owners to profit 
with that “high” wage, they required workers to pick a certain quantity of fruit per hour. 
If they failed to reach their quota twice, they were fired. Simple as that. This creates 
conditions in which farmworkers are forced to sit in the dirt for hours scrambling to 
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pick strawberries as quick as possible, regardless of the harm it does to their knees, 
backs, and fingers. Holmes also explains that many are forced to choose to sacrifice or 
meet basic needs: eating, drinking water, cooling off from the heat, and using the 
bathroom in order to make their quotas and not be fired (Holmes, 2013, p. 72-73; see 
Chapter 3 for more). Clearly, the U-pick experience is enormously different than that of 
a farmworker. 
The gap between these experiences shows how farmers will provide 
accommodations for basic needs with a luxurious twist for paying tourists but refuse to 
provide the basics for farm workers because it imposes additional costs. Farmers are 
structurally incentivized to and choose to create both circumstances in the name of their 
bottom line.  
Second to last, there is the Instagram code smiling customers (n=95, 7.2%), the 
cherry on top of the portrait selling agritourism spaces. The other codes have situated 
why someone might choose to visit an enterprise for natural beauty, education, or day 
drinking on their vacation. These photos show the customer the joy, gratitude, and fun 
they will have once they are onsite. They don’t have to trust the experience will be 
fulfilling because there are countless photos showing them all the people who already 
found agritourism gratifying. 
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Figure 17 Photos Coded Smiling Customers 
 
While photos demonstrated unrivaled joy and fun, captions struck a balance 
between portraying that joy and the pleasure business owners and service workers 
receive from providing that happiness: 
1. “Working to spread smiles every day” 
2. “Celebrating life, family, jobs, homes, babies, rings, dads, and grads. 
Join us soon @[enterprise]” 
3. “Happy guests that came all the way from Kansas City, Philadelphia, and 
Spokane for a visit” 
4. “This awesome family loaded with cuteness came ‘suited and booted’ for 
U-Pick today! Come for a visit this fall, lots of varieties ready and many 
to come! Call [name] for daily updates [phone number]” 
 
So far, we have detailed a lot of content styles that sell an agritourism space and 
its opportunities to a tourist. Farm Animals, Natural Beauty, and Aesthetics showed 
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potential visitors what they should expect to see. Experience, Outdoor Consumption, 
and Hedonism/Relaxation showed the consumer what they could expect to do. Smiling 
Customers tells them how it will feel. This leaves one last remaining code, Happy 
Employees (n=38, 2.9%) which merits some additional noteworthiness and time to 
dissect. On its surface, this code’s importance is obvious to anyone who has worked 
and/or been provided good hospitality. A glum, irate, or impatient service worker can 
put a damper on a dining or retail experience. Thus, it's important for businesses to 
demonstrate they have a great team of service staff that have the capacity and skill to 
construct a hospitable experience on the farm. 
  
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Figure 18 Photos Coded Happy Employees 
 
Recall that Lozanski and Baumgartner (2020) demonstrated that the presence of 
farmworkers on farms is conceptualized as disruptive to the tourist gaze and shatters the 
romanticism of rurality (p. 10). Additionally, interviewees highlighted that it is 
impractical and troublesome to have agricultural work done in tourist spaces. Photos 
and captions coded happy employees thus have an obscured layer of honesty. They 
demonstrate to consumers that they will not see Latinx farmworkers. All the happy 
employees featured in photos were white service staff or occasionally a winemaker, 
manager, or owner of an agritourism enterprise. Captions went to great lengths not just 
to assure tourists that they would have pleasant service staff, but they also frequently 
emphasized that white employees are humans with names, hobbies, and a reason for 
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living in Hood River. They portrayed them as whole members of the community that 
had lives beyond their jobs: 
1. “This week's staff highlight is [name]. He has been with us for two years 
now, is a recent Hood River Valley Graduate and will be attending U of 
O next year! [name] is our go-to-guy for wine glass polishing, restocking 
wines, and any other tast we need him to take on. He enjoys cooking and 
has quite the green thumb. We look forward to working with [name] 
during the summers when he returns home from school. Hopefully in a 
few years when he turns 21, he'll be pouring wine! We appreciate you 
[name]!” 
2. “Farming is a family affair! Four generations of [last name] have worked 
at our #familyfarm to bring you fresh #fruit for decades. Our family puts 
our heart and soul into what we do and we love the people like you that 
we get to do it for. Thank you for always supporting our #family and our 
#farm” 
3. “Meet [name], you may recognize her from her bright smile and bubbly 
laugh at the tasting room. This is her second year working at [enterprise] 
as a tasting room associate. You will mostly see her on weekends as she 
works full time in marketing at Thunder Island Brewery during the week. 
[name] was born and raised in Montana, but has made the Gorge her 
home for years now, with her son [name]. She teaches snowboarding in 
the winter and enjoys getting outside to enjoy the PNW. We appreciate 
you [name]! Cheers!” 
 
Although I did not create a code for it when examining website content, some 
enterprises created whole webpages dedicated to making their staff visible. Wineries 
more than any other business type provided this information. I did look at all of the 
webpages that detailed the workers at enterprises frequently flagged as “our team” or 
“meet the staff” etc. I have provided two of many, instructive examples: 
1. “[featured employee] is [owner's] eldest daughter. Her career in the wine 
industry started as a teenager in the vineyard pruning vines to help pay 
for her expensive auto insurance. She was away at college during the 
first several years the tasting room was open. After returning home in 
2006 from various adventures she got a job working with the 
government. After getting burned out she left and began working full 
time with [enterprise]. Prior to that she had helped with events, harvest, 
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and quality control in the winery. In 2014 her daughter [name] was born. 
She took a hiatus for two years and in 2019 came back as General 
Manager. [featured employee] is an avid tennis player and plays on 7 
teams throughout the Gorge and Portland areas. She enjoys food, USTA 
tennis, cooking, Pinot Noir, watching dogs play, swimming with her 
daughter and running the occasional 10k.” 
2. “[featured employee] has been a long time employee with [enterprise], 
and is our Wine Club Manager. As a retired teacher, her organizational 
skills keep the winery running smoothly and the Wine Club a real class 
act. She is an avid USTA tennis player, loves making art in a variety of 
mediums, and enjoys hiking and getting outdoors in her spare time.” 
 
Even some dogs have a profile: 
1. “No winery is complete without a winery dog! Rhett is a great friend and 
a champion pointing Labrador retriever. Anyone who thinks dogs can’t 
communicate and understand humans has to meet Rhett. Amazingly 
intelligent, he is joyous in the field and at home with his faithful 
companion, Robb. He is as complicated and nuanced as few creatures 
can be! is a great friend and a champion pointing Labrador retriever ...” 
 
Of the entire sample, there are two Latinx employees explicitly featured. Two of 
hundreds or thousands receive visibility for their work, contributions, and role as a 
community member in Hood River. The first of which, is an assistant winemaker, 
however, knowing the history of the business they could have started out as a 
farmworker before advancing to assistant winemaker. The second I can’t 100% confirm 
is a farmworker, however, the language hints at such. 
1. “Our rock is [featured employee], the Assistant Winemaker and the go-to 
guy for all the ins and outs of operations. Francisco has been with 
Cathedral Ridge since the beginning. He had worked for the previous 
winery, Flechinger’s and we were blessed to have had him come work 
for us. We count on [featured employee] to keep us doing the right 
things. Many members of his family have worked here helping us from 
picking to pruning and bottling to labeling. We are very fortunate to have 
this beautiful spirit on our side. 
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2. “[featured employee] came about in fall 2017 to assist with the harvest, 
and never left. He is all-around upbeat and positive, and is incredibly 
dedicated. He is enjoying learning all the inner-workings of the wine 
business.” 
 
I suspect the website’s language hints at other employees they aren’t making 
visible through the phrase: “Many members of his family have worked here helping us 
from picking to pruning and bottling to labeling.” It could be wasteful of the 
enterprise’s time and resources for temporary employees, however, the decisions to 
continually elevate members with a higher social status perpetuates farmworker 
invisibility and consumer ignorance. It also increases the clout and perceived 
importance of higher status workers. These decisions reify class boundaries and 
augment their differences. 
While Happy Employees is aimed at constructing the tonal understanding of an 
agritourism space, it also could aptly fit in the last section of the discussion making it a 
useful transition to moralizing agritourism. Moralizing agritourism steps beyond 
enabling blissful ignorance in communicating agritourism and the disappointing nature 
of selling agritourism that presents tourist experiences of farms as the antithesis of 
farmworkers’. By choosing to highlight service workers and specialized staff, 
businesses are signposting who is valuable to the cultural and economic matrix of the 
local community by nature of their job. Happy Employees told consumers which people 
are important and contribute to the functioning of an agritourism space, as well as the 
peoples’ livelihoods and incomes tourists are financing through purchasing goods and 
services. 
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Moralizing Agritourism 
 This section is the most important of the results because it captures the exact 
problems situated in the literature review. Here we get to answer the question: How do 
farm owners highlight agrarianism and market-oriented taproots? As established, 
agritourism is a market-oriented reform for farmers. It brings the market to the farm, 
instead of selling to food processors and distributors, which can use their oligopsonistic 
position to force farmers to sell their goods to them for artificially low prices because of 
global and regional economic competition. With agritourism, farm owners have 
increased power to shape their prices and they use the following narratives to do so.  
An important characteristic shared by the codes in this section, are their 
inherent, unquestioned value. Localism, Sustainable, Family Values, and Heritage 
content are positioned without elaboration and explanation of why customers should 
care. They are arguments used to moralize visiting and financially supporting 
agritourism enterprises. Consumers already have an incentive to visit agritourism 
enterprises purely for the benefits outlined in the selling agritourism section, but they 
can also view their purchases in a justice-oriented light through supporting local 
economies, “family farms”, and rural cultural lifestyles.  
First off, let’s interpret the code Sustainable. This code only came up a few 
times (n=4, 16%), but it’s still important to capture because of London et. al. (2021) 
argument that health-oriented taproots rarely address farmworkers. Here, enterprises 
made a claim to growing food with conscious attention to its environmental 
sustainability. 
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1. “We take pride in promoting local and sustainably grown produce and 
utilize a farm management system that incorporates best management 
practices.” 
2. “Vineyard care takes center stage in our wine production, where 
sustainable agricultural practices combined with careful management of 
the fruit yields on the vines lead to the noted luxurious intensity within 
our bottlings.” 
3. “For over fifty years, our family has raised delicious, top-grade, 
environmentally sustainable fruit, establishing [enterprise] as an 
important fruit grower in the Hood River Valley and Columbia Gorge 
region. We are 3 generations strong caring deeply about growing fresh 
fruit for our community.” 
Focusing on how food systems can be reformed to ameliorate their 
consequences is a vital challenge to overcome in our economy. Recall however, that 
Weiler et. al. (2016) argued that agrarian exceptionalism not only led to looser labor 
laws for supposedly deserving family farmers, but it also rationalized socializing the 
environmental consequences of industrialized farming such as unsustainable water use 
practices, overreliance on petroleum based chemical fertilizers and pesticides, soil 
degradation, and so much more (Weiler et. al., 2016, p.1143). 
Rarely do farmers position the consequences of unsustainable labor practices 
that rely on employing transnational laborers with sub-livable wages during the 
harvest's peak labor demand. Both issues are important, but both need to be addressed, 
and we must be astute when one is prioritized over the other. Weiler et. al. (2016) 
argued that it was glamorous for farmers to be small scale and organic or biodynamic 
growers. How do we make it glamorous to be employing sustainable labor practices as 
well? 
Second, is Localism (n=11, 44%), which is a fascinating and critical code to 
digest. Localism extolls the merits of local consumption, which as we have found out, 
can span a wide geographic range. Local product origins included the Columbia Valley 
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in central/ eastern Washington, the Willamette Valley, and more. Supporting local 
farmers meant supporting agritourism enterprises in the region, and websites used the 
following styles of language to situate the merits of local consumption: 
1. “With small family farms on the decline, I am committed to doing my 
part to uphold this crucial component of our local economy by 
continuing to raise affordable fruit of the highest quality, building 
relationships with our customers, and making visits to [enterprise] fun 
and unforgettable, innovating fresh and delicious recipes and products, 
and more.” 
2. “For the last 14 years it's been our privilege to not only bring you fresh 
fruit but also a fine selection of locally made jams, jellies, and honey 
products.” 
3. “We also have handcrafted baskets, local wild honey, Oregon-grown 
hazelnuts, dried fruit snacks, farm fresh Creamline and Chocolate Milk, 
and locally made chocolates and granola!” 
 
Local consumption and products are positioned as valuable without much 
additional explanation, and a worthy consumer choice in of itself. Why would you buy 
produce or other products from Walmart, when you could be supporting local 
businesses? This code doesn't request consumers to take more radical steps towards 
helping farmers such as pushing against regressive agricultural subsidies or dismantling 
input oligopolies. It just implores consumers to purchase directly from farmers, so that 
they can retain a greater share of profits. Recall Robinson (2020) calling this “a 
commitment to small scale capitalism” (p. 8). Farmers see this as a viable solution for 
them because they already have some perceived control over the means of production 
and promoting local consumption wrestles for control over the sales of products. 
This romanticized solution is a niche fix and not a structural solution to the 
death of small scale farming. Farmers markets, agritourism, and other methods of local 
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consumption aren't scalable long term structural solutions. Not all towns can invest in 
agritourism, especially ones without other visitor draws, tourist infrastructure, or 
proximity to an urban setting with a solid customer base, and many more reasons. 
Farmers markets must be accessible by consumers, and where food is produced does not 
geographically match where food is consumed by any means. Although, some of those 
gaps can be bridged. Additionally, recall that enterprises from this sample import many 
products from outside the Hood River Valley to either directly sell as agricultural 
products or to process into a refined product such as wine, cider, jam, or baked goods. 
How are the farmers supplying those inputs supposed to increase their income? 
Agritourism creates another set of farmer winners and losers. It’s certainly an 
opportunity for some, but it’s not a solution to the agricultural squeeze and restoring 
power to small-scale producers.  
 Farm to Consumer, the second most common website code (n=19, 76%), is 
similar to localism in many ways, except that it emphasizes the benefits to the 
consumer, rather than the benefits to the farmer. Of course, the boundaries between 
these codes are not concrete, and sometimes a piece of content argues for both localism 
and farm to consumer ideals. Farm to Consumer could fit in selling agritourism, 
however, I decided to group it next to localism due to their shared ideas and overlap. I 
do want to note that farm to consumer arguments sometimes play up the experience of 
food consumption, thus selling it, but other times its benefits are implied such as the 
third quote.  
1. “ When you buy direct from a farm, not only are you supporting small 
local business owners who are giving back to your community in many 
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other ways, but you know that the produce you’re taking home was 
fresh-picked as recently as that very day.” 
2. “New and old customers alike get to enjoy the special and deeply 
satisfying experience of tasting the sweetest, flavor-packed fruit picked 
right off the trees, while getting to know the people who put so much 
love and care into raising it.” 
3. “About an hour from downtown Portland, [enterprise] offers a unique 
farm experience for young and old alike, including, a year-round self-
service fruit stand, u-pick opportunities for cherries, apples, pears, 
strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, prunes, peaches, and nectarines in 
season and farm-raised lamb, pork and beef for purchase.” 
 
Virtually all animal products come from a farm, at least, that’s how we all think 
of it, but notice how the language in the third quote emphasizes its “farm raised,” which 
to some people inherently increases its perceived value, especially when its purchased 
directly from a farm. Even if it’s not the farm that raised the animal. The enterprise did 
not claim to raise and slaughter those animals, just that they were available to purchase 
from their fruit stand. Consumers are positioned to benefit by purchasing directly 
through farmers because the produce is of higher quality, fresher, and the consumer can 
develop relationships with the person growing their food. Sometimes this value is 
elaborated, other times the value is positioned as inherent. This has the potential to 
increase transparency of how food is produced depending on the questions the 
consumer asks and how the farmer chooses to answer them.  
Heritage is a fascinating and interesting code (n=17, 68%) capturing website 
language that highlights the generational aspects of “family farms.” Its value can be 
seen in two ways. One, making the claim to be a third-generation farmer or winemaker 
asserts expertise. It quite literally says I haven’t just been farming my whole life, but it's 
also in my blood. It adds perceived value to the products based on the history of the 
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individuals that help produce them. Second, it’s an inherently noble position to be in 
and support. Familial legacies have inherent value in many cultures, and to situate 
oneself as carrying out a legacy empowers the individual and their perceived 
importance. Part of the reason owners make a case for their legacy is a plea for 
economic support. Heritage content is positioned as both an identity and a marketing 
strategy. It’s the historical proof the owner is a true “family farmer” which is situated as 
an unquestionably noble cause for consumers to financially support.  
1. “We began as a family farm almost 100 years ago, producing apples and 
pears.” 
2. “The third-generation Oregon winemaker grew up in McMinnville – 
heart of the Willamette Valley, and has been in wineries before he was 
able to walk.” 
3. “The [last name] family has been growing tree fruit in the Hood River 
Valley for generations, but since 2000, they’ve enjoyed a near meteoric 
rise in the wine business.” 
4. “[Same] is a third generation orchardist from Parkdale, Oregon, whose 
grandfather emigrated from Japan in 1905, and through hard work 
started farming in Hood River in 1911.” 
5. “I figured, if my grandpa could have a U-Pick business, so could I, and it 
worked! I love it. And I love my customers. Everyone is so happy and 
grateful for what we do. We keep expanding what we grow because 
growing healthy organic food is a beautiful thing for everyone!” 
6. “As my Great Uncle (pictured far left) said,  ‘every year the fruit and 
season will be different!’ For a farmer this is a true quote. You never 
know what each year might bring to your table from our fruit stand. We 
are just glad that after 5 generations to still be farming in the Hood River 
Valley.” 
 
I could go on. Several websites emphasized owning century farms, when a farm 
is passed down within a family for at least 100 years. This isn’t to mention the 
paragraphs of content on websites detailing intimate family history for the public to see. 
Some owners narrated how they came to succeed their parents' business, and others 
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emphasized the families they have created, sons and daughters that went to college, and 
how they have mixed hopes one of their kids will take up the plow when they die. All 
this content reproduces the cultural status of the family farm. The content places the 
emphasis of these spaces on the family its associated values of love, hospitality, 
kindness, and openly embracing visitors. It becomes less about farming itself, and more 
about the inherently astute moral values instilled in white proprietors. People are 
interested in publicizing their heritage, preceding and succeeding their lifetimes. Some 
go on to explain how this informs their work, but many solely position their history and 
legacy. 
7. “[Owner] is a 3rd generation farmer, fermenter, and nurse practitioner. 
[Enterprise] opened Memorial Day weekend of 2019 as the very first 
winery/cidery/brewery in Mount Hood, Oregon and the southernmost 
vineyard in the Columbia River Gorge. Weaving together farming, 
fermentation and hospitality fills [Owner’s] life with joy and meaning. 
[Owner’s] great-great grandparents founded a vineyard in Switzerland 
and later immigrated to Helvetia, Oregon (1905) where they planted 
[enterprise] vineyard. Continuing the tradition, [Owner’s] uncle and aunt 
pioneered [enterprise] Vineyard in 1974 in the Willamette Valley. 
[Owner’s Enterprise] is proud to partner with [Aunt and Uncle’s 
enterprise] Vineyard and serve their exceptional wines under the 
[owner’s enterprise’s] label. We look forward to sharing our family’s 
award-winning wines in our tasting room at the foot of Mount Hood 
writing the next chapter in our family’s story of fermentation and warm 
hospitality. 
 
This is a critical moment to recall Oregon’s History of agriculture. The state 
repeatedly made it difficult for minorities to feel safe and slowly develop wealth and 
financial independence through private property. It’s worth noting, to my knowledge, 
there is only one non-white owner in the studies sample. The third-generation farmer, 
whose family emigrated from Japan, is almost without a doubt an exception to 
dispossession of Japanese property led by State officials and White proprietors during 
128 
 
 
internment. See quote number four. Also notice they detailed their relatives purchasing 
the land in 1911, before Oregon’s Alien Land Law passed in 1923. 
All but one of these owners have had the privilege of likely being born white 
and almost certainly from white families. Their legacy has had much support from the 
State of Oregon and to a broader degree US white privilege and White supremacy. They 
also have the continuing support of agrarian exceptionalism eliminating their 
obligations to environmentally and socially sustainable farming practices, which others 
inevitably suffer from. Audiences must be attentive to both the hard work, luck, and 
structural support these individuals have. They also must be attentive to the moral 
arguments they are using to maintain and continue their positionality in structurally 
violent and exploitative system. This content serves to moralize agritourism because the 
cultural conceptions of agrarianism and the yeoman farmer are being summoned as a 
noble legacy that farmers are actively living out. They expect consumers to 
automatically interpret their positionality as inherently special and different from 
purchasing from corporate farms or grocers because of their familial history. No one 
bothers to explain these connections because our culture is already accustomed to them. 
The last code aimed at moralizing agritourism is family values (n=15, 60%). 
Here, websites aim to portray farms as repositories of American cultural values related 
to the purity and sanctity of the family. Because these farms are owned by families, 
their landscape, business, and character are automatically wholesome. People who visit 
the farm are to benefit from the sanctity of the space, and farmers, similar to heritage, 
are making a case to customers that it is in their best interest to visit and preserve these 
spaces by purchasing agricultural products and/ or services from them. Consumers can 
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temporarily participate in the family’s lives and join in as honorary guests by visiting 
their farm. Also, many enterprises position the value of family as contributing to the 
community. 
1. “Hospitality and generosity are two of the biggest core values for my 
family and our farm. It’s our tradition to open up our farm like a large 
living room and invite family, friends, and visitors to come ‘taste and 
see’ the abundance of our harvests.” 
2. “[enterprise] also distributes to local and regional businesses and 
eateries, and participates in a wide range of community partnerships. We 
believe passionately in the value and benefit of the family farm in a 
community and do all we can to sustain our contribution here in the 
Hood River Valley and beyond. Please come visit our farm!” 
3. “Our family spends our days sharing this place with you, and with each 
other.” 
4. “After attending UC Davis from 1978-1980 and apprenticing in 
Germany, Rich returned to Oregon and spent the next 25 years in 
McMinnville raising a family and making wines for his private label, 
Viento and for other well known wineries in the Willamette Valley and 
Columbia Gorge AVAs (American Viticultural Area).” 
5. “[name 1] is proud that he’s only missed one cherry season in the last 30 
years since he was in grade school – when he and [name 2] were living 
in Brazil. [name 1] and [name 2] got married in 2002 and have 7 kids 
together – 5 boys and 2 girls. [name 1] and [name 2] partnered with 
[name 3] and [name 4] Poole and started marketing their own fruit 
directly in 2003. From the smallest [last name] ([name 1] and [name 2’s]  
children) to Grandpa and Grandma ([name 3] & [name 4]), the whole 
family chips in and is involved with some aspect of the farm. Today, the 
[last name] family offers an opportunity for “U-Pick Cherries” right from 
the [last name] Family Farm property in Hood River, Oregon, as well as 
deliveries of a variety of fresh produce from their farm, as well as from 
other Oregon family farms to Portland, Newport, Corvallis, and beyond.” 
 
Just like Heritage, much of the content also emphasizes how inseparable a 
business is from the family. Folding these together once again moralizes the agritourism 
space. Tourists are asked to financially sustain a business and the family. Not just one 
or the other but both, together. Both these codes show how visible white proprietors are 
130 
 
 
in digital agritourism landscapes. They, and their families, are centralized as the main 
characters on websites with some supportive roles from managers, specialized workers, 
and service staff. The website material is making references to the cultural idea that 
farms are inherently pure and a repository of moral and familial values (Weiler et. al., 
2016, p. 1141). This implores you as the consumer to make an ethically wholesome 
decision to support them.  
Moralizing agritourism has focused the website content aimed at eliciting 
consumer support for environmentally sustainable farming, farm to consumer supply 
chains, supporting family farm legacies, and preserving the repository of moral values 
endemic to family farms. This leads us to the final section of the discussion, Latinx 
Representation, which will demonstrate the ghastly, enormous gap between white 
proprietors and Latinx farmworkers.  
131 
 
 
Chapter 6 Conclusion 
 First, let’s summarize the results and what we have found through the course of 
this study. Agritourism enterprises in Hood River, Oregon prefer to highlight products 
and services they sell, natural beauty of the farmscape and surrounding scenic 
landscapes, as well as contributions of white, managerial, specialized, and service 
working positions.  
Any Latinx labor featured is incomprehensive, mostly relegated to the 
background, and lacks any direct appreciation or gratitude. Interviewees A and C had a 
hard time speaking to the social consequences of these issues directly and instead 
preferred to think about them in terms of their personal experiences and simple 
marketing decision making. Interviewee D understood that these decisions are 
problematic but offered a very limited explanation for why that is and directed the 
question towards a mural. Interviewee B thought that honest, accurate representations of 
farm work would be incompatible with the agritourism model.   
These findings reinforce the conclusions of Lozanski and Baumgartner 
(2020) that farmworkers are perceived as destructive to the tourist gaze and rural 
romanticism of a white farmer community (p.10). The study also emphasizes the 
ways in which a discourse of bounty in Korsunsky (2020, p. 426) is used to obscure 
the labor that produces that bounty, and it also enforces Hutchison’s (2013, p. 974-980) 
argument that advertising of agricultural products fetishizes the finished product. The 
findings also emphasize how agritourism enterprises can fall into the same health-
oriented taproots and market oriented-taproots that urban agricultural movements do, 
which seek only to partially reform the problematic aspects of agricultural without 
132 
 
 
addressing the racialized health, economic, and political disparities endemic to the 
business (London et. al., 2021, p. 208). 
Additionally, farm owners saw agritourism as an opportunity to enrich 
themselves, pass on the farm to an heir, as well as a method to preserve their cultural 
heritage and status. These reinforce the themes I frequently found in the Journal of 
Travel Research, which doesn’t mention Latinx farmworkers at all- much less, how 
agritourism could be leveraged to improve their living and working conditions.  
Thus, above all, we have found that agritourism is a lucrative model to 
preserve and put the family farm on a pedestal. Hood River’s larger than family 
farms employ this agrarian conceptualization to heighten their cultural and 
economic power in the dire straits of neoliberal economics. This alone might not 
be surprising or particularly problematic. However, the idea that they can’t show 
consumers all the human beings supporting their heritage is incredibly harmful 
and helps reinforce racial-class divides and the invisibility of farmworkers. 
How could we find out more? 
 First and foremost, I would like to acknowledge how the methods of this study 
could be improved. While I am satisfied with the instrument of a discourse and content 
analysis for websites and Instagram, I would wish to have another shot with interviews. 
First, I would have liked for there to be more of them. I acknowledged the limited 
availability of professionals and their skepticism of the University of Oregon in the 
methods. However, I think I could have avoided some of those issues by trying to 
interview folks during the spring, fall, or winter instead of summer’s peak season, and 
133 
 
 
not highlighting which specific university I was affiliated with. Some of these folks 
might be happy to think they are interviewing with someone from Oregon State. 
 I would also reformat the interview script slightly. The findings from this script 
are important and led to me spending time and energy thinking about the supply chain 
of agritourism. Recall, I dissected how when agritourism facilities manufacture products 
or purchase them from elsewhere, they are still relying on cheap agricultural inputs 
produced by a farm that may not be able to invest in agritourism. This is an important 
limitation to how viable the economic framework would be to other farms in the U.S., 
and it creates a set of winners and losers for small scale farmers while not solving the 
structures fueling their demise. This could also serve to be an important question for 
interviews in of itself. I wonder how farmers would view this pattern. However, all this 
didn’t necessarily fulfill the initial purpose of this project, which was focused on how 
farmers use the cultural clout of agrarianism to create a wholesome image of a family 
farm that obscure Latinx labor. 
 To better accomplish those goals, I would recommend not stopping the 
interview after asking about social media representation of farmworkers, and instead, 
treat it as a point to pivot the conversation. I was unsure how people would respond to 
the question, and I wasn’t prepared to think on my feet and respond to their answers to 
continue the conversation towards more interesting content. I think I could have done 
more to ask interviewees to entertain the social consequences of their media decisions. 
When examining my memories and the produced manuscript, I feel our conversations 
were too centered around their perceived expectations of how to advertise to American 
consumers. These interviewees might view this question in a practical marketing 
134 
 
 
mindset and excuse themselves from thinking of larger social consequences. I wish I 
had asked them to think beyond that, and I think it would be excellent to ask them to 
think collaboratively about solutions to disparate representation. A more delicate 
balance could have been struck, and through that, we all could have learned more and 
found better conclusions.  
 Lastly, I think there is some utility in verifying these results are not limited to a 
specific geographic region. I mentioned in the site selection that I had choses an 
arbitrary boundary of the Hood River Valley, and that agritourism spanned much of the 
Columbia Gorge, Columbia Valley, Willamette Valley, and Rogue Valley. I wouldn’t 
want to waste too much time and energy focusing on the problematic nature of 
agritourism websites and Instagram content, as opposed to looking for solutions. Thus, I 
would recommend blending a similar content analysis with some methods better aimed 
at working towards finding and implementing structural solutions.  
How could we alter the status quo? 
Throughout the past two years thinking about this project, I have wrestled with 
the question: How do we make a change to this system? How do I make a change? I am 
still very uncertain about how to answer these questions. I will offer one of the many 
ideas that came to mind in order to poke at some of the answers and thoughts I have 
arrived at through this study. I want to start by positioning a hypothetical pro-labor 
agritourism enterprise. Earlier on in the project I came up with this as a solution. 
Presently, I am skeptical about its ability to improve labor conditions for a substantial 
group of people, but it would surely start stir the pot. 
135 
 
 
 What would happen if an agritourism business in Hood River started marketing 
itself as pro labor? To me, this would look like a farm guaranteeing livable wages, 
respectable living conditions, and a safer, more comfortable working environment to its 
farmworkers. They wouldn’t do this quietly but blast it on their website and social 
media while simultaneously bringing awareness to the structural violence imposed on 
farmworkers throughout the PNW and wider United States. The enterprise would 
implore tourists: Come support our business and our commitment to treating all our 
employees, especially farmworkers, as dignified community members that deserve so 
much better.  
 This would no doubt cause some uproar in the Hood River Valley. Such a 
radical business model could be perceived as threatening to other enterprises. The 
owner of the pro-labor enterprise might risk alienating themselves from their class of 
fellow farm owners. Although difficult, contentious, and controversial, I can’t help but 
wonder what type of conversations such a radical move would start among business 
owners, locals, farmworkers, and tourists. While there could certainly be backlash, I 
also wonder what potential progress and change could come from such a direct, vocal 
stance against the status quo. Would other people start making demands that the 
community could do better? Would more people be confronted and educated on farm 
worker conditions? Would restaurants feel pressured to purchase their local produce 
from there?  
 This scenario has its limits. Not only would it be a socially uncertain prospect as 
established, but this would also be a huge financial risk for a farm owner to start taking 
on. Radically reforming wages and living conditions would not come without a cost, 
136 
 
 
and they would have no guarantee that locals or tourists would be open to visiting and 
purchasing from that business model. Not to mention they might probably need an 
exceptional visitor volume to create the revenue necessary to support higher labor costs. 
It would be a noble cause, but a risky one. 
 The scenario also glosses over the weakness this study exposed. I have painted a 
long historical arc of inequality on farms along racial lines and positioned agritourism 
as a recent addition to that arc. Biased, sugar coated, tourist-oriented media from 
agritourism enterprises is a manifestation of longer historical trends and structural 
racism, especially the heightened visibility of white workers and rare 
acknowledgements that Latinx farmworkers exist. My above scenario doesn't do 
anything to solve the structural inequality built into the system. It rests on a hypothetical 
farm owner playing white savior with their business, which could certainly still help 
move the status quo, but it’s a stretch to call it a solution. Therefore proper, 
representative media is no cure all or a replacement for unions that can organize for 
better working conditions, political visibility, and power to leverage employers and 
lawmakers. 
This doesn’t mean owners and others in positions of power on farms can’t do 
better or make beneficial changes to their advertising and social media content. There's 
two pieces of media we examined that stuck out to me as potential starting points. 
137 
 
 
 
Figure 19 Starting Points for Representation 
 
 I thought these photos were a good launching point because it demonstrates that 
blossom thinning and harvesting is done by hand. The blossoms photo features a worker 
showing what that work looks like. The harvest photo features workers in front of the 
fruit of their labor. A step further would have been to name the persons if they 
consented: “and here we have [name] working on pruning this cool spring morning to 
ensure your U-pick experience in August is perfect.” Or “[name] and [name] endured 
the harsh smoke from fires to start harvesting grapes for our sparkling wines! Thank 
you [name] and [name], we are fortunate to have you as part of our community!” These 
are beautiful photos, and they still demonstrate things tourists want to see such as 
blossoms and views of the surrounding Cascade Mountains and agricultural products 
that are turned into delicious drinks. It also takes a step towards educating the consumer 
audience with a more representative caption.  
138 
 
 
I would also like to see more posts along the style of happy employees making 
farmworkers visible, and verbalizing gratitude for their contributions to the farm and 
local community. This includes websites too. Hood River’s economy wouldn’t function 
without all these individuals. All these people also contribute to the local culture and 
vibrancy of Hood River, and agritourism enterprises should celebrate that just as much 
as they do their white employees. These incremental changes of media representation 
add up and can assist in making critical members of the community visible, cherished, 
and celebrated.  
I also wonder what it would look like for farms to emphasize some of their 
farmworker employees' stories more on websites and other materials. There is a 
tremendous amount of visibility to generational legacies by highlighting familial 
heritage and family farm discourse. Why shouldn't we celebrate other legacies? Why 
shouldn’t we acknowledge other employees' histories, dreams, and hardships? 
Additionally, many enterprises positioned themselves as bastions of the community. 
They claimed to open their farm like a living room for all to visit and become a part of. 
Only a dysfunctional family hides some of its members through shame and guilt. If 
farmers want to reach the lofty vision of a welcoming family farm, they need to 
examine their own dysfunction and structural abuse as opposed to repeatedly shouting 
to the American consumer “we are so great and welcoming and loving!”  
139 
 
 
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