2008-09-19 TGREENWELLFARMS - Laserfiche WebLink

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stick out the season. Sometimes I find out they’ve been somewhere else in Kona, but they are not, you know, living with us, or in our current housing. MELROSE: Was the question really how long do they stay with the, working for Greenwell Farms has something to do with the extension of the season. So the season will be shorter or longer, kind of depending on what, when it rained and how often it rains, how many fruitings you have. So that this season, for instance, is going to be a fairly long season just based on the continuous rainfall they’ve had this year there. There are other seasons that are much more compacted. So you pick only red and you pick it when it’s ripe, so they stick around for that period in time. One of the things that Greenwell Farms is trying to do is, their buildings are going to be built to what’s called H2A standards – and you’ve seen those standards in the application. That program is really a response to and a method to, after the 9/11 issue and the difficulty in moving people in and out of the country from other places, it seems to be a way that people looking for labor can find labor sources and not have to run a lot of immigration, kind of get pre-cleared folks. It may not, you know, their buildings are built to their standards because we want to make sure that the standard and the program is available. Whether the program actually generates the kind of people you are looking for is another challenge.And right now a lot of the workers are coming from Central America and Mexico and also folks coming out of Southern California and other places, rotating as they move through other seasonal crops. But there is a good chance that some of those workers start coming from Thailand or other parts of the world that are in seasonal labor markets. And that was one of the reasons why we kind of created these little clusters of three or four units of what’ll amount to about 18 workers in each of the clusters. Because you could actually be getting labor from a variety of different locations, and almost in the camp history traditions where you have a Japanese camp and a Chinese camp, they actually get along better if they are working and staying within their own units. So those are things we are just prepared to deal with in the future. DOMINGO: I can see the present existing agreement. So the practice relieves the applicant of certain obligations to its employees, whereas, again referring back to the plantation days where they used to go to Philippines, Japan, wherever, and recruit workers and bring them in and establish them in different places and organize their whole life entirely and take care of them. But in these cases, he indicated, you know, they come up to him and apply for jobs, and that certainly does not obligate him to anything; his only need is supervise jobs for them and to take care of his needs on his farms. And I think, but what ought to be concerned is that, you know, those structures and those living units, as you indicated, will be up to standards and everything. Now, the picture that you have here in your application, the three structures, they are not totally completed yet. They are in a phase of building completion? MELROSE: I believe they have been fully permitted and the first set of workers moved into them last week. Right? GREENWELL: Yeah. DOMINGO: Last week. So then -. EXHIBIT B 8