Selling the farm: Why one South Jersey farmer decided to call it quits

Men in muddy boots gathered under a drab December sky last year, eyeballing the tractor tires and soil tillers, whole fields full of farm equipment the Marino family was auctioning off in Swedesboro, in South Jersey.

That’s what happens when a farmer gets out of the business, but it still hurt, like someone rummaging through four generations of memories. Joe Marino, 50, told his father to go hunting that morning. Take your mind off it.

Earlier this week, Russell Marino Sr. , 72, Joe’s father, stood beneath the sun pruning tomatoes on a raised bed behind the farmhouse he still lives in. All the fields around him were green with someone else’s crops. Most of the heavy machinery was gone.

“From a farm to a garden, he has to stay busy,” Joe said.

When the Marino family called it quits in 2021, they were farming 3,000 acres on their Sun Valley Orchards in Gloucester and Salem Counties, the largest family-owned produce farm in the Garden State. In June, The Inquirer chronicled the plight of other South Jersey farmers struggling against low prices, competition from beyond U.S. borders, and increased wages for employees. One farmer said he was “50/50″ on planting crops next year. Another had sold off nearly half his property to stop the bleeding.

By that time, Joe Marino was expanding his cold-storage business in Swedesboro, his days as a farmer behind him. .

”2019 was the beginning of the downturn for us. We had never lost money and we lost a lot of money, in 2019,” Marino said. “It was a perfect storm of bad weather, labor struggles, and prices were about as low as they’d ever been. COVID came in 2020 and that didn’t help anything. We couldn’t make up for the losses.”

While prices had been driven lower in 2019 due to international competition, the loss of bulk sales from food-service accounts servicing restaurants, cruise ships, and hotels during the COVID-19 pandemic deepened the blow in 2020.

In July of 2021, with prices as low as 2019, Marino made the decision.

“I told my brother, That’s it, we’re done,” he said. “We loved what we do and it’s all I ever wanted to do, but when it’s not there, you have to be smart enough to get out. You can’t go down with the ship.”

Marino, the mayor of South Harrison, Gloucester County, and his brother, Russell Jr., were already mired in a conflict with the U.S. Department of Labor in 2019 that is ongoing today. In November of that year, the department announced that a judge ordered Sun Valley Orchards to pay $556,745 in penalties and back wages to 147 farmworkers, including 96 temporary foreign workers on H-2A visas.

The issue, Marino said, dates back to 2015, when they decided to use the H-2A visa program for the first time. The Marinos even hired a consultant to help fill out the paperwork. The H-2A visa program allows farms to bring migrant immigrant labor into the United States to fill agricultural jobs. After the Labor Department investigators came to the farm to check up, Marino said a paperwork error over whether the employees would be served meals – they were – or given a kitchen to cook their own food – they weren’t – led to the bulk of the fines.

The Institute for Justice, a Washington-based nonprofit law firm, has taken the case for the Marinos. Bob Belden, an attorney with the institute, said Marino’s case, and others brought by the Labor Department are unique and problematic. The department writes the rules, investigates and prosecutes violations with its own employees, and cases are heard in administrative courts by agency judges, Belden said. Even the appeal process for a Labor Department case, Belden said, is heard in-house.

Belden filed a federal lawsuit against the department last year on behalf of the Marinos, seeking an independent venue.

“We believe the cases should be heard in federal courts, by federal judges,” Belden said.

The department did not return requests for comment on the Marinos’ lawsuit.

Michelle Infante-Casella, an agricultural agent in Gloucester County and professor with the Rutgers Cooperative Extension, said the loss of the Marino farm’s crops may single-handedly alter New Jersey’s place in the agriculture rankings.

“They grew so many peppers and eggplants, just on that one farm, we may get knocked down a few pegs just in those categories,” Infante-Casella said.

The Marinos, Infante-Casella said, “got a raw deal” from the Labor Department.

Marino said the future of family farms in New Jersey and beyond is in peril, both because of the federal labor issues he’s dealt with and a pricing model he doesn’t see changing.

“Asparagus prices are terrible. Squash is terrible,” Marino said. “You can’t give squash away.”

The individual support of consumers who stop by farmers markets and roadside stands isn’t enough to sustain large-scale farms and agriculture, and the bulk customers who have fled to cheaper international produce have no incentive to return.

“If they can get the same produce out of Canada for $3 a box less, they will,” Marino said. “I don’t see it getting any better. There’s a lot of guys who didn’t get out last year and I think they might this year.”