The Stories Project: Oregon Livelihoods Traded Away

Don Buhr Residence: Molalla, OR Occupation: former refrigerator technician at AgriFrozen food processing plant.

Snapshots "In the summertime, we would employ about 1200 people there at the cannery [AgriFrozen]." "When you're 55 and older, it was going to be hard to find work, especially when you're not trained in a specialty field. You look at beans going by on a belt... that doesn't take much training. These people had done this for years. Where do you find another job like that, especially now days?" "The last couple of years that we processed raspberries, we got them from Taiwan. They were real dirty, not dirt on the berries, but lots of leaves and stems in them. We had to run them across the inspection belt for probably the second time. The ladies took the stems out and the leaves out and packaged them. Even doing that we could package them for $.05 a package less than buying the raspberries from the growers we had in Gresham. That would be one of the things we were facing. We could buy the vegetables from a foreign country and have them processed for less. "

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