24 HOURS: Farmworker labors for family in 6 a.m. hour (with video)

It was just after 6 a.m. on a Tuesday in late May, and Julio Gutierrez was nowhere to be seen.

That wasn’t because he was dodging work. Far from it.

It was because he was going above and beyond, which is his M.O.

Gutierrez, 28, is one of Gary Larsen’s best employees. He was in a field, out of eyeshot, picking clean a row of asparagus.

When he was finished there, he’d head to another field — Larsen farms about 330 acres of asparagus in Pasco — to cover for some co-workers who hadn’t shown up that day.

Gutierrez works on the farm with relatives, including his father and brother.

“He’s worked for us now for five or six years. He’s second-generation. His dad has been with us since about ’91,” Larsen said.

“What they’re doing today is, they’ve got their normal (rows) that they’re cutting. But we’re starting to lose people to cherries. They’re tired of cutting asparagus,” Larsen said. “These guys are such go-getters that when we lose (part of the crew), they’ll come to cut another piece.”

Hector Lopez, Larsen’s longtime foreman, called Gutierrez and his kin the farm’s “bail-out crew.”

Along with picking asparagus, Gutierrez also works in the scale house, weighing boxes of stalks.

Larsen’s operation yielded about 3.5 million pounds of asparagus this year, and “Julio has weighed every pound of that,” the farmer said.

The weighing, the picking — it’s not easy work.

Gutierrez must be meticulous and conscientious in the scale house. And in the fields he must be strong.

Asparagus is a crop that’s picked by hand.

There are a few machines that can do it, but they’re not as efficient as a worker like Gutierrez, who can tell by sight which stalks are ready and shear them off with a sure sweep of his knife.

After a while, Gutierrez finished with the far field. He hopped in a pickup truck and took a short ride to another.

Soon, he was walking a row.

He’d bend over and cut. Take a few steps. Bend over and cut some more.

Over and over.

Lopez watched, his arms crossed over his chest.

“This is one of the hardest jobs. I’ve always been a migrant worker. I’ve been in onions, I’ve been in spinach. A whole bunch. And, boy, this is one of the toughest ones,” he said.

“Every once in a while, I’ll help out here and there. Just to remind myself how hard this job is,” Lopez said.

The 55-year-old Lopez was born in Oregon and grew up in Texas, the son of laborers. He was offered a college scholarship, but “I didn’t want to leave my dad alone,” he said.

So he continued working in the fields. He and his wife, Catalina — they were high school sweethearts — have two daughters.

The girls both are in Texas. “One is married and the other one is going to college,” said Catalina, who works on Larsen’s farm with her husband.

“She wants to be a surgical nurse,” Lopez said, obviously proud.

Lopez feels a kinship with Gutierrez. He sees in the younger man someone who wants to succeed, who can be counted on.

After about an hour, Gutierrez was done picking.

He shared a little about his life with the Herald, speaking in Spanish with Lopez interpreting.

He’s from Sinaloa, Mexico, and his wife and kids — two girls and boy — still live there. He misses them, he said.

He spends the fall at home with them, returning to the U.S. in January to work in dairies and during harvest.

He’s a legal U.S. resident, and he’s working on securing the same status for his young family.

He works so hard in Larsen’s fields and at his scale house because he wants to make a better life for them, he said.

It was about 7 a.m. Gutierrez had been picking for several hours. The day wasn’t done yet.

He hopped back in the pickup truck and headed to the scale house.

He sat down in a chair, pulled out some paperwork and continued his work.

This story was originally published July 23, 2016 at 8:06 PM with the headline "24 HOURS: Farmworker labors for family in 6 a.m. hour (with video)."