Court Opinion

ID: 9470042
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 02:55:52.860274+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:41:42.164736
License: Public Domain

ROSENN, Circuit Judge,
dissenting.
I respectfully dissent because I believe that the service performed by appellant Marrero is not an activity incident to farming within the meaning of the Farm Labor Contractor Registration Act (the Act).
At the outset, I must note that under this court’s holding in Donovan v. Frezzo Brothers, Inc., 678 F.2d 1166 (1982), compost used in mushroom cultivation is not an agricultural or horticultural product within the meaning of the Act. We described the composting process as “more akin to manufacturing than to agriculture.” Id. at 1171.1 For this reason, the mere handling *798of compost — a nonagricultural product — is not an activity incident to agriculture. The question then becomes one of whether the activities engaged in by Marrero’s employees are so integral to the mushroom growing process, “a type of farming,” that we must deem those activities to be “incident to or in conjunction with such farming operations” under the Act. See 29 U.S.C. § 203(f).
A review of the stipulated facts in this case reveals that Marrero is an independent contractor engaged on an annual basis in the business of removing spent or dead compost from mushroom beds. Each mushroom grower, to whom he offers his services on a contract and fee basis, engages his services only two or three times a year after the mushroom harvest has been concluded. Under these facts, the majority conclude that the service performed by Marrero’s employees is an activity incident to agriculture sufficient to bring them within the terms of the Act because the removal of spent compost is a prerequisite to the filling in of new compost, and the production of more mushrooms. I cannot agree.
The process of deciding whether a given activity is one “incident to agriculture” necessitates judicial line drawing. The cultivation of any agricultural product will inevitably involve a wide variety of activities more or less closely related to farming. The status of certain core farming activities, such as the sowing of seeds, or the injection of mushroom spores into compost, seems clear. Yet as one moves away from these core farming activities and approaches the periphery of agricultural pursuits, the status of various activities becomes murky. Is the insect control specialist who flies over a field in a crop duster one or more times a year engaged in an activity incident to agriculture? What of the contractors who build the wooden trays in which mushrooms are grown? Are the building contractors who erect the mushroom houses, or “doubles” as they are commonly known, and the banker who finances the mushroom grower either seasonally or otherwise, and presumably inspects the premises and crop from time to time, also engaged in activities incident to agriculture? If so, are the employment practices of the contractor and banker subject to regulation under the Farm Labor Contractor Registration Act? I think not.
In the instant case, I believe that the activity performed by Marrero’s employees is not sufficiently integral to the growing process to be deemed an activity incident to agriculture. Removal of spent compost is not a step in the mushroom growing process. Rather, it is, in essence, a biannual or triannual clean-up operation, too remotely related to the mushroom growing process to be considered an integral part of it.
It is important that courts ■ distinguish between activities which are truly incident to farming, and those which are too remote from the cultivation process to be so considered. Failure to draw this distinction can only result in application of the Act in situations where Congress never contemplated its application. Congress enacted the Farm Labor Contractor Registration Act to protect migrant workers and farmers from unscrupulous middlemen who sought to exploit both groups. S.Rep. No. 202, 88th Cong., 1st Sess. (1963), reprinted in 1964 U.S.Code Cong. & Ad.News 3690. See also Donovan v. Heringer Ranches, 650 F.2d 1152 (9th Cir.1981); Marshall v. Green Goddess Avocado Corp., 615 F.2d 851 (9th Cir.1980). It did not enact the Farm Labor Contractor Registration Act to regulate the labor practices of every independent contractor who happens to perform services for any person engaged in agriculture.
In the instant case, the majority have chosen to apply the strictures of the Farm Labor Contractor Registration Act to an independent contractor who is not in the business of supplying laborers for farms. He does not traffic in labor. Marrero’s employees work directly for him and go onto the property of each mushroom grower only two or three times a year to perform a discrete task only peripherally related to the mushroom growing process.
*799I therefore dissent from the majority’s opinion which seems an unwarranted and potentially limitless expansion of the reach of the Farm Labor Contractor Registration Act. I would reverse the judgment of the district court.

. As the majority recognize, we concluded in Frezzo that
the preparation of mushroom compost was not “cultivation and tillage of the soil” because compost is not soil; that it was not the “production, cultivation, growing [or] harvesting of any agricultural commodit[y]” because compost, as distinguished from mushrooms themselves, is not an agricultural commodity but is more appropriately characterized as a manufactured product; and that it was not any other form of “farming in all its branches.”
Maj. op. at 794-95.