MOSES LAKE — Members of the Moses Lake Chamber of Commerce gathered at Pillar Rock Grill Tuesday evening for the organization’s annual meeting which included the induction of Mike Laplant and Frank Martinez into the Grant County Farm Bureau’s Agriculture Hall of Fame.

“The Moses Lake Area Agricultural Hall of Fame was formed in the year 2010 to recognize and honor distinguished individuals that have made significant contributions to the ag industry in our community in the Greater Moses Lake Area,” said incoming Moses Lake Chamber of Commerce board chair and Grant County Fairgrounds Director Jim McKiernan before the awards were presented.

Peter Dufault with the Grant County Farm Bureau gave out the awards to the two honorees after describing their contributions to agriculture in the region.

Dufault said Laplant had moved to the Moses Lake area as a toddler and helped out on the family farm. He later got married and set up an alfalfa hay farm in Grant County, near Moses Lake, where he still lives and works today.

“(Laplant) has worked tirelessly to represent all farmers in Grant County over the years,” Dufault said. “As a hay grower, he worked to promote the hay industry (through) his involvement in the local hay association.”

Laplant also served as a board member for a local irrigation district which Dufault said is the lifeblood of the farming community in and around the Columbia Basin. Laplant has also been a member of the Bureau since 1994 and has served in farm bureaus at various levels, including at the state level where he served as vice president of the Washington State Farm Bureau and oversaw the Washington Environmental Policy Development Committee. He also moved on to serve as president of that state organization.

Dufault said Laplant also worked with legislators in Washington D.C. to lobby for the interests of agriculture professionals.

Laplant – who was also recognized as the chamber’s farmer of the year – said he was surprised by the award and jokingly stated he’d been lured to the event under false pretenses.

“Some of these organizations I belong to, we take a long time to get somebody an award or recognize them, and sometimes kinda posthumously,” Laplant, who was joined at the event by his wife, said.

Dufault discussed Martinez’s lifelong service to the agriculture community as starting out as a migrant farm worker from Río Bravo, Tamaulipas where he was born in 1951. Martinez’s family worked harvests in Virginia, Ohio, Michigan and Oklahoma – among others – prior to eventually settling in Washington.

“In the beginning, (Martinez) remembers sleeping in a little shack or barns on a piece of cardboard on the floor using gunny sacks as a pillow and blankets,” Dufault said.

Since then, Martinez has founded his own farm which he has grown from 125 acres to now owning more than a thousand acres of his own property and large amounts of leased land to grow additional crops in the area. This is in addition to the storage units that store tens of thousands of tons of potatoes, tractor-trailers and other farming equipment.

Martinez has also represented Washington farmers through an appearance on the show “Washington Grown” and other TV appearances – including one Super Bowl ad.

Martinez’s work for the potato industry has garnered him the nickname “Potato King” and has been featured in several national periodicals.

“It’s been a pleasure (serving the industry),” Martinez said. “I grew up as a farm worker traveling around the country, settling in Warden in ‘53 and live in the city for a long time now, in Moses Lake. … Everywhere I go, I try to promote potatoes because that’s been my life and that will be my life until the end.”

R. Hans Miller may be reached at rmiller@columbiabasinherald.com.