As a high school student, Camp helped manage the graders in the family’s potato shed. He joked that the workers knew far more about the job than he did and probably laughed among themselves while he tried to manage them. Those workers were largely families who had come to California from Arkansas, Oklahoma and Texas, many of them Dust Bowl families who arrived with very little. Later, the family’s workforce became largely Hispanic. Camp saw the same qualities he had admired in those earlier generations: hard work, loyalty and a desire to provide better opportunities for their families. He watched the children of workers grow up and pursue careers of their own. Some became attorneys. Others entered professional fields. One became Camp’s dentist. Those relationships have stayed with him and remain a part of what agriculture makes possible—not only food, but opportunity. Still Showing Up Camp has spent a lifetime working in an industry that rarely offers easy answers, and yet he remains engaged. Western Growers President and CEO Dave Puglia described Camp as “the man in the arena,” pointing to his deep understanding of California’s complicated water systems and his ability to build trust among people with competing interests. That trust has been built over decades. Camp’s own measure of success is a little less grand. It is whether the people working together managed, every once in a while, to move the needle. He didn’t set out to become a prominent figure in California agriculture. As a young man, in fact, he seemed set on becoming a doctor. Instead, his path took him somewhere else. And then, over the decades, he kept choosing to stay the course. Perhaps that is the best way to understand Camp’s legacy. He has spent a lifetime showing up for his family, his business, his community, his fellow farmers and an industry that, in his own words, still “makes something.” For a farmer, perhaps there is no better legacy than that.
29 Western Grower & Shipper | www.wga.com October – December 2026
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