What agriculture needs now is more labor

Those of us living and working in rural and small town America have a message for our city cousins. We need workers and we need them now. Whether we’re making maple syrup in Vermont, picking apples in Washington, harvesting grapes in California, milking cows in Wisconsin, processing peaches in Georgia, feeding pigs in Iowa, packing pickles in Michigan or trail-driving in Colorado, we need access to a dependable source of ag labor. We’ve become increasingly dependent over the years on migrant labor, legal and illegal, to help run our farms, ranches, processing plants and service industries. Therein lies agriculture’s labor woes. Sourcing legal migrant labor is getting harder and harder for America’s food producers. Why don’t we hire local workers from the community? We wish we could. Our neighbors don’t want to work under farm conditions for the prevailing pay scale. In fact, we are required to advertise and offer jobs to local residents before we can qualify to hire temporary migrant workers under the Labor Department’s H-2A program. Agriculture employers have not experienced much success hiring local labor for many years. Unfortunately, most domestic workers don’t show up for the job, or when they do, they tend quit within a few days. Jobs in agriculture are physically demanding, conducted in all seasons and are often transitory.