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Shining Light on Farm & Food Policy for 20 Years.
Sunday, March 09, 2025
A bipartisan farm labor reform bill released Wednesday would expand the H-2A program to year-round workers and provide farms relief on wage rates, while offering legal status to existing agricultural workers who are undocumented.
Industry groups say the Trump administration's plan to make the H-2A farmworker visa program easier for growers to use would instead drive up their labor costs and create new wage disparities.
The Senate is expected to clear a stopgap spending bill this week that will keep the government operating and trade-aid payments flowing to farmers after the new fiscal year begins Oct. 1.
The Department of Labor will no longer require agricultural producers to place advertisements for H-2A jobs in print newspapers, in a move designed to boost recruiting for workers and save employers money.
A sweeping proposed overhaul of the H-2A farm labor program would have varying impacts on worker wages, while cutting farmers’ transportation expenses and reducing the number of applications farms have to file to import employees.
The Labor Department is proposing to overhaul wage requirements and streamline the application certification process for the H-2A farmworker visa program, which is under heavy demand by growers searching for new sources of labor.
One in every three producers surveyed around the country say the difficulty of finding enough workers is making it harder to operate their farms and ranches and hindering their ability to expand.
WASHINGTON, June 14, 2017 - President Trump has been in office for nearly five months, and farmers are still waiting for his administration to take steps to address the labor shortage that many producers say continues to plague the sector.
