Labor

RSS

Companies serving the U.S. agriculture sector are bracing for trade frictions in early 2025 by frontloading imports and diverting shipments to ease the impacts of a possible port strike and tariff hikes.

In 2024, rural America played a large role in carrying Donald Trump to the White House for a second time. Across the country, hurricanes damaged ag infrastructure in Florida, the Carolinas and the Southeastern U.S., and H5N1 spread to dairy cattle. 

After months of development, the farm bill passed out of the House Ag Committee with four Democratic votes and guarded optimism, but it never even made it to the House floor, ultimately leading to another one-year extension of the 2018 farm bill.

Congressional leaders were nailing down the final details of a stopgap spending bill Monday night that was expected to include $10 billion in economic assistance for farmers, as well as a one-year farm bill extension, sources tell Agri-Pulse.

The Adverse Effect Wage Rate that farmers are required to pay H-2A workers is rising by an average of 4.47% nationally to $17.74 per hour, according to list of 2025 wage rates published in a Federal Register notice Monday.

President-elect Donald Trump on Thursday signaled support for unionized dockworkers' calls to bar automation at East and Gulf Coast ports amid tense labor negotiations that may result in a mid-January strike. 

The Labor Department will have to keep farmworkers informed of enforcement efforts, under a settlement reached with six farmworker groups.

Federal and state court judges have blocked the proposed merger of Kroger and Albertsons after finding the scale of the divestiture plan, which involves selling about 580 stores to C&S Wholesale Grocers, cannot make up for the loss of competition that would result from the merger.

The world’s largest commodity trader plans to slash about 8,000 of its global 164,000-person workforce as part of a sweeping effort to cut costs and restructure. 

President-elect Donald Trump is setting up a cabinet of unusually diverse views and backgrounds that together could have a far-reaching impact on the food and agriculture sectors. Farm groups will be counting on his pick to lead USDA, Brooke Rollins, to be an advocate for ag within an administration. North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum could be a key ally on energy policy.

Provisions in a Labor Department rule addressing the treatment and pay of H-2A farmworkers have been enjoined by a federal judge who ruled Monday the department exceeded its authority or did not adequately explain why it was changing its regulations.