That was the rumor that Marsha Habib heard. The co-owner of Oya Organics in Hollister, a 20-acre organic farm on California’s Central Coast, learned about the cherished H-2A visa three years ago. Faced with a sudden labor shortage in 2019, she and her husband, Modesto Sanchez-Cruz, found themselves considering the federal program, which permits U.S. farms to hire foreign seasonal workers when qualified locals are unavailable.

To the two small-scale farmers, however, the relevant information was confoundingly scarce. “It was something we’d heard about,” recalls Habib, “but didn’t have a clue as to how to apply.”

Fortuitously, her cousin, Michael Guirguis, an entrepreneur with a background in labor policy and economics, stepped in to help. As he unraveled volumes of complicated regulations and a process laden with paperwork, he started developing a digital platform for managing the unwieldy workflow.

Along the way, he turned their bureaucratic quagmire into a golden opportunity by founding SESO, a San Francisco-based startup that streamlines the H-2A program. Given the rapid decline in domestic farmworkers—a trend spurred by an aging workforce and anti-immigration policies—the 37-year-old guest worker program is in desperate need of reform, says Guirguis. 

The end-to-end digital platform—a first among the small number of existing H-2A agencies—leads agricultural employers through a complex maze of federal and state labor laws, helping them stay on top of a long compliance checklist. SESO’s modernized solution promises greater transparency and accountability for the antiquated system, one susceptible to employer violations and worker abuse.

In order to ensure an adequate labor force, there’s a heightened need to make the process more efficient, accessible and transparent for both employers and employees alike.

Otherwise, “we’ll be importing more fruits and vegetables,” says Guirguis, “while our crops are left rotting in the fields.”

A group of farm workers making their way to the US with the help of SESO. Photography courtesy of SESO.

Labor shortages have long plagued American farms. Between 1950 and 1990, the number of hired and family farmworkers declined by 51 percent and 74 percent, respectively, contributing to $3.3 billion in missed GDP growth in 2012 alone.

From 1942 to 1964, millions of Mexican guest workers helped fill the gap through short-term contracts issued by the Bracero Program. The H-2A program began in 1986, opening the field to other eligible countries—a list that currently totals 81—although more than 90 percent still hail from Mexico. In the past decade, program participation has grown at a steady clip, increasing nearly four-fold in a decade, reaching 275,000 in 2020.

Yet, despite no cap on quota, seasonal guest workers filled only 15 percent of the country’s 2.4 million available farm jobs last year. Critics, including Guirguis, point to the program’s numerous pitfalls. “It’s a complicated, highly fragmented process of working with multiple government agencies and timelines,” he says, with much of it still “done with pen and paper, spreadsheets and filing cabinets.”

And errors and oversight can have costly consequences. In addition to steep fines for violations, administrative delays often result in the late arrival of workers; two years ago, an Oregon farmer lost some $180,000 worth of asparagus while his crew languished for weeks at the U.S.-Mexico border.

H-2A is also rife with worker abuse and exploitation, some of which echo descriptions of its predecessor (the U.S. Department of Labor officer in charge of the Bracero Program ultimately shut it down, calling it “legalized slavery”). Recently, there have been similar accounts of H-2A workers facing brutal labor and housing conditions, wage theft and illegal production quotas, with one recent, high-profile crackdown exposing a human trafficking ring that used H-2A visas to lure thousands of victims to farms in Georgia. Meanwhile, domestic workers have accused employers of displacing them with foreign workers and giving them preferential treatment through better pay and hours.

Most growers, however, simply want to follow the rules, says Daniel Ross, SESO’s in-house compliance attorney. But the rolls of red tape and hyper-technical regulations make it easy for employers to quickly fall out of compliance. “For a farmer who’s focused on raising and getting their crop to market before it spoils, it’s just a mountain of paperwork,” says Ross, noting that the audit-heavy program stipulates a rigid, 48-hour window for compiling documents.

“It would take days to create a paper file that captures all of that information,” he notes. And without proper documentation, “you have no way of proving that you’re in compliance.”

The transparent system also enhances worker protections, assuring workers they will not have to pay recruitment fees or transportation costs (both of which are illegal under H-2A) and allowing direct, fee-free payment transfers. And since closing $25 million in Series A funding last year, SESO opened a Mexico office that helps workers handle immigration logistics, including co-ordinating consulate visits and obtaining the actual visa.

Beyond support in navigating the onboarding process, however, functionality on the worker end is limited to safety videos, detailing employee rights and information on reporting employer violation. Building an actual reporting feature into the interface wouldn’t be “practically possible because of the need to protect [complainant] anonymity,” says Ross. “It’s our responsibility to make sure workers know where and how to report [abuses] and that they know their rights.

Photography by Shutterstock.

Despite bi-partisan support and wide endorsement by farming organizations and advocates, two bills aimed at comprehensive H-2A reform—the Farm Worker Modernization Act and the Affordable and Secure Food Act—failed to pass late last year.

Both called to stabilize the Adverse Effect Wage Rate (AEWR) or the minimum pay rate for H-2A farmworkers. Set annually by the federal government, it can fluctuate dramatically by state—last year, Florida’s increased by 2.7 percent while Pennsylvania’s jumped by 10 percent—and creates budgetary headaches for growers. The proposed fix would have also extended federal domestic farmworker protections to H-2A participants and given them flexibility to prolong or modify their contracts without jeopardizing their visas.

Any meaningful reform needs to bolster the rights of H-2A workers, says Antonio De Loera-Brust, communications director for United Farm Workers (UFW). “Many growers want to streamline the H-2A program to reduce costs,” he notes, yet job safety and welfare are too often sacrificed in the name of efficiency.

Foreign guest workers still lack basic legal protections that are given to domestic counterparts, says De Loera-Brust, noting that they’re excluded from the Migrant and Seasonal Agricultural Worker Protection Act, which stipulates health and safety standards. “In a system where your visa and housing are dependent on your employer, it’s far too easy for bad actors to get away with abuse,” he says. “We want to make sure that H-2A workers are not the next iteration of the Bracero program.”

Last year, the Department of Labor issued several program amendments; while falling far short of comprehensive reform, they do increase some wage, housing and transportation protections, as well as employer accountability. Ultimately though, ensuring compliance is key to worker welfare, says Guirguis—and automating and digitizing the heavy paper trail leaves “much less potential for oversight and abuse.”

“There’s an incredible amount of institutional knowledge baked into [SESO’s] technology,” says Tyler Rodrigue, CEO of Noble Vineyard Management in Ukiah, California. As a licensed farm labor contractor, his company relies on the platform to make H-2A hires for more than 55 small and family-owned vineyards in Northern California.

Rodrigue acknowledges the high costs of hiring H-2A workers: Along with housing and transportation, his entire crew—both foreign and domestic—is entitled to the AEWR. And because California’s rate is higher than its state minimum wage, it increases expenses by almost a third. “But this program allows us to do hiring right,” he says, noting that the near-85-percent worker return rate reflects the well-placed efforts.

Between drought, the pandemic and flooding, farmers have enough to battle, adds Oya Organic’s Habib. “So, not needing to worry about whether we’ll be able to find enough labor is a huge relief.”

The post Why This Company Says the Popular H-2A Visa is Overdue for a Tech Upgrade appeared first on Modern Farmer.

The Migrant Workers Alliance for Change has tagged tables in hundreds of restaurants in Ottawa, Toronto and surrounding areas with large political offices with the codes. The codes  appear to be menus; but upon first scan, they instead showcase the exploitative working conditions faced by many foreign farm workers. 

The “To-Die-For Sweet Potato Fries” item, for example, tells the tale of a potato harvester from Jamaica named Garvin Yapp who was killed in a farming accident in southern Ontario last summer. The “Bitter Strawberry Tart” explains the 18-hour days some workers spend harvesting strawberries on their hands and knees—most of the time under the hot summer sun. Those who come in contact with these secret menus are also directed to a petition that calls on the Canadian government to provide better labor conditions for migrant workers and to grant them permanent resident status. 

Robert, a greenhouse worker from Jamaica who has been in Canada for the past seven years with temporary resident status, is no stranger to such conditions. He tells Modern Farmer he hasn’t had a day off since the pandemic began in 2020. He came to work on Canadian farms in hopes of building a better life for himself. 

“The moment I got off the plane, it didn’t take long to realize all of our rights were taken, our rights have been forgotten,” he says. “We do what [the employer] wants us to do. We can’t say no because the moment we stand up to say no… I will be told that I can go home, back to where I came from.” 

Robert has seen cases where injured workers were prevented from going to the hospital because businesses were worried about the visit raising the price of their insurance. He’s spent long days with fellow workers in unventilated greenhouses, where the air is thick and pesticide-ridden. 

“I had problems breathing. I had coworkers with constant headaches. Sometimes, you have people throwing up, blood coming out from their nostrils,” Robert recalls. 

The Migrant Workers Alliance for Change has documented these issues and other examples where farmworkers say their employers subjected them to crowded, substandard housing, long hours and unsafe working conditions that threaten their health. And those who want to raise concerns, like Robert indicated, fear they will be deported or barred from coming back into the country. Canadian studies have also illustrated the bleak reality of these conditions where, between January 2020 and June 2021, nine migrant agricultural workers died in Ontario.

Workers like Robert believe permanent residency status will help them better assert their rights, grant them access to social services such as health care without the permission of their employer and allow many workers to reunite with their families in Canada. Prime Minister Trudeau  promised  a change in status for all temporary foreign workers in his 2021 immigration policy priorities. 

Canada brings in more than 60,000 seasonal agricultural workers each year, under the  Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP), which allows Canadian employers to hire temporary migrant workers from Mexico and 11 countries in the Caribbean. 

Photography courtesy of Migrant Workers Alliance for Change.

As politicians headed back to the House of Commons in Ottawa at the end of January, organizer Luisa Ortiz-Garza says it was the perfect opportunity to launch the campaign and get attention from both civilians and politicians. 

“We thought, what better way of making people part of our fight than showing them what it takes for the food to reach their tables while they’re at the table—the hidden cost,” she says. “What we are really saying is that our workers need equal rights and deserve to live a dignified life with their families.” 

Ortiz-Garza says the response to the campaign has been overwhelming. The group has  garnered thousands of signatures since the initiative began in late January. She notes, however, that momentum is building and QR stickers will eventually be plastered inside the country’s east and west coast provinces over the next few weeks. The organization says they will continue to campaign until the Canadian government fulfills its promise. It is planning to hold an event this weekend and another one in late March, centering around the secret menu initiative and its request for permanent residency. Ortiz-Garza says details would be published on the organization’s website in the near future.

As for Robert, regardless of how successful the campaign ends up being, he says he will continue to find ways to speak up and speak out. 

“I’m never going to be tired of telling my story, until the world knows what migrant workers are faced with,” he says. “If people are enjoying a cucumber or a pepper and it comes from Canada, I am one of the persons who helped to have that get to their table. I hope at least they think about the people on the ground who make this happen.”

The post Farmworkers in Canada Hack Menus, Protest for Better Labor Conditions appeared first on Modern Farmer.

The Hmong American Farmers Association (HAFA)—an association founded in 2011 by a group of farmers in Minnesota looking to advocate for Hmong American farmers in the state—says that the recent purchase of 155 acres of Minnesota farmland marks the first time in American history that Hmong farmers own and operate their own farm operation on US soil. 

For years, the farmers rented the acreage, located in the Vermillion Township (Dakota County) of Minnesota. Now, 16 Hmong families—all members of the HAFA—chipped in to purchase and share the land. 

Access to land ownership has been a long-time hurdle for BIPOC farmers. According to USDA and census data, Black, Indigenous and other people of color cultivate less than one percent of American farmland, regardless of accounting for nearly one-quarter of the country’s population. 

And according to the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, access to land is the number one barrier that new farmers face. And with centuries of structural racism within the pathway to land ownership for farmers, the burden of acquiring land is historically heavier for farmers of color—resulting in white farmers owning 98 percent of American farmland. 

The recent purchase, finalized in early October, marks a major milestone for the HAFA, which took to social media to celebrate the achievement. The association and farmers purchased the land with money acquired through grants and community support. 

Of the 155 acres of land purchased, 125 acres are tillable. Currently, vegetables and crops such as corn, tomatoes, parsley, green beans and cabbage are cultivated on the land. As of now, the produce grown on the farm is sold at farmers’ markets and supplies food to a seasonal subscription service as well as a program called Veggie RX. The Veggie RX program is run with the intention of mitigating malnutrition and hunger through produce donation. 

In the near future, the HAFA hopes to raise enough money to purchase 1,000 fruit trees to add to the swath of land.

The post The Country’s First Hmong-Owned and -Operated Farm appeared first on Modern Farmer.

As Ruth Conniff reports in her new book, Milked: How an American Crisis Brought Together Midwestern Dairy Farmers and Mexican Workers (out today from The New Press), the reduction in American dairy farms has impacted generations of people and moved beyond borders. The longtime journalist and editor-in-chief of the Wisconsin Examiner spent a year looking closely at the changes in American dairy farms. A common element on most farms she visited: Mexican workers. Conniff set out to explore how American reliance on Mexican labor bonded these two seemingly disparate groups so tightly.

As Conniff writes, the fall of dairy farms on American soil coincided with a period of crisis in Mexico, which sent “millions of subsistence farmers off their land, sending them into the cities and walking across the desert looking for work.” 

The impetus for these concurring dilemmas, says Conniff, was the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, which was enacted in 1994. Under NAFTA, goods could be sold across the three participating countries (Canada, Mexico and the US) with reduced tariffs—or no tariffs at all. Cheap US corn flooded the Mexican market, causing thousands of Mexican farmers to go bankrupt when they could no longer sell their crop locally, eventually causing them to need to migrate north in search of work. “The rural parts of Mexico are suffering, in a more intense way, from some of the same forces that are afflicting rural parts of Wisconsin and Minnesota,” says Conniff. “Big Food and Big Ag are making it really hard to make a living for smaller farmers.” 

Those Mexican workers will often cross the US border illegally to work on dairy farms. While the H2-A visa allows agricultural workers entry to the country, it’s a temporary visa designed for seasonal work. Dairy farming, on the other hand, is year-round. No such visa exists for those workers. 

RELATED: Can Biodigesters Save America’s Small Dairy Farms?

“Circular migration is sort of a hallmark of Mexican workers in the United States,” Conniff explains. She describes a federal program from the 1950s, aimed at supplementing a labor shortage after World War II, which brought undocumented workers across the border to work on farms and in agricultural processing. “The flow back and forth across the border was very easy. Now, we have a militarized border and a moral panic about immigration, but people are still coming. And they’re still carrying whole US industries, especially agriculture, but they’re doing it under really dangerous conditions. And it’s really expensive.”

Conniff focused on a group of farmers in Wisconsin, each of whom employs Mexican workers. In alternating chapters, Conniff tells the stories of the farmers and then their workers, moving swiftly across the border to paint a picture of how  and why these folks are tied so tightly together—especially in the wake of the 2016 presidential election. 

“Most of the [farmers] I talked to voted for Trump, in spite of the fact that they are deeply involved with and completely economically dependent on these undocumented workers from Mexico,” says Conniff.  She describes one farmer named John who, at first, had reservations about employing undocumented workers. Desperate, he cast his doubts aside. 

“The documents John’s employees show him are almost certainly fake,” Conniff writes in the book. “John takes a don’t-ask-don’t-tell approach. Even his most ardent Trump-supporting neighbors agree with him on this issue: American agriculture would collapse without undocumented immigrant labor.” 

Part of the reason these farmers can hold these seemingly opposing views, Conniff reasons, comes back to NAFTA. Trump promised to do away with the agreement throughout his presidential campaign, once calling it the “worst trade deal” the US had ever signed. (In 2020, with NAFTA dissolved, the three countries entered into the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement instead.) “The way the farmers themselves explain it is to say ‘he doesn’t really mean it,’ or ‘yeah, he’s a loudmouth, but he’s going to do the right thing.’”

In that way, says Conniff, farmers were able to turn a blind eye to the president’s less palatable traits, such as Trump describing Mexicans as rapists, after stating “they’re bringing” drugs and crime across the border. Perhaps this was a bout of cognitive dissonance, or maybe it was willful ignorance. Either way, Conniff describes the American farmers bonding with their Mexican workers, even while some farmers still voted against their workers’ best interests. 

Many of those workers are conflicted as well. Just as important as speaking with the farm owners was hearing directly from the Mexican farmworkers. For many of the folks with whom Conniff spoke, the money they can make in the United States keeps their families fed and housed back home in Mexico. Conniff interviewed several farmers who sent money back to build houses, put their kids through school or started businesses. Still, their lives are often difficult. One woman Conniff interviewed, named Blandina, says that the farmers she and her husband work with treat them well, but there’s the expectation that they will work constantly and for less money than American colleagues. “Our labor is exploited,” Blandina told Conniff. So Blandina and her husband Pablo keep their goals in mind: sending their daughter to university and eventually moving home. 

RELATED: American Agriculture’s Reliance on Foreign Workers Surges

Of course, not every farmworker goes back to Mexico. As people build lives and communities in the United States, it becomes harder to leave. Conniff interviewed one family whose two sons were born in Wisconsin, making them US citizens. With kids, it’s even harder and more expensive to traverse the border, so the parents often stay put for years. And then “the kids go to high school, and potentially on to college in the United States, and they cannot imagine going back to subsistence living in a remote village in Mexico,” says Conniff. Now, there are “parents who have always dreamed of going back…and you have the kids who become increasingly distant from that idea.”

That’s where groups that advocate on behalf of agricultural workers come in. There are campaigns across the country pushing for legislation to help undocumented workers and their families. Conniff writes about the Wisconsin Farmers Union, which works in tandem with immigrant rights activists to push for driver’s licenses for undocumented workers. There’s also Voces de la Frontera, a worker-led organization dedicated to immigration reform and workers’ rights. While those groups, and others like them, push for change, Conniff says it’s important to take stock of where we are presently. “We have this two-decade-old economic relationship that is absolutely baked into the way we run our dairy and agricultural economy,” she says. “It’s a fantasy to think that you’re just going to build a wall, and this will end, and it will be the best economically for the United States.”

Instead, Conniff says that after her year reporting this book, she has come to recognize the importance of a legal year-round visa for agricultural work as a clear first step. The idea has bipartisan support, and it simply acknowledges the real work that people are doing. “Then the bigger question is, how do people live livable lives? How do we have sustainable work lives and sustainable food, and people don’t have to smuggle themselves in the trunk of a car across the border?” Conniff asks. “And how do we [preserve] those beautiful small farms that have made Wisconsin such a lovely place?”

Milked reaches far beyond the people its author profiled. The stories are personal and universal, stretching into farms and fields across the country and over borders. Farmers and workers will continue to be bonded together by the economic demands of both countries. 

In the meantime, the number of dairy farms in the country continues to drop.

The post In New Book, Relationship Between US Dairy Farmers and Mexican Workers Laid Bare appeared first on Modern Farmer.

While the market for fresh fruits and vegetables has increased over the past 30 years, it seems American consumers are increasingly seeing produce from outside of the country on shelves. In 2019, the US imported more than 40 percent of its fresh fruit—a huge jump from 2001, when the country brought in only 20 percent of all fruit. The report found that, in addition to bananas, which have historically always come from outside of the country, fruits such as raspberries, avocados and pineapples are now mainly imported from other countries. Fresh veggies don’t fare any better, with the US importing 16 billion pounds of vegetables in 2019, including 99 percent of all asparagus you see in produce departments.

This increased reliance on imported fruits and vegetables impacts growers, workers and farmland. In the past two decades, land dedicated to growing produce has decreased by more than six percent, with the largest drop coming from groves of citrus fruit.

Why is the US continuing to bring in more produce rather than grow production in our own backyard? The report posits a few theories.

First, there are fewer self-employed and family farmers working today than there were in the mid-20th century. The rate of hired agricultural workers and farm hands has also dropped, and workers are, on average, getting older. In 2019, less than 20 percent of farm workers were under 25, and nearly half of workers were 45 years old or older. This suggests that as farm hands and agricultural workers age out of the industry, they aren’t being replaced by younger workers. Fewer workers means less picking and harvesting, with less produce making it to the shelves.

The NAE also notes that labor costs on fruit and vegetable farms are higher than the average farm, which only contributes to the staffing shortages. Labor makes up about a third of the cost on fruit farms and nearly a quarter of costs on vegetable farms. With the labor force aging and fewer young people joining the workforce, economists at the NAE expect labor costs to continue to rise to attract new people.

Year after year, the demand for labor continues to grow. Since 2010, the number of H2-A visas that the US has issued has nearly tripled, to more than 280,000 visas in 2020. Those visas allow temporary foreign workers to come to America for up to 10 months and work for an agricultural employer. Farms rely on seasonal labor to help during planting and harvesting, and year after year, that demand has grown. The NAE found that the majority of H2-A visa applications specified that workers would handle apples, blueberries and strawberries—all fruits that require a specific skill set and gentle handling during harvesting. Increasing the number of temporary visas and focusing on creating a consistent workforce would pay dividends for these farmers.

While imported fruits and vegetables offer benefits for consumers—such as increased variety of produce available all year round and competition keeping prices stable—it can be difficult for smaller farms to compete with the amount of produce brought into the country every year. The NAE report doesn’t suggest what consumers or producers should do about that, but it seems clear that the next decade will be a tipping point for the sector. Will Americans refocus on local produce and eating seasonally or will global availability and resources win out?

The post So Much For Eating Local appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Called Fruits of Labor, the documentary follows 18-year-old Ashley Pavon as she juggles working her two jobs while navigating school and family obligations. The film is centered in Watsonville, California, a coastal city near Santa Cruz, where strawberries are the main crop and where many residents are connected to the agricultural sector. To help support her family, Ashley finds jobs picking strawberries that are clumped tightly together in huge rows and packing frozen strawberries in a processing plant.

Although Ashley’s is just one story, filmmaker and director Emily Cohen Ibañez aimed to highlight the realities of so many agricultural workers, many of them teens like Ashley, who have to labor under harsh conditions while just barely scraping by. Ashley and her family live in a cramped house with another family, sharing one washroom among 12 people. It’s a reality for many Americans, says Cohen Ibañez. “We have half a million children today working in agricultural fields, despite it being one of the most dangerous forms of work in the United States.”

Filmmaker and director Emily Cohen Ibañez. Photo by Andy Lemmis.

Throughout the film, there’s a sense of dread that permeates each scene. We watch as Ashley shops for a prom dress with a looming unease. We see Ashley and her mother, Beatriz, lying on a bed, talking about her nail polish, but things are tense. Even as Ashley smiles and hangs out  with her boyfriend or her siblings or her friends, a heavy question hangs over every moment of the film and Ashley’s own life: Will Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers show up today?

“There is a constant threat of not knowing when you could be swept up in a raid,” says Cohen Ibañez. “When Ashley came to me and said, ‘Oh, when I turn 18, I’m going to adopt my siblings in case my mom gets deported,’ I kind of freaked out.” The film shows Ashley and Beatriz meeting with a lawyer to walk through the process of making Ashley a legal guardian of her siblings in case the worst happens. (Beatriz has since started the process of citizenship and documentation).

Through Fruits of Labor, Cohen Ibañez wants to show the finesse involved in these jobs that are often dismissed as easy or unskilled. “We did a lot of slow motion in the field, and we had to ask Ashley to slow down to capture her picking the strawberries, because she moves so fast,” she says.

As the main breadwinner of the family, Ashley carries an incredible amount of responsibility on her shoulders, and Cohen Ibañez wanted to tap into that inner world in the film. Ashley narrates much of the documentary, talking about her hopes and dreams for the future—such as graduating high school, going to college and helping her siblings and her mother. She and Cohen Ibañez worked together to write the voiceover, and Ashley is credited as co-writer of the film. “It was very intentional to have Ashley be a part of the authorship of her own story,” says Cohen Ibañez. “I wanted this perspective of the complex young woman, and I wanted to show the universal struggles of a teenager coming of age, but within her particular situation and within the precarity of this contemporary moment.”

Ashley and her mother, Beatriz. Photo by Gabriella Garcia-Pardo.

Cohen Ibañez honed in on the little things that make up teenage-hood today, “whether it’s finding the right prom dress or worrying about your grades or falling in love for the first time and the teenage reflections on one’s existence.” At the same time, it’s clear that Ashley carries burdens that other teens do not. She’s not sure if she’ll graduate high school, for instance, because she often misses class to work her two jobs. She takes on the responsibility of caring for and financially supporting her younger siblings. She works to cultivate a community garden for people in her community, especially welcoming undoumented immigrants to join in the process. “I was impressed by her, and I was drawn towards her,” Cohen Ibañez says. “I loved learning her view on berries, for example, that her ancestors lived with the wild berries; I thought that was beautiful.”

Cohen Ibañez hopes that people watching the film will think deeply about the food chains on which we all rely and about who is involved at each step of the process. “To me, the food system is working for a very small percentage of people, but for the majority of us, it’s a broken system,” she says. “This is essential labor. We need it. Without farmworkers, we’re not going to make it. We aren’t going to grow all our food. It is great to garden. I love gardening, but most of us don’t have the capacity and the bandwidth to grow all of our food we need.”

The slice of life that Fruits of Labor explores underscores the need to elevate agricultural jobs and see farm workers as essential to both the economy and local communities. “Give that work the dignity and respect they deserve. A living wage, good bathrooms, hazard pay. We have these wildfires now [where farmworkers] are getting asthma and health problems,” says Cohen Ibañez. “This is treating people as if they’re not full human beings. We need to change that.”

Fruits of Labor debuts on PBS today, and is available for streaming on pbs.com. 

The post In New Documentary, the Realities of the American Food System Are Laid Bare appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Linnea Kooistra’s roots in farming go back 10 generations. She and her husband, Joel, were both raised on dairy farms, and they operated their own in Woodstock, Illinois, for over 40 years. But in 2018, they were confronted with the hard decision of selling their herd of almost 300 cows.

After months of deliberation, they decided to sell the herd in part because they relied on immigrant workers to care for and milk the cows, and they feared losing their workforce.

“The labor situation, you know, it was just so hostile,” Kooistra said. “We were just worried that we’d lose our labor pool. We couldn’t do it, the two of us. There was just so much work. We just couldn’t do it.”

Farming generates $19 billion annually in Illinois, according to the state Department of Agriculture, and the state is among the top producers of commodities such as corn, soybean and pork. But farmers say they struggle to find local workers. As the farming industry faces a severe labor shortage, producers rely overwhelmingly on foreign-born workers to maintain crops and tend livestock.

Kooistra had three full-time employees and two part-time workers on the farm. She and her husband found it was becoming increasingly difficult to find employees willing to be at the farm at 4 a.m. to tend the cows, so around the year 2000, they switched to an immigrant workforce.

“People have different reasons why they would not like to work on a farm,” Kooistra said. “From my experience, at a certain point, there were just no longer people interested in working on farms, so once we switched to an immigrant workforce, we were able to attract employees and quality employees.”

The labor pool for those who want to work on a farm is small and isn’t expected to get any bigger. Employment of agricultural workers is projected to only grow 1 percent from 2019 to 2029, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics—slower than all other industries.

In 2020, there were 6,260 workers in farming, fishing and forestry occupations in Illinois, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. Nationwide, according to the latest Farm Labor Survey, there were 613,000 workers hired directly by farm operators last April, an 11 percent decrease compared to April 2020.

Meanwhile, the reliance on the H-2A temporary agricultural program has steadily increased over the years. The number of workers with H-2A visas in Illinois worksites went up by 266.5 percent in five years, from 809 in 2015 to 2,965 in 2020.

Nationwide, between 2010 and 2019, the number of certified H-2A positions in the US rose by more than 220 percent, according to a USDA data analysis. All areas of agriculture saw an increase, but the growth in H-2A employment was more pronounced in product categories with high labor requirements and seasonal jobs, including fruit and tree nuts, vegetables and melons.

Adam Nielsen, Illinois Farm Bureau’s director of national legislation and policy development, said teenagers used to do seasonal labor in the past, but they have moved on to other jobs. Agricultural labor, he said, is not particularly attractive for local workers because it’s intense.

“If you’re not able to find people,” Nielsen said, “either you do it yourself or you exit that part of the industry.”

Hog farmers feel the burden

Central Illinois pork producer Phil Borgic, owner of Borgic Farms, Inc., started farming after he graduated from college in 1978. He first started noticing a decrease in farm workers about 20 years ago. The labor pool, he said, has been getting smaller since then. Borgic said the biggest hurdle in attracting workers is that people “don’t know what we do everyday.”

“It’s not working in slop and mud all day,” said Borgic, adding that the facilities are ventilated and clean. “That’s been a conscious effort on my part—upgrade our facilities, plenty of light, make things clean and appealing to our workers, besides being friendly to our pigs.”

Mike Haag is a fourth-generation hog farmer in Emington, Illinois. He raises 17,000 hogs a year on his family farm. The number of hogs at the farm has decreased in recent years in part because of labor shortage. At the moment, he has two full-time employees. Six years ago, when the farm had sows, he employed 12 people.

“This last winter, I spent two and a half months by myself out here trying to do it all myself,” Haag said. “We’re looking at reducing our numbers again, just because I’m to the point where I don’t want to have to do it all.”

For individual farmers, he said, it’s difficult to compete with larger employers that are able to offer their workers benefits.

“A lot of bigger corporations can put together benefit packages way cheaper than what small individual farmers can,” Haag said. “I mean, just to, to present like a health insurance package for a family that’s working for you is at a cost. Well, we priced some last year to try to come up with a health insurance plan, and it was going to cost us between $17,000 and $20,000 a year to come up with a health insurance program.”

For a few years, he hired foreign workers through the H-2A program. The seasonal agricultural program allows employers to bring in foreign workers to fill temporary jobs. One of the requirements to qualify for the program is to prove that there are not enough U.S. workers available to do the work.

“We worked with a lot of South Africans that came up through a visa program, and for a while, that worked pretty good,” said Haag, who brought workers through the program for about 10 years. “But it became harder and harder to get the help, and it was seasonal. They could only be here for nine months.”

Haag stopped hiring foreign workers through the program about six years ago largely because of the cost.

The program requires employers to pay for workers’ transportation and provide housing. H-2A workers must be paid a government set wage. In Illinois, this year’s rate is $15.31 an hour, an amount above the state’s $11 minimum wage.

Last year, according to the USDA, the average duration of an H-2A certification was 5.6 months. Despite the coronavirus pandemic, which limited movement across borders, the number of foreign workers employed in Illinois under H-2A visas between 2019 and 2020 went up 15.2 percent.

Labor advocates have long pointed out flaws in the program and have called it exploitative, particularly because of guest workers’ dependence on their employers.

For Mariyam Hussain, supervisory attorney of Legal Aid Chicago’s migrant farmworker project, an increase in workers who hold H-2A visas is cause for concern because they could be taken advantage of by employers.

“They may not have community ties, and they depend on their employers for housing, food, water, wages, all of which is generally included in the H-2A  job orders in the contracts,” Hussain said. “And so if an employer is a bad employer, which happens a lot, and doesn’t provide the adequate amount of food, water, or adequate housing, there’s not a lot they could do.”

A bipartisan farm worker bill

The Farm Workforce Modernization Act aims to make changes to the guestworker H-2A program and provide a pathway to citizenship to agricultural workers. The bipartisan bill, passed by the House in March, is now stuck in the Senate, as legislators debate over immigration.

The proposed legislation would expand the H-2A program, streamlining the process and providing visas to year-round producers such as dairy and hog farmers. The bill would also freeze the minimum wage employers are required to pay guest workers.

The bill has strong backing from farm owners. Organizations representing producers such as the National Pork Producers Council are pushing for the proposed legislation to be passed, advocating for year-round access to the H-2A program without a limit on the number of visas issued.

Large groups that advocate farm workers such as United Farm Workers and Farmworker Justice support the bill, highlighting its significance in providing a pathway to citizenship for the roughly 1 million undocumented agricultural workers.

Smaller grassroots organizations, however, have expressed concern and disappointment over the bill, The Counter reported. Some groups that oppose the proposed legislation say it does “nothing to address the root causes of labor exploitation that farmworkers face on a daily basis.” The Food Chain Workers Alliance argues the bill would “make conditions even more difficult” for laborers and expands the H-2A program without providing oversight.

The Senate Judiciary Committee, chaired by Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin (D), on July 21 held a hearing on the bill, which included testimonies from Kooistra and Secretary of Agriculture Thomas Vilsack.

“I urge my Congressional colleagues here today to meet this moment of bipartisanship efforts and move legislation forward this year that provides legal status and a path to citizenship for farmworkers—securing a reliable workforce for our agriculture industry—as well as legislation that provides a living wage for these essential workers along with strong labor protections,” Vilsack said at the hearing, marking the first testimony from a secretary of agriculture before the committee in two decades.

Kooistra made a similar plea to the senators. She said current workers who are undocumented deserve to work toward citizenship and advocated for the expansion of the H-2A program to give dairy farmers access to guest workers year-round.

“Do we want our food produced in this country where we have the safest food supply in the world?” Kooistra asked the committee. “The ag labor crisis on our farms is an issue of national security that must be addressed, and it must be addressed now.”

Amanda Perez Pintado is a corps member with Report for America, a national service program that places journalists into local newsrooms.

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The first version of a massive omnibus bill, called the US Citizenship Act of 2021, was officially introduced into Congress this week by Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey and Representative Linda Sánchez of California. Given that somewhere over a million (getting specific numbers is tricky) of America’s farmworkers are undocumented, this is also a major issue for agriculture. So, what’s in the bill?

The biggest part of the proposal concerns a path to citizenship for basically all undocumented people in the United States. Provided they pass a background check and pay taxes, all undocumented people in the country will have the option of getting onto a track to citizenship: five years of following these rules and paying taxes, then the standard green card process. 

“Congress should pass this bill immediately,” said Bruce Goldstein, president of the advocacy group Farmworker Justice, in a press release. Farmworker Justice notes that the proposed bill includes many elements of the Fairness for Farm Workers Act of 2019, which was an attempt to fix some of the labor laws related to farmworkers. One major inclusion: Farm employers would be forced to pay overtime wages to farmworkers, a longstanding exclusion from an important labor protection. With the new pathway to citizenship that this bill proposes, undocumented farmworkers could gain legal status that would remove the fear of deportation that often inhibits them from enforcing labor rights.

Undocumented farmworkers have some specific regulations in the proposed bill; many are not permanently in the United States, so farmworkers instead have rules incorporating hours worked in the country. If undocumented farmworkers can prove that, in the past five years, they have worked for 2,300 hours or 400 days of agricultural work, they’d be eligible to apply for a green card immediately. The bill also makes it easier for the partners and families of undocumented workers to gain citizenship.

Perhaps most importantly, hiring undocumented workers is illegal, which means that employers aren’t terribly concerned about labor violations. Working conditions for undocumented workers are notoriously awful. Getting those undocumented workers a legal status in the country also confers upon them all the protections that they’d been lacking, including protection from unfairly low wages, safety gear, access to health care and a limit on hours worked. 

A major refocus of the immigration system comes with a vastly decreased emphasis on border patrols and security; instead, funding is specifically focused at easing the often-dangerous transition from undocumented to legal resident, by cracking down on coyotes and other human smugglers. 

Republican lawmakers have signaled that they will not support the bill in its current form, suggesting that it encourages illegal immigration (it does not; it simply makes legal immigration easier, including for those who already live in the country) and that it will take jobs away from Americans (also untrue, at least for agriculture, where there has been an acute labor shortage for years, despite regulations that reward farmers for hiring American citizens).

The Democrats have a majority in the House and a 50-50 tie in the Senate, along with a Democratic vice president, who breaks Senate ties. But Republicans may threaten a filibuster, which would require 60 votes to overcome, and it’s not likely that ten Republicans will vote in favor of the bill as written. More likely, it’ll be rewritten and broken up into component parts in order to pass. 

The post New Immigration Bill Would Give Undocumented Farmworkers Path to Citizenship appeared first on Modern Farmer.

That hadn’t been a guarantee for much of this week.

When President Joe Biden announced the travel ban on Monday, the White House made no mention of granting seasonal guestworkers the kind of exemption that the Trump administration had previously offered as part of its own COVID-19-related travel bans. But following a short—and apparently effective—blitz from farm interests and their allies in Congress, the State Department announced Friday morning that it would grant exemptions on a case-by-case basis after all. 

“The H-2 program is essential to the economy and food security of the United States and is a national security priority,” the department said in a statement. “Therefore, we intend to continue processing H-2 applications for individuals who provide temporary labor or services essential to the United States food supply chain, as permitted by post resources and local government restrictions.”

South Africans represent only a sliver—somewhere around 1 or 2 percent, by most accounts—of the roughly 275,000 seasonal workers who came to the US through the H-2A program last year. But they are nonetheless an attractive workforce given that many arrive with agriculture experience, having worked during their country’s own growing season, which takes place during the American winter. 

The travel restrictions and ensuing exemption come as public health experts sound the alarm over the dangers posed by recent mutations of the coronavirus that causes COVID-19. Of particular concern is a new variant first documented in South Africa, known as B.1.351, which is believed to be more infectious than early versions of the virus that has already swept across the globe, killing more (quite likely, many more) than 2 million people. 

When the travel ban was announced, farm interests began pleading for the Biden administration to use a national-interest carve-out to exempt the seasonal ag workers from the restrictions. The American Farm Bureau Federation, the largest farm lobby in the country, sent a letter to the heads of the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security on Thursday formally requesting the exemption. Meanwhile, at least two farm-state lawmakers in Congress—Republican Reps. Frank Lucas of Oklahoma and Rick Crawford of Arkansas—circulated their own letter to colleagues trying to drum up support for one as well.

The exemption suggests that the farm lobby will continue to hold sway in Washington—albeit likely not quite as much as it enjoyed the past four years. It’s still early days in the new administration, and farm groups—like all interest groups—are looking for signs about what the next four years are going to look like in Washington. Biden has tapped Tom Vilsack to helm the US Department of Agriculture once again. Vilsack is well known to the farming world from the eight years he led the USDA under President Barack Obama, as well as the two terms he had served as governor of Iowa before that. 

The Biden administration has also frozen rule changes proposed in the last days of the Trump administration that would have decreased the amount employers would have to pay some H-2A workers. So at least when it comes to the H-2A visa program, this much is clear: It is nearly impossible to believe that Biden will prove more receptive to employers’ wishes than Trump was.

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Shortly after President Joe Biden was inaugurated on Wednesday, his chief of staff Ron Klain reportedly issued a memo saying the new administration would freeze all pending rule changes proposed by the Trump administration. This included a new rule released by the Department of Labor last week that would have made changes to the H-2A visa program for foreign farmworkers. 

Under these regulations, employers would only have to reimburse workers for the cost of traveling from the US embassy or consulate where they acquired their visa, rather than from their home. Labor groups, which applauded the rule’s withdrawal, say it would have put an undue burden on workers who live in rural areas that aren’t close to an embassy or consulate. 

The DOL has announced that the rule will not be published in the Federal Register, a requirement for new regulations to come into effect. The announcement said that the department will review the rule and let the public know if any further action will be taken. 

On Wednesday, Biden also unveiled an immigration reform bill that would make undocumented farmworkers eligible for green cards. If passed, the bill would also give these workers the chance to become US citizens three years after receiving green cards. 

The post Biden Administration Withdraws Pending Changes for H-2A Farmworkers appeared first on Modern Farmer.