Top US Farm Group Says Ag Guest Worker Visa Program Needs Reform

Reform of the H2-A guest farm worker program is necessary to better meet the needs of farmers and the workers they employ, American Farm Bureau Federation President Zippy Duvall wrote in op-ed published in the Los Angeles Times. "American agriculture relies on hundreds of thousands of skilled workers to plant the fields, tend the crops, harvest the produce and pack it for markets both here and abroad," Duvall said, but, "We don’t have enough of these workers." The nature of farm labor, and fact that less "than 2% of Americans grow up on farms," Duvall said, makes finding domestic workers challenging. "Farm work is episodic and often seasonal, and fruits and vegetables have a short window to be harvested, packed and shipped to market," he observed, a factor that makes the situation even more difficult. However, work in the dairy production industry presents an opposite issue as cows "must be milked twice, sometimes three times, a day, 365 days a year," he commented. Regardless of the work or ag sector, farm work often "means long hours of hard work," Duval added.