All Together Now! Agriculture Needs To Speak With One Voice
January 25, 2023 Each year, I schedule a week-long road trip to visit farms in areas I might not get to normally.
Last October, I drove to the Southeast to visit mostly Georgia farms. An interesting pattern emerged.
As growers told me how their farms developed, person after person said fellow Georgia grower Bill Brim helped them along the way. Brim took them underwing, gave them advice on tricky challenges, and offered to connect them to advisors or professionals where needed.
Naturally I wanted to profile Brim. If his wisdom has helped so many in his region, he has advice the entire industry would want to hear.
We enlisted a veteran vegetable industry writer, Pam Caraway, to interview Brim for this month’s cover story. When she spoke to Brim (who happens to be her long-time friend), he was too fired up to answer questions about leadership and insights.
His ire was focused on the new H-2A wage ruling. So if we were going to give him a platform to talk to his fellow growers, then he would use that opportunity to discuss the state of guestworker labor.
At American Vegetable Grower, our content philosophy is to find the most difficult issues in the industry and offer constructive examples of how to handle things. They’re often small profiles of how one operation finds solutions.
Our goal is to spark discussions about how their ideas might work for you.
Frankly, we’ve struggled with finding stories about labor. The U.S. has too many ag jobs without enough people to fill them. Sure, increased wages are one answer. But how high do they need to go to compete with easier work? And who’s willing to pay for those increases?
Which grower has a story that really moves the needle on that?
We have shared stories of growers who found creative solutions on small pieces of the issue — building a healthier work environment, training the next generation. But there simply isn’t anyone who has found a magic bullet to address the bigger issue of too much work for too few people.
Which is why Brim’s advice on the topic is spot on. The only way to address the crushing issue of increased wages and finding legal foreign workers is if everyone works together.
A few powerful voices like Bill Brim’s matter. But they’re not enough. Rural communities are too cut off from politicians and government agency decision makers for a handful of people to counter balance the voices of those with no ag background.
If things are going to change, it will take all of us talking with those in power.
Oh, One More Thing …
While we all know ag labor is an issue, here are a few USDA statistics that spell out some of the issues in black and white:
- 2% – Year over year increase in U.S. ag workers from October 2021 to October 2022.
- $17.72 – The average per hour gross wage earned by all farm workers in the U.S. in October 2022. That’s
up 7% from 2021. - $17.04 – The average field worker per-hour wage in October 2022, which is up 6% from 2021.
- 4X – How much issued H-2A visas has grown in 10 years.
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