The H-2A guest worker program & the #1 way to solve the labor shortage

Photo by Brittany App

Professionally speaking, I think about two things every day: water and labor. They’re both hard to manage and there will never be enough of either. But since I’ve tackled the subject of water here recently, let’s talk about labor.

At the farm level, labor is typically manual, repetitive and fairly low-paying work. Usually that means minimum wage or a piece-rate job, so finding folks to do the work is already tough.

The federal government came up with one solution called the H-2A Temporary Agricultural Workers Program. Here’s how the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services defines it:

The H-2A program allows U.S. employers or U.S. agents who meet specific regulatory requirements to bring foreign nationals to the United States to fill temporary agricultural jobs. A U.S. employer, a U.S. agent as described in the regulations, or an association of U.S. agricultural producers named as a joint employer must file Form I-129, Petition for a Nonimmigrant Worker, on a prospective worker’s behalf.

During this pandemic, we at Spinaca have experienced a massive shortage of labor. We decided for the 2021 season to apply for the assistance of guest workers through this H-2A work visa program. In order to get help by the beginning of harvest on April 1, I had to start the paperwork process on November 17 the year prior. 

The workers are here now, and it’s going well, I’m happy to report, but it hasn’t always been a home run for other farmers. Shay Myers is an asparagus grower on the Idaho-Oregon border who applied for — and was promised — the help of H-2A workers. But due to a technicality, those guest workers were delayed; as a result, he lost 350,000 pounds of asparagus because he had no one to harvest it. I only know about this because he posted a video on TikTok that went viral. You can see him standing in front of his asparagus fields, powerless to get it all out of the ground. You can hear the emotion in his voice as he speaks.

From my point of view, while the H-2A program may help in the short-term, all it’s doing is rotating our need for labor into another market that can supply it. Instead of using local domestic labor, we’re now having to go down to central Mexico to recruit workers, bringing them all the way up to our growing region, feeding them, housing them and paying them higher wages. This is not a sustainable business model. It’s like putting a tourniquet on a bleeding jugular: at some point, it won’t work anymore.

Looking back through history, the search for labor is often a constant rotation of one group followed by another, from indentured servants to the turn of the 20th century with Chinese immigrants, to the Latino people who have dominated low-wage jobs in recent decades. It’s a wheel that turns and turns, but never goes anywhere. 

While we’re grateful for the opportunity to be selected to utilize the H-2A program, it’s like a Band-Aid on our industry. How can we address the disorder, rather than the symptoms? How can we do a better job at planting and harvesting so we don’t need to use so much low-wage labor?

As I ponder this, I keep coming back to mechanization. By advancing our cropping and harvesting techniques through the use of mechanization, I believe we could use less labor and pay higher wages to those we employ. In other words, by needing fewer workers, we might be better for those we do hire. 

Advancing mechanization and the methods we use to crop and harvest could elevate peoples’ standard of living, which is what everybody wants. Everyone wants a better life for their kids, better educational opportunities, better neighborhoods, a better quality of life. But that’s nearly impossible when you’re making $16.08 an hour, living in an apartment with four other people and paying $1,500 rent per month. Importing labor is just more of the same: a short-term solution that does nothing to solve the root problem. 

Years ago, someone posed an interesting question to me: If there was no garbage truck to pick up your waste on a weekly basis, how would your consumption habits change? It’s a great exercise for getting to the root of an issue. 

So I pose this question in terms of the labor shortage: How would we work if we couldn’t rotate foreign labor in to help? How would our methods change? How would we innovate? What are the challenges and benefits of even asking ourselves such a question?