The only true constant in agriculture is constant change. Farmers and ranchers are forever evolving their agricultural business and practices as time passes. My wife grew up on a farm in southeastern South Dakota, and when her father was a young man, Midwest agriculture was very diversified. At various times, the family raised hogs, sheep and sugar beets; today, their agriculture is principally about growing No. 2 yellow corn and soybeans. Given their climate, location, soil and infrastructure, that evolution makes perfect sense. Today, my brother-in-law and his son operate that six-generation family farm mostly by themselves with the use of some very impressive technology; we periodically get videos from my brother-in-law watching South Dakota State Jackrabbits football on his tablet while he’s combining the beans.
The evolution of agriculture has been different in California, and there are several reasons for that. California’s climate allows for some kind of agriculture to go on nearly every day of the year. Billions have been invested in water, transportation and processing infrastructure. And California has a large population of agricultural employees living in rural communities throughout the state who are ready and able to perform the planting, pruning, cultivation and harvesting tasks that produce iconic California commodities that are familiar to virtually every American, from strawberries to tomatoes to wine.
Mechanization and automation in California agriculture has also helped us deal with a shrinking and aging workforce. We’ve all heard that the average age of farmers and ranchers is getting older all the time; the same thing is happening to agricultural employees too. Their average is above 40 now. California has become America’s dominant provider of certain automation and mechanization-dependent commodities like processing tomatoes for ketchup and tomato sauce, and tree nuts like almonds, walnuts and pistachios; this has been made possible by the advent of unique-to-California technology like the mechanical tomato harvester and tree shakers and sweepers. The future holds the promise of exciting new technologies like autonomous tractors, automated air blast sprayers and automated laser weeders using visualization technology to distinguish between immature lettuce plants and adjacent weeds.
As exciting as the future of agriculture is, we have a critical need for employees to do ag work in California right now. Our workforce is aging and getting smaller every year, and an eternal truth is that ag has long been the first rung on the ladder of opportunity for new Americans. In California, immigrants from China, Portugal, Armenia, Japan, the Philippines, Mexico and Central America have all gotten their American start in ag. But those immigrants have raised their kids to be schoolteachers, craftsmen and tradesmen, lawyers, judges, local officials and even state legislators!
Since the 1996 federal immigration changes, the flow of new people from rural areas in Mexico and Central America slowed to a trickle; as a result, migrant worker flows from northern Mexico, Texas and Florida nearly disappeared in the 1980s and 1990s. In California, our migrant worker streams settled in small cities and rural communities throughout the Central Valley and in the agricultural areas of our coastal counties. The disappearance of the mid-U.S. and eastern migratory worker streams left agricultural producers in the Southeast and upper Midwest heavily dependent on the H-2A temporary agricultural worker visa program to be able to harvest their fruits, vegetables and berries. The aging of our California ag workforce and its “settling out” has also led California ag producers to use the H-2A program more and more. H-2A program usage went from nearly nothing a decade ago to numbers large enough to make California the second largest user of the program in recent years.
California Farm Bureau has been supportive of reforms to the H-2A program like the Farm Workforce Modernization Act, and we support reforms to the program that will fix some of the problems created by recent H-2A program regulations, and make the wage standards for the program bear a more reasonable relationship with actual, real-world agricultural wages.
Fixing the H-2A program is critically important to the future of U.S. food production, but as important is finding a political path to legal status for agricultural employees who migrated to the U.S. 20 or 30 years ago without legal status and have not been able to resolve that problem, even if they have U.S.-born children or a spouse who is a citizen or permanent resident alien.
These people are an integral part of communities across rural California and rural America where our food and fiber (and let’s not forget nursery products like houseplants and flowers that furnish food for the soul) are produced and whose hard work and sweat help build our world. We need to find a solution to our long-stuck immigration problem, because we all like to eat. — Bryan Little, Sacramento, CA
(Bryan Little is the senior director of policy advocacy at the California Farm Bureau.)
