Trump’s Rhetoric Worries Farmers

Real estate mogul and presidential contender Donald Trump’s tough talk on immigration has exacerbated already difficult labor shortages in agriculture and bogged down what the ag community hoped would be a low-key Congressional process to fix the nation’s guest-worker program, Politico Magazine reported.

“Trump is terrible for agriculture,” Harold McClarty told the magazine. McClarty is a California peach and plum farmer who relies on thousands of workers every year.

Roughly 1.4 million undocumented immigrants work on U.S. farms each year, or about 60% of the agricultural labor force, said Chuck Conner, president of the National Council of Farm Cooperatives.

Farmers say they depend on undocumented workers because Americans
simply won’t do the back-breaking labor farming requires, and the existing guest-worker program for foreign workers is broken.

In fact, finding labor is so difficult that farmers are changing what they grow, Steve Freeman, a vice president at Pacific Coast Producers, told Politico.

Grapes, apples and pears are very labor-intensive crops, he said, prompting some farmers worried about laborers to shift to growing almonds, pistachios and walnuts.

So farmers keep one eye on their orchards and the other on Capitol Hill, Polito reported, where they hope lawmakers will vote to overhaul the existing H-2A guest-worker visa program.

The American Farm Bureau Federation has worked all year with House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) to rework the program, said the group’s legislative director, Kristi Boswell.

While the overhaul effort has seen progress, she said the only legislation to come out of the committee has been an enforcement measure.

Boswell said “dialogue in the presidential race is politicizing” the farm labor issue, which is expected to complicate progress. S