Many farms rely on hired help largely through the H-2A program. As the President cracks down on illegal immigration, one Alabama tree grower reminds the powers-that-be that agriculture needs a more efficient option.
“There’s very little automation in the nursery business, so we have to have labor to do almost everything we do. We grow landscape trees, so planting, pruning, and staking. We have equipment to run that we need when we’re harvesting. When we’re shipping, we’ll have multiple crews working on many different things at one time,” said Phillip Hunter.
Hunter’s operation uses the H-2A program. He says it has been helpful but needs some serious attention.
“It’s a good program, but it’s been around 40 years, and it needs to be updated, and it needs to be streamlined, particularly the adverse effect wage rate, which we must pay. It has gone up in Alabama 34 % since 2023.”
The Farm Bureau has also spoken out on the adverse effect wage rate. Officials there call it unsustainable.
“It’s outpaced inflation eight of the past ten years. It’s highly unpredictable from year to year. We’ve seen increases as high as 23 percent from one year to the next, which is just simply unsustainable given the challenges that we see and the predictability that farmers and ranchers need to be able to make ends meet,” said John Walt Boatright, director of government affairs for the American Farm Bureau.
The Farm Bureau says farms using H-2A labor use around 40 percent of their input dollars to pay for it.
