News

Farm Labor Survey under question

A farm labor specialist is analyzing how the USDA conducts its Farm Labor Survey and how farmers using the H-2A guest worker program are impacted.

Michigan State University’s Zach Rutledge tells Brownfield crop and livestock farmers are surveyed four times a year on the wages they pay their workers

“That includes hourly wage compensation and some forms of bonuses that might be given to employees,” he says. “They are not necessarily an average wage per se but they’re an average hourly earnings that are calculated on data that are not actually reporting wage values.”

He says the survey is used to help determine H-2A wages, but including salary-paid workers could impact the results.

“There’s speculation about potential issues with the sample methodology and the way they reweight and calculate the final statistic which is somewhat of a black box that I’m not sure anyone really understands other than maybe the statisticians,” he says.

Farms that directly employ workers, including H-2A workers, are also included in USDA’s Farm Labor Survey.

Rutledge says there have been large wage increases in several regions since last October including in Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio in the Corn Belt.

The Lake Region, which includes Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, had a 35-cent decline year over year, which for the first time in nearly 15 years could cause the H-2A rate to decline.

The American Farm Bureau Federation says it expects the Adverse Effect Wage Rate to increase by 4.5 percent nationally based on survey data with wide regional variability.

New rules for implementing H-2A wages and a recent ruling by a U.S. District Court will cause more than half of workers to immediately receive pay increases in December when the final 2025 AEWR numbers are released.

Participation in the H-2A program has increased by 300 percent over the past decade with more than 370,000 jobs certified this year.