Farm Workers Hard to Find in 2020 [Poll Results]

Posted by Carol Miller|May 27, 2020

There’s been a lot of speculation about how difficult labor will be to find this year. Although USDA published its Farm Labor Survey this week, it did not report on how many specialty crop growers farm workers. So we don’t have hard numbers to back up the prevailing consensus. Even when the USDA report comes out, it will not separate out specialty crop workers. They fall into the catch all category of “other crops” in the report.

Which is why we asked you about what you are experiencing on your operation in an informal online poll last week. The results are in!

A full two-thirds of you report you’re having trouble recruiting labor compared to past years. The hardest hit group seems to be those who are using H-2A workers. Only 17% of those responding that use the guestworker program said 2020 recruiting isn’t any worse than the last few years.