Oct 8, 2025

H-2A wages: market vs. mandate

“The federal government implemented a social program that farmers and ranchers are required to run.” A friend of mine said something like that the other day, and I told her it was interesting to think of it that way.  

The more I thought about it and let it stew, the more it made me stew. The heat was turned higher as I analyzed the consequences further. This “social program” is not funded by the U.S. Treasury but is instead mandated by the government to come from the pockets of hardworking farm and ranch families.

The H-2A Temporary Agricultural Worker Program is intended to allow farmers and ranchers to legally hire foreign workers when there are too few domestic workers who are ready, willing and available to do the work that needs to be done. Under the law, these jobs must be temporary or seasonal, so unfortunately those farm jobs that are not do not qualify.

Consequently, my friends in the dairy industry who need milkers can’t use the program to fill their need for those workers. Similarly, mushroom farms, year-round greenhouses, hog operators, livestock businesses and many others are shut out as well.

Markets set prices

So how was this temporary work platform for agricultural work transformed into a social program? It took a lot of work, and regulators unleashed, to do the damage.

The global marketplace for agricultural labor ought to determine the wages that are paid — and it usually does. A given level of demand for a commodity, including labor, together with the given level of supply for that commodity, will determine its price. That’s what farm and ranch families experience every day. They produce a crop, and the market pays them according to supply and  demand. Pretty simple, isn’t it? Supply and demand. 

This is the way it should work unless, of course, government regulators who have a social agenda to advance are let loose.

Agricultural businesses that use the H-2A program to hire foreign workers to fill jobs for which domestic workers are unavailable must not adversely affect the wages and working conditions of American workers in similar jobs. That makes sense: hire Americans first.

However, in the prior administration, regulators issued rules meant to prevent adverse effects that instead advanced a social agenda.

Wage abuse

Not only did the wage regulation promulgated by the Biden Department of Labor (DOL) continue its misuse of the USDA’s Farm Labor Survey (FLS) to establish wages for most workers, the social engineering piece was not profound enough for the bureaucrats. 

We must understand that the average gross wages compiled by the FLS do not represent a wage rate found in agriculture anywhere on Earth. It includes not only base wages but also incentive payments for productivity, overtime, bonuses, piece rates and any other compensation paid to workers, divided by the number of hours worked. It also includes the wages paid to H-2A workers who are the unintended beneficiaries of the wage so compiled. Crazy!

Apparently, because markets aren’t trusted by bureaucrats and some politicians think they can hoodwink their constituents into believing that everything should be free, the prior administration took it a step further. They decided that for common tasks done on the farm, like driving a truck from the field to the packing shed, building a corral for your livestock, driving your coworkers from the housing to the job site, that a separate state-by-state wage series should establish that.

This action had the foreseeable consequence of shuttering American farms and forfeiting our food production to our competition, all to boost wages far beyond what the market will pay. It was a social program to transfer assets from agricultural enterprises to their employees.

Similarly, activists in the Biden DOL put forth regulations under the guise of “worker protection” that the U.S. Supreme Court and the Congress had both indicated wouldn’t fly. Courts shut this down, at no small cost to the people who had to litigate it, and now this administration is working to rescind that foolishness.

This administration should do the same with the AEWR rule. Let markets work and give American farm and ranch families a break from this social engineering.  

— Michael Marsh has led the National Council of Agricultural Employers since 2017. A Wyoming native and certified public accountant, Marsh worked for a CPA firm with farm and ranch clients investigating fraud. He was director of finance for the Almond Board of California for 7 years and for 15 years was CEO of the largest U.S. dairy producer trade association.