In May 2023 a detailed Position Paper titled “Organic Agriculture is Soil-based: A Fundamental Principle Underlying Organic Crop Certification” was filed with USDA’s National Organic Program (NOP) by 5 dissenting USDA Accredited Organic Certifiers (out of 80 total) who have banded together refusing to certify soilless operations in the face of NOP’s continuing unilateral blanket allowance of hydroponic production to qualify for the organic label.
On March 29, 2022 the final Origin of Livestock (OOL) Rule was at long last instituted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), finally resolving statutory language ambiguities from the 1990 Organic Food Production Act (OFPA) that have been keeping family dairies at a major disadvantage in the organic milk marketplace for years now. The rule goes into full effect one year from that date. While we celebrate a Big Win for organic integrity and the surviving grassroots organic dairy farmers who have long suffered under the loopholes – we need to become even more vigilant going into the future.
On March 29, 2022 the final Origin of Livestock (OOL) Rule was at long last instituted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), finally resolving statutory language ambiguities from the 1990 Organic Food Production Act (OFPA) that have been keeping family dairies at a major disadvantage in the organic milk marketplace for years now. The rule goes into full effect one year from that date. While we celebrate a Big Win for organic integrity and the surviving grassroots organic dairy farmers who have long suffered under the loopholes – we need to become even more vigilant going into the future.
I feel so grateful that our Founder was with us for last year’s 50th Anniversary Celebration of NOFA’s beginnings in 1971. He was featured in Al Johnson’s wonderful NOFA history compilation, “Organic Roots” as well as a panel participant in the ‘Thrilling Tales of Yesteryear” presentation. These Anniversary videos, along with Elizabeth Henderson’s “The Next 50 years of NOFA” are available for viewing at https://nofa.org/nofa-50th/.
Acting through its North America subsidiary at the end of August, Groupe Danone, the multinational corporation and owner of Horizon Organic abruptly cancelled the contracts of 89 of their longtime northeast milk suppliers in Vermont, New York, New Hampshire and Maine – effective by August 2022. Danone’s exit means that over 10 percent of the northeast region’s organic dairy farms will be left without a market since other organic processors have limited capacity to accept new producers. The terminations will further have an acute impact on local economies, community resilience and area environments.
First, some Good News. After years of industrybacked climate change denial and misinformation strategies that included derailing legislation in the Obama era and further impeding advancements under the Trump administration – the federal government is finally stepping forward to address the existential threat of the planet’s irrefutable Climate Emergency. With climate change now set as a full governmental priority, the Biden Administration is also officially recognizing a major role for agriculture in removing displaced carbon dioxide from the atmosphere via soil carbon sequestration practices.
Re: Identifying Barriers in USDA Programs and Services; Advancing Racial Justice and Equity and Support for Underserved Communities at USDA; Docket ID FSA- 2021-0006
Although Interstate NOFA’s policy agenda stretches from soil health and food system justice to GMOs and the implementation of food safety regulations with numerous issues in between, here in the dawn’s early light of a new decade the Policy Committee is dealing more than ever with multiple challenges to organic integrity. Not surprisingly in this scoundrel time, an increasing number of trials have been of the top-down governmental variety. Understanding where we’ve been informs where we’re going – what follows is a more in-depth look at these federal onslaughts and the organic community efforts to thwart them.
By Elizabeth Henderson
In February, a dairy farmer friend sent me a note confiding that a few farmers she knows are living on cereal until their milk checks arrive. Yet, the recently released census of agriculture shows that the number of young farmers is growing even as the average age of farmers also increases, and there are uplifting articles about young Black farmers connecting with the land and enjoying the self-empowerment that comes with being an independent farmer.
Meanwhile, voices are rising about the central role that regenerative and organic farming can play in a Green New Deal, a program to mobilize all possible forces to prevent climate disaster.
How can we make sense of these conflicting currents? What policies and programs will create a just transition for family-scale farmers? What changes will enable farmers to maximize the potential of photosynthesis for putting carbon in the soil to supplement reductions in greenhouse gas emissions in mitigating climate disaster?
Farmers who are constantly worrying about financial viability have little bandwidth for new practices or long-term improvements that take initial investments. As Robert Leonard and Matt Russell noted in an opinion piece in The New York Times:
“Government programs like the current farm bill pit production against conservation, and doing the right thing for the environment is a considerable drain on a farmer’s bank account, especially when so many of them are losing money to low commodity prices and President Trump’s tariffs.”
The farm debt crisis of the 1980s never completely went away and has now resurfaced with a vengeance. In 2017, aggregate farm earnings were half of what they were in 2013 due to vast overproduction of basic commodities, and farm income has not recovered. The North American Free Trade Agreement resulted in the loss of mid-sized and smaller farms in all three signatory countries as integrated production and marketing favored larger farms.
Since 1950, the U.S. has gone from 5.4 million farms to just over 2 million, a loss of more than 3 million farms, with important shifts from many smaller integrated farms to fewer large, more specialized farms that grow even larger. For dairy farms in particular, these have been hard times as illustrated by the losses in the two top dairy states. New York State has lost 20 percent of its dairy farms in the past five years. Wisconsin lost 691 dairy farms in 2018.
While the persistence and shrewd maneuvering of organizations like the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition and the National Organic Coalition meant that programs that support organic and sustainable farming fared remarkably well in the 2018 Farm Bill, the bulk of the more than 500-page bill carries on with business as usual, even making it easier for big farms to get bigger by failing to cap the payments any one farm can receive and allowing more relatives to cash in on programs in the bill.
Both mainstream parties advocate the neoliberal, free-trade policies that the ever more aggregated seed, food and chemical corporations have imposed upon the U.S. since World War II to the detriment of family-scale farms all over the world. The dairy farmers who got through the winter eating cereal and the new farmers who are eagerly starting out are in urgent need of radical change.
Why is this happening? Political economist and author Eric Holt Giménez would say this is just capitalism working as it is supposed to. Faced with slim margins in the race to cover farm expenses, farmers produce more, and that drives prices down even further. The beneficiaries are the ever-larger corporations that have consolidated their dominance in the food sector. The result? Shoppers pay more, and a shrinking portion of what they pay goes to farmers.
At first, this mainly hit conventional farms; then in 2017, organic processors started limiting the amount of milk they purchased from organic dairies and cut the price paid below the cost of production. As a result, family-scale farms of all kinds are going out of business, and tragically, there are increasing reports of farmer suicides.
If you juxtapose the Agricultural Economic Insights chart with the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) chart above showing the declining number of farms, it is clear that loss of farm income corresponds with the loss of farms. More than half of U.S. farm households lost money farming in recent years, according to the USDA, which estimated that median farm income for U.S. farm households was negative $1,553 in 2018.
Farm incomes have dropped despite record productivity on U.S. farms because oversupply drives down commodity prices. Through a plethora of racist policies, Black farmers have lost land at more than five times the rate of white farmers from the peak of Black farmland ownership in 1910 until the 1990s. Meanwhile, profits in consolidated food businesses (farm inputs, retail stores) remain high with returns on investment ranging from 8 to 35 percent. Clearly, there is plenty of money in food: It just does not get apportioned fairly to the people who do the actual work.
Programs to train new farmers, especially veterans, get media attention and funding, but as the National Young Farmers Coalition repeats tirelessly, land in most parts of the country is too expensive for a farmer to buy with farm earnings. USDA data show that farm families have a middle-class income, but only on the largest farms growing a few commodities is that income from farm earnings.
So, while presidential candidates and Green New Dealers are putting bold proposals on the table for public discourse, farmers, farmworkers and concerned eaters should take the opportunity to hammer out proposals that will solve the structural issues that have turned U.S. farming into a problem instead of the win-win-win solutions that are possible.
Declaring that she wants “Washington to work for family farmers again,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren promises to take some steps in the right direction by breaking up vertically integrated trusts, allowing farmers themselves to repair the equipment they purchase, ensuring that contracts for livestock farmers are fair, reinvigorating country of origin labeling, and restricting foreign ownership of farmland.
Sen. Bernie Sanders goes much further, outlining a program that would completely restructure the food system so that farmers can make a living and afford to pay living wages to employees. These are the policies this country needs if we hope to keep family-scale farming.
When farmers can afford to adopt regenerative organic practices, they will take more carbon out of the air and put it in the soil where it builds soil health, making the people and livestock who eat those crops healthier. The original New Deal’s parity pricing also fueled the soil conservation that ended the dust bowl.
Farmers can focus on carbon farming if the price they receive in the marketplace covers the costs of running their farms. Family-scale farmers and the people who want to eat locally grown food all need a fair Green New Deal for the 21st century.
This article was produced by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
Comments on Proposed Changes to H-2A Program
Adele Gagliardi
Administrator, Office of Policy Development and Research
Employment and Training Administration
U.S. Department of Labor
200 Constitution Avenue NW, Room N-5641
Washington, DC 20210
Re: Temporary Agricultural Employment of H-2A Nonimmigrants in the United States
RIN 1205-AB89
Dear Ms. Gagliardi,
Thank you for this opportunity to comment on the proposed changes to the H-2A program. The Northeast Organic Farming Association Interstate Council (NOFA-IC) wishes to stand on record in opposition to most of the proposed changes to the H-2A temporary agricultural worker program. While the proposal makes a few changes that are helpful to farmers, most of the changes make conditions worse both for foreign workers who wish to come to work on US farms and for farmworkers who are already in the U.S. employed on U.S. farms and thus, ultimately, worse for the future of farming in the U.S. The proposed regulations would decrease farmworker wages, increase their travel costs, decrease oversight of their housing conditions, weaken enforcement of H-2A standards, and reduce job opportunities for U.S. farmworkers. Furthermore, the proposed changes will disproportionately favor the largest farming operations and labor contractors at the expense of family-scale farms.
Founded in 1971, the Northeast Organic Farming Association is one of the oldest organic farming education and advocacy groups in the country. NOFA is a regional federation of seven independent state Chapters in NY, VT, NH, MA, CT, RI and NJ. Beyond work on state initiatives, the Chapters work together regionally, nationally and internationally via the NOFA Interstate Council (NOFA-IC), a separate 501(c)(3) organization.
The U.S. food supply depends on the work of over two million farmworkers, most of them foreign born and more than half of them lacking legal status. The million undocumented farmworkers live in constant fear of detention, family separation and deportation, and the farmers who employ them live in constant fear of losing their employees, including workers who have served farms for many years and hold positions of responsibility. The H-2A program offers the only legal alternative to hiring undocumented people, but it is a poor substitute for root solutions to the farm labor needs of U.S. farms.
The members of NOFA believe that this country will never have a farming system that is worth sustaining until farm work is elevated to the status it deserves, contributing as it does to one of the basic functions of human existence. Workers on farms should be treated with respect, paid living wages for a 40 hour work week with full benefits, including health insurance,
unemployment insurance and Workers Compensation. They should receive adequate training in health and safety and their work should not expose them to toxic materials that threaten their health and the health of their families. They should have the same right to freedom of association as workers in other sectors of the economy. If these conditions were fulfilled, qualified immigrants as well as U.S. residents would be attracted to farm jobs.
In the short term, any credible reform to U.S. policies regarding farmworkers must retain H-2A provisions regarding compensation, housing, and transportation; strengthen protections against employer harassment and unfair practices, including wage theft, particularly focusing on H-2A labor contractors; provide H-2A farmworker access to courts regarding legal grievances against employers, like wage theft and harassment; and establish a significantly altered program that provides for flexible work stay duration, the ability to change agricultural employers, and the full integration of presently undocumented farmworkers, including a path to permanent legal status, including the option of citizenship. Unfortunately, the proposed rule changes to the H-2A program are regressive, making matters worse.
The DOL proposed changes weaken the recruitment requirements and the protections for U.S. workers that allow them first access to available jobs. Instead of importing foreign workers, undocumented workers who are already in the US should be provided with legal status so that farmers can legally hire them without fear of committing a felony.
Under the existing H-2A law, farm employers who would like to hire temporary foreign workers must first obtain a labor certification from the US Department of Labor (DOL) stating that they face a labor shortage and that they are offering wages and working conditions that will not adversely affect US farmworkers’ wages and working conditions.
The DOL proposal eliminates the 50% rule that gives U.S. workers preference for available jobs for the first half of the work contract period, reducing it to the first 30 days of a contract. This change means that U.S. workers applying for work at an H-2A employer with jobs lasting multiple months would be ineligible for the job after the first 30 days. The proposal also includes a “staggered entry” provision, a new system that would allow farmers to bring in H-2A workers at any time up to 120 days after the advertised initial date of need. This provision also makes it harder for US farmworkers to know when jobs might be available to them.
The DOL proposal would allow farmers to make changes to the job terms without providing the H-2A workers, or U.S. workers who may also be working at a farm, with any voice in the changes.
Guestworkers generally lack bargaining power to demand improvements in conditions and higher wages, due to their restricted non-immigrant, temporary status and other factors, including the debt they often owe upon arriving in the U.S. Foreign workers who have traveled long distances and often made great sacrifices for their families should be able to negotiate any changes to the terms of work that they were promised before coming to the U.S. and there should be a process for appeals.
DOL should withdraw the wage proposal because it will cause, not prevent, adverse effects to U.S. workers’ wages. DOL should continue to use the USDA Farm Labor Survey to determine the AEWR. Additionally, DOL should not weaken the prevailing wage requirement, but instead ensure that prevailing wage determinations are made and implemented.
Particularly concerning is that the DOL proposal will probably result in lower wages for farm workers. The existing low wages is one of the primary reasons that farm jobs are unattractive to many US citizens; lowering them will only make things worse. Under the current H-2A regulations, workers’ wages must be at least the higher of: (a) the local “prevailing wage;” (b) the state or federal minimum wage, (c) the agreed-upon collective bargaining rate; or (d) the “adverse effect wage rate” (AEWR). The AEWR is intended to ensure that the hiring of guestworkers does not undermine (“adversely affect”) the wage standards for U.S. farmworkers. The proposal would change the methodology for calculating the AEWR. Currently, the DOL sets an AEWR for each state based on the USDA’s Farm Labor Survey (FLS). Under the proposal, the first source for the AEWR would be USDA’s FLS; however, if the FLS does not report an annual average hourly gross wage for the standard occupational classification (SOC) for that job in the state or region, the AEWR would instead be the statewide annual average hourly wage for the SOC reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Occupational Employment Survey (OES). The practical impact of these and other technical changes is that farmworkers’ wages will likely decrease. As the DOL itself acknowledges, the OES does not even survey farms, but rather surveys establishments that support farm production, such as farm labor contractors, who are among the lowest paying employers of farmworkers. Thus, the OES should not be used as a source of the AEWR. DOL’s own explanation of this proposed methodology shows that if it had been used in 2018, some workers at H-2A employers would have earned lower wages.
We also strongly oppose the proposed changes regarding the longstanding requirement that farmers offer a local prevailing wage if it is the highest wage. Under the H-2A program, there are supposed to be surveys of the prevailing wage for U.S. workers for particular jobs in local labor markets (while the AEWR measures wages in a broader set of jobs and wider geographic area). Under the proposal, DOL would only require consideration of a prevailing wage rate if the DOL’s Office of Foreign Labor Certification (OFLC) issued a prevailing wage, which would be based on the state workforce agency (SWA) submitting a wage survey that must meet a number of challenging requirements. It is likely that few prevailing wage determinations would be issued. In some jobs, the local prevailing wage rate for particular jobs is a significantly higher wage than the state AEWR. In the absence of the prevailing wage determination, however, H-2A employers could lawfully offer below-market wage rates. For low-wage farmworkers these could be very harmful pay cuts.
The DOL should withdraw the proposed changes to the transportation reimbursement. This cost should continue to be covered by employers, not workers.
The proposed regulations would shift some H-2A program costs from farmers to H-2A workers. The H-2A program for decades has required that farmers reimburse workers for their long-distance travel costs to the place of employment. Now, DOL proposes to only require farmers to pay the costs of transportation for H-2A workers to and from the U.S. consulate or embassy in their home country, rather than their homes. Yet workers often live far from consulate locations and are recruited where they live. DOL acknowledges that farmworkers will lose tens of millions of dollars per year from this change, which is money they cannot afford. Many H-2A workers borrow money to pay such costs and arrive in the U.S. under great pressure not to risk employer retaliation due to their fear that they will be unable to repay their loan. This change will only drive foreign workers further into debt to travel to jobs in the U.S. and make them more vulnerable to exploitation by unethical employers.
Despite high profile stories of dangerous and substandard housing under the H-2A program, the proposed regulations would allow housing to be provided to farmworkers without annual inspections by government agencies.
If a state workforce agency (SWA) notifies the DOL that it lacks resources to conduct timely, preoccupancy inspections of all employer-provided housing, DOL would allow housing certifications for up to 24 months, during which time conditions could deteriorate to unsafe levels. Further, following a SWA inspection, DOL would permit employers to “self-inspect” and certify their own housing. Given the high rates of violations of the minimal housing standards that apply, it is deeply troubling that DOL could allow vulnerable H-2A workers to live in housing that has not been inspected annually by a responsible government entity.
The proposed changes do include some modest improvements to address health and safety concerns regarding housing that must be provided to H-2A workers and long-distance, migrant U.S. farmworkers. In a very troubling development as the H-2A program spreads to new areas where there is limited housing, some H-2A employers have been housing workers in motels or other rental or public accommodations. Under the proposal, where there is a failure of the applicable local or state standards to address issues such as overcrowding, adequate sleeping facilities, and laundry and bathing facilities, among others, DOL would require that the housing meet certain OSHA standards addressing those issues. While this is a step in the right direction, greater protections, including improved standards, are needed for H-2A housing. Furthermore, the effectiveness of these improved standards could be undercut if there is not a sufficiently strong system for and commitment to inspections and enforcement of housing violations.
The surety bond requirement must be substantially increased and coverage extended to cover more H-2A farmworkers, as the victims of harassment.
The proposal includes a modest improvement requiring an increase in the bond amounts required to be posted by H-2A labor contractors (H-2ALCs). This is important because H-2A labor contractors are unable to pay back workers for labor violations. DOL has recognized the need for higher surety bonds, but the increases are insufficient. Improvements are also needed to help victimized workers access the bonds. However, the proposal fails to address a number of other significant challenges workers face with H-2ALCs, and the already troubling lack of transparency with H-2ALCs will be exacerbated by the proposed changes. Too often farm operators seek to keep their labor costs low by hiring H-2ALCs and seeking to use the H-2ALCs as a shield to escape responsibility. The DOL is well aware that labor contracting is a notorious method for farmers to evade responsibility for the mistreatment of farmworkers, but its responses to these abuses are utterly inadequate.
The Department of Labor should withdraw the harmful proposed changes to the H-2A program consistent with these comments.
In addition, there are serious shortcomings in the program’s policies, administration and enforcement that this proposal utterly fails to address. For example, in many locations around the country there are no prevailing wage surveys being done and therefore the prevailing wage is not required to be paid by H-2A employers, who are allowed to undercut the labor market. The Department and other agencies have also failed to prevent recruitment fees being charged to many farmworkers under the H-2A program, which leads to greater debt and contributes to the workers’ vulnerability and fear of challenging unfair or unlawful conduct. Discriminatory job qualifications are applied to U.S. workers by employers that prefer guestworkers. There are also rampant violations of farmworkers’ labor rights, including occupational safety protections.