More Issues Affecting Farmers

More Issues Affecting Farmers. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Fruit Grower Report.

Dan Fazio with State Farm keeps on top of a lot of issues that affect the farming community in the Pacific Northwest and he talks about another item they are watching.

FAZIO: The Obama Administration looks like it’s going to rescind the new H2A guest worker rules for farmers. These are rules that allow farmers to get legal and stable workforce. Very, very good rules, had protections for workers, had protections for the employers to encourage the farmer to use the program to bring in guest workers.

Just before the election the Bush Administration put these rules in place.

FAZIO: They were only in place for a very short while; a couple of months and then the Obama Administration issued an emergency order where they gave us 10 days to respond why they shouldn’t rescind these new rules which by all accounts are working out very, very well.   

Fazio says they have tried diligently to recruit Americans for the jobs but it just seems that we don’t want to work that hard.

FAZIO: We still need farm workers and the unemployment rate could be 20% and we’d still need farm workers. These are just jobs Americans don’t want to do. So it’s here we go again. New administration, they’ve got a new idea on how to make it work after we spent hundreds of hours learning the new rules they’re going to go ahead and rescind them two months after they went into place.

That’s today’s Fruit Grower Report. I’m Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.