H2A Labor Program Important to Tree Nursery's

Difficulty finding ag labor is a common challenge for farmers across the US. Philip Hunter is a wholesale tree grower from Alabama, and he says hired help is vital to his business's success.

“There's very little automation in the nursery business, so we have to have labor to do almost everything we do. We grow landscape trees, so planting, pruning, staking, we have equipment to run that we need when we're harvesting, when we're shipping, we'll have multiple crews working on many different things at one time,.”

Hunter's nursery uses the H2A guest worker program to find labor, and he says while the program has been helpful to his business, the system still needs some updates.

“It's a good program, but it's been around 40 years, and it needs to be updated. It needs to be streamlined, particularly the adverse effect wage rate, which we must pay. It has gone up in Alabama 34% since 2023.”

And he says farmers can and should get involved in advocating for changes to the labor program.

“We've been advocating three different approaches, executive action to the Trump administration, legislative action through our congressman, and then action to the agencies like Department of Labor, Department of Homeland Security, USDA get involved there.”

Wholesale tree grower and AFBF’s Philip Hunter.