At the heart of economics is being able to see the context behind the numbers and data, says Samantha Ayoub, director of workforce and business policy for the International Fresh Produce Association. Ayoub joined “The Packer Podcast” to discuss challenges facing specialty crop growers and what she sees with the data.
“I really see the economics piece as being able to give people the tools to put behind their personal stories, to say, ‘This is what I experience on my farm, but look, the data and statistics show that this is common across the industry, whether it’s specialty crops or ag as a whole,’” she says. “And really getting to put some extra oomph and some extra credibility behind the arguments that we’re making in D.C. to show the impacts of the policy our lawmakers are making.”
Specialty crops are a unique category in agriculture in that there are roughly 300 specific commodities. What makes advocating for the needs of specialty crops difficult, Ayoub says, is a general lack of data for some commodities. While larger commodities have data, they’re often grown in different states where the policy impacts could be slightly different. Even within commodities, she notes, two regions might have very different growing seasons and timing.
“The more that we can band together, I think, is critically important — and show that to our policymakers with our large industry voice,” she says.
As the produce industry faces several significant challenges, growers say the biggest need is certainty.
“Policy should be the one place that our farmers know what they’re getting into,” Ayoub says.
H-2A Labor Costs and the Push for Wage Certainty
However, that’s not necessarily the case right now. Ayoub points to the uncertainty around H-2A guest worker wage rates. While the program will mark its 40th anniversary in November, the lack of any sort of modernization has impacted growers.
Mechanization hasn’t caught up to the immediate needs of growers, she says, and H-2A labor costs include much more than just paying farmworkers — such as housing, transportation and application fees.
“If there were domestic workers — I hear this all the time — it would be cheaper to hire domestic workers,” she says. “So, it is truly a [course] of last resort for our farmers to go into the H-2A program because of all the other complexities with using it.”
While the industry awaits the Department of Labor’s new methodology for establishing the Adverse Effect Wage Rate, or AEWR, Ayoub says the changes the department set forth in 2025 were a welcomed relief from escalating wages.
“The October Adverse Effect Wage Rate methodology in 2025 was a lifeline to our farmers,” she says. “I cannot count the amount of members who have looked at me and said we would have gone out of business had we not had some form of reform.”
A big misconception, she says, is that this immediately means growers want to pay workers less.
“We know that commodity prices are not controlled by our farmers,” she says. “They can’t raise their prices just to pay their workers more as well.”
Ayoub says no other industry in the U.S. has so much uncertainty, not knowing what the H-2A wage will be starting in the summer, which is when new AEWR rates are released under the Labor Department’s 2025 methodology change.
“We just saw the first update under this ruling, and we saw as high as a 20% increase in some states,” she says. “That doesn’t happen in other industries and is not a sustainable way of running a business, especially a farm that operates on low margins.”
Competing Against Foreign Imports and Regulatory Standards
That October 2025 update, Ayoub says, helped put some of the decision-making back into the hands of growers who could pay returning H-2A workers a higher wage and “actually compensate the people who have been wonderful, loyal employees that have helped sustain the American food system.”
She says these increased costs to domestic growers put the industry in a precarious spot where lower-cost imports are more competitive on price. And that could push more and more production out of the U.S.
“It’s not even just countries that we think of that just have a lower wage rate, it’s that they’ve made policy that makes those industries more sustainable in other countries,” she says. “It is crucial that our farmers here have access to the workforce to continue to operate. … We all want food safety — that food is safe to eat — that is critical. But we also need to uphold the food coming into the United States to the same standards so that we can harmonize across the board, and our regulatory [oversight] of folks coming into the United States as well.”
