Walt Duflock, senior vice president of innovation with Western Growers, says it’s a challenging time for ag labor. While the domestic labor supply has dwindled, more growers have used the H-2A guestworker program, he says.
“Every time we turn around, we’re talking about labor shortages in the fresh produce industry,” he says. “How bad is it? It is bad, and it’s not getting better.”
Duflock, whose organization represents around 2,300 growers, joined “AgriTalk” to discuss the current state of ag labor and the challenges to automation. Duflock says those growers using the H-2A guestworker program have additional regulatory costs, which have caused wages to skyrocket.
“A lot of folks said, boy, when we get to $20 an hour for farm labor, that’s going to be Armageddon,” he says. “Well, we zip right past that with H-2A because you throw an adverse effect wage rate, which is the minimum wage for those folks, into the mix. That’s almost $20. And then you house them, you transport them and you feed them. That’s $28 to $30.So the fastest growing percentage of California labor right now is the highest cost part of it. And there’s no end in sight.”
Duflock says an analysis by California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, calculated the true costs of ag labor. In 2005, that figure was $109 an acre. In 2017, that number jumped to $977 an acre. In 2024, that figure came to $1,600 an acre.
“Same farmer, same operator, same crop, 20 years apart, $1,600 per acre per year,” he says of which is about 80% in labor.
So, what is the industry to do? Duflock says it’s simple: automate or relocate. He says using the Census of Agriculture data from 1997 to 2022 and then projected to 2052, he estimates the state of California will lose a significant number of farms.
“We are forecast to lose one-third of our acres in California and over half of our farmers in 50 years,” he says. “So, we will be down to less than 20 million acres from 2029. We will be down to 43,000 farmers from 87.”
Duflock says a lot of that attrition is due to production moving outside the U.S. to other countries with less regulatory pressure, better water availability and a steady stream of labor. But, for U.S. growers, technology is a strong path forward.
“Right now, where we’re making progress is on the non-harvest activities,” he says. “That’s about one-third of the hours.”
Duflock says growers paid about $16.3 billion for about 850 million hours of labor. And automating the non-harvest tasks is a start, but harvest is a real challenge, as it makes up the lion’s share of the labor needed.
“We’ve effectively got zero percent of fresh harvest automated at the moment,” he says. “That is 560 million hours that we bought last year.”
Duflock says he sees the potential for about 15% to 20% of harvest automation in the next few years, but to get there, there will need to be industry investment.
“We need private-public, and we need some new investment strategies for harvest,” he says.
