It’s been a year of good news for growers participating in the H-2A program, and while the consensus is that there’s still work to do, they have a lot to be thankful for going into 2026.
In August, the USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service announced it would discontinue the agency’s Farm Labor Survey, which the Department of Labor previously used to set the minimum Adverse Effect Wage Rate. In October, the DOL issued an interim final rule that changes how the AEWR is calculated. In addition, the Department of Homeland Security moved to streamline the H-2A petition process, a change that now allows DHS and DOL to process H-2A visas concurrently. Finally, the Trump administration also took steps to halt and repeal the DOL’s 2024 Worker Protection Rule.
As of the publishing of this story, the industry still awaits the publishing of the final rule.
Jon DeVaney, president of the Washington Tree Fruit Association, says growers at the organization’s recent meeting seemed buoyed by some of the developments.
“A lot of growers were left just shocked, in a good way, after so long of just seeing the minimum wage rates for the H-2A program rise,” he says. “To actually see those wage rates get revised in favor of what growers have been asking for — for some of these changes for more than a decade — to see that that change happen left them sort of stunned and unable to respond.”
Nikki Enersen, lead of the American Association of AgLabor Providers, says the industry has seen positive remarks by U.S. Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer, who expressed her commitment to the H-2A and to ag labor when she attended a National Council of Agricultural Employers’ event in early December.
“I think the general feeling in the ag sector is that it’s good that its sustainability is being considered, because a lot of farmers have really been struggling,” she says. “However, there’s a lot of uncertainty and new rules to learn.”
And that tends to be the general sentiment among growers.
Immediate Relief for an Industry on the Brink
Jamie Clover Adams, executive director of the Michigan Asparagus Advisory Board, says growers she’s connected with are heartened by the progress made.
“Our industry, the asparagus industry, was really on the edge,” she says, noting growers have told her it’s a good first step. “They remind me, especially the growers that employ people, ‘Jamie, this is just the beginning. We’ve got other things that need to be fixed.’”
Clover Adams says she’s thankful that the interim final rule went into place immediately, as the Michigan asparagus industry was in a crisis. She surveyed growers in 2024 to gauge the potential impact of the Adverse Effect Wage Rate (AEWR) remaining the same or increasing.
“Forty-seven percent of them said they’d be out of asparagus in a year and another 34% said within two to five years,” she says. “Within five years, we would have been a shell of what we are today, and that would have a real negative effect on the communities that they’re in.”
Clover Adams says she encourages growers to be patient and to understand there might be some kinks to work out with the new regulations as they begin to file H-2A applications.
“At least out of the gate, this rule has provided some immediate relief, which was needed,” she says.
Caleb Herrygers, a fourth-generation farmer who grows tart cherries, apples and asparagus at Herrygers Farms in Oceana County, Mich., says he’s still uncertain how the different Level 1 and Level 2 wage rates will play out.
“We’re cautiously optimistic,” he says. “We’ve been working for years with really nothing to show for it, and now we finally have something to look forward to.”
Herrygers says he assumes that hand-harvesting will fall under Level 1, but he says he’s also eyeing Michigan’s state minimum wage, which will be over $15 an hour.
“I don’t think that we’re going to see as big an impact as what it seems like when you look at it at first,” he says.
Herrygers says he is also paying attention to how farm labor contractors work through these changes and how that affects piece-rate structures. A bright spot, he says, is an opportunity for different pay rates at those different wage levels, which is something he’s been unable to do with higher wages.
“It’d be nice if it opened up the structure where an incoming worker might be at the base rate, but a 10-year veteran might get a dollar more or something like that … so that you could have a little bit of upside for seniority,” he explains.
Herrygers says legislative action is also needed now to complement these new policy changes to ensure Michigan’s state minimum wages don’t rise to a point where growers are back where they started.
“That’s probably the biggest question mark of the whole thing: Where’s it going to go from here? How are they going to set it?” he says. “Are we going to end up three to five years from now with a wage potentially higher than what we’ve had in the past and no real help from the legislature because they look at it as, hey, they just helped us three years ago?”
Fourth-generation apple and peach grower Sarah (Lott) Zost in Gardners, Pa., says she’s relieved that the wage escalation has been addressed. In years past, she says she would put her family’s higher-than-average wages in the Farm Labor Survey, which would then be used to calculate the next year’s wages.
“Which just feels like you’re shooting yourself in the foot,” she says.
Zost says she is also happy about the methodology that will split different skill levels to better reflect the current ag labor market.
“It has been getting more and more divorced from the reality of who’s out there, and with offering that wage to our year-round crew at the higher wage each week, we’re still not getting any applicants,” she says. “So, it’s not like the wage was the driving force to get people into the industry, as it was supposed to be.”
Katie Vargas and her husband, Manuel, are sixth-generation apple growers at Joe Rasch Orchards in Sparta, Mich. Vargas and her family have used the H-2A program for 11 seasons and have begun the process to file for workers for next year. She is also hopeful about the potential to differentiate between different tasks and wages to assign corresponding jobs.
“Now we can look at who’s doing something that they need more experience for and assign it that way,” she says. “There’s definitely going to be savings, which will be very helpful. It just gives us that flexibility to manage where people fall on that spectrum of the wage levels.”
Vargas says she’s also looking forward to the potential to stagger workers in the contract instead of having to file two different contracts; her family can have workers who need more practice or perform orchard tasks arrive earlier, and the rest can come closer to harvest. She says crews coming in waves under one application will save her family time, paperwork and energy.
“That’s something we’ve asked for a long time,” she says. “And it was nice to have that recognized and be able to do that.”
High Cost of Unsustainable Labor Trends
Kate Tynan, senior vice president of the Northwest Horticultural Council, says her organization’s survey, which reported that 99% of grower returns for the 2023 crop year went toward labor, was actually slightly lower than the final result as growers were still selling apples into the season.
“We went back to our participants in the survey, and we actually were able to get a few more folks to participate to really shore up that data,” she says. “We found that at the end of the day, for the 2023 crop, 108% of what growers received upon the sale [of] their fruit went to labor costs alone, so they were in the red by 8% before they paid for fuel, before they paid for fertilizer and any other orchard-related costs. Nobody can argue that that’s sustainable.”
Tynan says the survey conducted this past summer shows that at 97% for the 2024-25 crop year, which was a smaller crop, but it demonstrates that the 2023 figure is not an anomaly. And growers have more than doubled the use of H-2A in about nine to 10 years, which she says really underscores the need for these reforms.
“There are so many employers who are now involved in H-2A that the worker has many options,” she says of the current state of ag labor in Washington state. “And those non-H-2A employers are having to pay at least the H-2A wage, or in some cases more, to keep their workers from leaving and going to that H-2A farm next door. This is now this artificially high wage rate, not to mention all these other costs that are associated with the program. That’s the new floor for everybody, and that really underscores the need to make sure we’re getting this right in terms of how these wages are being calculated.”
Tynan says that the interim final rule changes when new wage rates will be published — switching from December to July.
“[What] this [interim final rule] did not change is that if you have a new rate that’s published during a worker’s contract and the wage rate goes up, then the grower has to immediately start a higher wage,” she says. “If the wage rate goes down, then the workers are guaranteed the underlying rate within the contract.”
So, Tynan says, growers would immediately have to absorb the wage revision in July, but she adds that this is something that the Northwest Horticultural Council addressed in its comments.
“Let’s just have new rates go into effect when you sign a new contract,” she says. “We’ve seen in the Northwest in the last decade, in some years, where we’ve seen it go up 7%, and there have been folks who’ve seen it go up 20%, and trying to absorb that kind of cost that you haven’t budgeted for is certainly challenging. Our hope is that’s not going to happen under the new methodology.”
Zost says she’s included comments on the interim final rule about how some wage rates are calculated. Mainly, how a worker who also drives a van would be paid a chauffeur rate.
“I wrote in my comments that he drives the van every single workday, but only for 30 minutes, and he’s spending another nine hours doing the same work as everybody else,” she says.
Zost adds that she’s also concerned about how the skill levels could play out. Spot-picking for color, for example, is currently a higher skill level, but she says the entire crew spot-picks, and it’s one of the easiest jobs to train.
“Spot-picking apples is pretty straightforward,” she says. “They have this much color, and it has to be this much not green.”
She says she also argued that if it was a task that was supervised and following a crew leader’s instructions all day, it also should not be at a higher level.
“There’s potential for good, but it all depends on exactly how some of this stuff gets implemented,” she says.
Next Chapter for Specialty Crop Producers
While there’s still a lot to be seen once the final rule comes out, for now, growers say they finally see ag labor heading in a positive direction.
“Because it’s been so, so long of trying to get something — and sometimes it had felt like we would take one step forward and then all of a sudden it would be like two steps backwards — I think we’re all just kind of like, ‘Let’s actually get through seeing some of this play out,’” Vargas says.
However, Vargas says it is evident that a lot of the policy updates have been influenced by the agriculture community.
“I think there’s very positive movement forward for us,” she says.
Zost says it also helps to have a labor secretary with an agriculture background.
“I think she really took concerns like this very seriously and wanted to do what she could to address them,” she says. “And I appreciate working within the current regulations to do what they can to make things more workable. Some things can only be changed with legislation.”
Zost says she also wants to see how the final rule impacts the wages for her family’s domestic seasonal migrant workers.
“I don’t think my crew is going to really enjoy these three guys getting paid less than those guys for no real good reason in their eyes,” she says. “But again, that could be changed; we will see. Overall, this new [interim final rule] gives me some optimism that our escalating wage costs are going to slow down and even maybe go down a bit, which would be very nice.”
To sum up 2025 in labor: DeVaney of the Washington Tree Fruit Association says it was a year of rapid changes. The year started with unpredictability around the potential impacts of immigration enforcement and uncertainty about ag labor in general and has moved to where it now seems those in the specialty crop industry are cautiously optimistic.
“We went through a lot of uncertainty over the course of the year, and then with the new rules, that was a big change that was welcome, but it was a constant adaptation to changing expectations and circumstances,” he says. “This year the good news is, after complaining that things just kept going on in the negative direction with rapidly increasing costs and program rules and no good changes, having a little bit of the problem of a rapidly changing environment when some of those changes are positive, that was a welcome change of pace.”
