Katie Vargas and her husband, Manuel, are sixth-generation apple growers at Joe Rasch Orchards in Sparta, Mich. Katie Vargas and her family have used the H-2A program for 11 seasons.
A team comes from February to November for orchard tasks and harvest, and a team comes from August till May or June of the next year for packing apples.
And this need for H-2A workers comes from a lack of domestic workers.
Three years ago the Department of Labor released new regulations for the H-2A program — around 1,600 pages — which Katie Vargas said was a challenge to understand and then implement, especially for a small management team.
“Sometimes it feels a little bit like they were written without like the actual like farm in mind of how things operate, the seasonality of things and how fast things change,” she said.
Another significant challenge, she said, is a continued rise in the Adverse Effect Wage Rate.
“Keep in mind the housing and all that goes into the extra costs — the transportation, electricity, everything,” Manuel Vargas said.
About 95% of workers return year after year, and while it might be easy to think crews are unaffected or don’t understand what’s happening on the farm, he said crews see the impacts of rising labor costs.
“They always get worried about if you’re going be able to keep them coming back because of the wages [rising],” he said. “They see that the value of an apple doesn’t go up but the cost of labor, the cost of maintaining the houses and everything goes up.”
Katie Vargas said crews working in the orchards and in the packinghouse are often family, and they communicate about packouts and what they’re seeing come off the packing line.
“I think it really helps them have that full circle perspective,” she said. “There’s so much more beyond just putting it in the box and just like sending it to the store. If they bruise an apple, like that’s not worth anything. If the apples have leaves on it, [there’s] the extra work it takes to take that off.”
And Manuel Vargas said crews care about the work they do and its impact on the farm.
“It’s a good crew,” he said. “They care about the farm, and they always try to put in their best because they want the family to stay in farming.”
To help understand the true cost of farming, Katie Vargas said her family has started to keep track of everything from the cost of inputs, orchard tasks and more.
“We’re keeping track of all the time that’s going into those blocks, all the applications that are going on in certain blocks, and we’re looking at how much has this cost,” she said. “When we get to harvest time, we’re doing our best to guess what the market looks like, and especially for processing the last couple of years, whether or not we go back and do a second pick on something with labor being the biggest expense for us.”
Katie Vargas said this is a big change from her childhood.
“Growing up, I remember going to the packinghouse with my dad and talking about the different apples and where they were getting sorted to,” she said. “When I saw the processed apples come off, I asked if they were going to waste it or just thrown away, and he said, ‘Every single apple has a home here,’ and that was the way it was. Every apple had a place to go, and now they don’t. And if you pick it and it doesn’t have somewhere to go, you’ve just expensed more.”
And Katie Vargas said her family has worked with the crews at harvest to emphasize picking for quality.
“We didn’t want anything that was going to go across the line that was going to cost us for that time at the packing shed and everything for it to just end up being wasted or go to processing when we weren’t getting the return on it,” she said. “Our quality standards last year were really high too. That goes back to having a great crew and them understanding everything that they did and doing a really nice job with it.”
Manuel Vargas said that meant having a lot of conversations with the crews about what the market wants and what the crews need to pick.
In terms of the current state of agricultural labor, Katie Vargas said her family isn’t getting domestic workers to apply for open jobs; H-2A becoming harder to navigate and rising pay rates and AEWR make it a challenge for family farms to stay afloat.
“Who are we hurting in all this if farms go out of business?” she said. “The workers are really committed to this. It makes a huge difference for then. They make here at harvest what they’d make in a whole year back home, and they’re able to start businesses and send kids to different schools. I think they have a lot of pride in what they do, too.”
Manuel Vargas said workers want to learn more about the horticultural side of fruit growing and take on more responsibilities on the farm.
“They just want to have a nice place, consistent and a stable job for a long time,” he said.
And Katie Vargas said that, as a business owner, it’s hard to budget and understand exactly how the year will shape up when the Department of Labor sets the AEWR for the state. And that makes budgeting and understanding costs a challenge.
“I think that’s something that I think a lot of people don’t realize that we don’t have, as farmers, that we can’t budget,” she said. “We are told what our biggest expense is going to be, and we have to go with it.”
