As homeowners, operators and members of multigenerational household farms in Maine — Penny with Jordan’s Farm, a combined vegetable operation, and Jenni with Flood Brothers, one in every of Maine’s 172 dairy farm households — we nicely know that the rising price of meals is due partly to the intense issue farmers have in securing long-term, sustainable labor on our farms.
In line with Maine Farm Operations, as of 2015, immigrants made up 18% of all farmworkers within the state. They’re important to our potential to get meals from our farms to Maine’s tables, and their significance has solely grown as Maine’s workforce continues to age and shrink and the state’s unemployment charges have returned to almost pre-pandemic ranges.
The USDA has predicted that meals costs may rise as much as 10% in 2022. This hurts Maine households and Maine’s vital restaurant sector. The shortage of sufficient seasonal and year-round farm employees is a crucial issue affecting meals costs and is one direct results of antiquated federal immigration insurance policies. Maine households that must put meals on the desk shouldn’t be those paying the worth for outdated and dysfunctional immigration legal guidelines.
In 2021, the Home of Representatives handed the Farm Workforce Modernization Act to enhance our federal immigration legal guidelines affecting farms and farmworkers, with bipartisan assist. That was a superb begin. Now within the Senate, Sens. Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, and Mike Bennet, D-Colo., have taken the lead in negotiating enhancements on the Home’s options and transferring the method ahead. Passing new Senate laws is crucial to fixing labor shortages going through the Maine agriculture sector and sustaining the state’s financial system as a complete.
That’s why we’re calling urgently on Sens. Susan Collins and Angus King to get firmly behind Sens. Crapo’s and Bennet’s efforts to modernize how we rent international farmworkers, chopping out the forms that makes this an ordeal 12 months after 12 months, when actually what we want is multi-season entry to the identical extremely expert employees.
On the flip facet, these extremely hardworking people, lots of whom change into like household to us and are members of our communities, deserve good wages, secure working situations and a pathway to everlasting residency within the U.S. in return for all they do to assist be certain meals will get from our household farms to the household desk.
This isn’t simply the moral and honest factor to do. It’s essential for our financial system A current Texas A&M Worldwide College research on the hyperlink between stabilizing the agricultural workforce and lowering inflation and client costs reveals that making certain farmers have a secure, dependable, pretty paid and authorized workforce is essential to protecting America’s grocery cabinets stocked, combating inflation and decreasing meals costs for all home shoppers.
Moreover, addressing workforce shortages going through farm employers and stabilizing the H-2A visa utility course of is crucial for enhancing our nationwide meals safety by defending home agriculture manufacturing. In line with the USDA, the U.S. will probably be importing extra agricultural items than we export in 2023.
The truth is that in Maine and throughout the nation, immigrant employees are the spine of the agricultural workforce within the U.S. With out them, we won’t be able to feed our nation.
Our household farms run on the grit, goodness and abilities of Mainers, lots of whom weren’t born within the U.S. however now name Maine residence. We’d like a brand new system that can allow us to maintain them in our make use of and in our communities with out having to reinvent the wheel yearly — and that can allow them to truly plan lives and households long-term in Maine. We’d like a system that acknowledges their essential contributions to our meals programs and ensures that they’re able to dwell and work with out worry.
Once more, it’s the fitting factor to do. However extra to the purpose, we actually don’t have a alternative. We’d like Sens. Collins and King to get behind this laws instantly in order that the Senate can take motion this 12 months.
Penny Jordan is without doubt one of the homeowners of Jordan’s Farm in Cape Elizabeth, and Jenni Tilton-Flood is a farm member of the family of Flood Brothers Farm in Clinton.
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