Who Harvests America’s Food? The Role of H-2A in U.S. Agriculture

By Dr. Lorin Harvey

Every harvest season, I get some version of the same question:

“Why don’t farmers hire Americans workers to harvest the sweet potatoes in Mississippi?”

The difficult reality is that, in many rural communities, a sufficiently large and dependable domestic seasonal workforce simply does not exist.

Why? Consider the job.

Agricultural harvest work can be physically demanding, outdoors and highly seasonal. A farm may need 100 or 150 additional employees during a relatively short harvest window but cannot necessarily provide those same jobs 12 months of the year. It’s a temporary job.

Hard physical work plus seasonal employment is a difficult combination for building a large permanent local workforce.

That does not mean farmers are allowed to skip American workers and immediately hire workers from another country. In fact, quite the opposite.

Before receiving H-2A certification, an employer must recruit U.S. workers. The Department of Labor requires employers to document those recruitment efforts, record U.S. applicants and, generally, hire qualified and eligible U.S. workers who apply. U.S. workers must also be offered wages and working conditions that are no less favorable than those offered to H-2A workers.

And the numbers illustrate the scale of the problem.

In fiscal year 2025, American agricultural employers requested 415,496 H-2A positions, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. Of those, 398,258 positions were ultimately certified – meaning DOL acknowledges there is no U.S. workers available for them, and hiring foreign workers would have no adverse effect on similarly employed domestic workers.

An American Farm Bureau Federation analysis of this labor situation reported something even more striking: only 182 of the nearly 415,000 advertised positions received a domestic applicant. That is less than 0.04%.

Agriculture also operates under a constraint most industries don’t face: The crop doesn’t wait.

When fruits and vegetables are ready for harvest, they’re ready. They wait for no one.

A sweet potato farmer doesn’t need 150 people who might show up sometime this month. They need a dependable crew today, tomorrow and the next day until hundreds of acres of a perishable crop are safely harvested.

So, who are those busloads of migrant workers who do this work? Many of them participate in the H-2A Temporary Agricultural Worker Program, the majority of whom come from Mexico. H-2A is not an undocumented labor program. It is a federal program that allows agricultural employers experiencing a shortage of domestic workers to hire foreign workers temporarily for seasonal agricultural jobs.

The program is administered through multiple federal agencies, and workers enter the United States for a specific temporary or seasonal agricultural purpose.

There is also a misconception that H-2A is simply a source of “cheap labor.”

H-2A employers are subject to federally prescribed wage requirements. Employers must pay the highest applicable required wage rate depending on job duties, skill and experience. Employers may also have significant obligations involving paperwork and documentation, housing, transportation, workers’ compensation and other program costs.

None of this means the H-2A system is perfect. Agricultural labor policy, wages, working conditions and mechanization are all legitimate topics for discussion.

But simply eliminating access to seasonal agricultural workers does not mean those jobs will suddenly be filled by Americans.

It will instead mean fewer labor-intensive crops are grown domestically, higher production costs and greater reliance on imported fruits and vegetables.

That trend is already worth paying attention to. USDA’s Economic Research Service reports that imports supplied about 59% of U.S. fresh fruit availability and 35% of fresh vegetable availability in 2023, with import dependence increasing substantially over the past several decades.

That's why I think this conversation is bigger than immigration or farm labor. It is also a conversation about food security.

We can maintain a regulated, legal pathway that allows temporary workers to help American farmers produce food here ... or we can increasingly import the food itself.

If we value American-grown food, then we also have to have an honest conversation about the workforce required to grow, harvest and pack it.

American agriculture requires an agricultural workforce. Food security depends not only on our ability to grow crops but also on our ability to get them out of the field.

Dr. Lorin Harvey is an assistant professor and Extension sweet potato specialist at Mississippi State University. He is a member of the American Farm Bureau Federation’s Partners in Advocacy Leadership Class 13.

This article was originally shared on LinkedIn.