Mediaboss Marketing

WASHINGTON, July 12, 2017 Witnesses and lawmakers at a House Agriculture Committee hearing todayshowed broad support for immigration reform and mechanization research to address labor shortages faced by specialty crop producers.

Consumer demand is increasing but natural resources remain fixed and the labor supply is shrinking, said Rep. Collin Peterson, the panels ranking Democrat. Peterson represents Minnesota, a state that produces large amounts of specialty crops like apples, pumpkins, strawberries and sweet corn.

Specialty crops, including fruits, vegetables and tree nuts, represent just 1 percent of farm bill funding, according to Paul Wegner, president of the California Farm Bureau Federation. But another witness, Andrew LaVigne, CEO of the American Seed Trade Association, said specialty crops have an impressive farm gate value of $11 billion.

Although the industry is ripe with challenges, witness Gary Wishnatzki, owner of Wish Farms located in Plant City, Florida, said availability of labor is the greatest of these challenges.

Wegner echoed Wishnatzki: While it is outside the jurisdiction of this committee, we ask first and foremost that Congress move rapidly toward allowing a legal workforce in the United States to guarantee that future immigrants who desire to work in American agriculture be allowed entry.

Additionally, Wegner said he strongly opposes mandatory E-Verify, an online system that provides immigration status which is used as a prescreening for hundreds of thousands of employers. E-Verify has been voluntary since 1996, but the Trump FY 2018 budget calls for implementation of mandatory E-Verify.

Chairman Mike Conaway, R-Texas, noted that the House Judiciary Committee has jurisdiction over immigration reform and that he is in conversation with that panels chairman, Bob Goodlatte R-Va., about his proposed reform plan. In his concluding statement, Conaway emphasized that the impact of an E-Verify mandate is not lost on Mr. Goodlatte or the rest of us in terms of how we implement that.

Wegner told the lawmakers that mechanization may be the industrys future with robots harvesting specialty crops that are currently collected by humans. If we dont aggressively invest in the development of new technologies, the consequence will be to lose a large share of our nations specialty crop production, Wegner said.

Witness Kevin Murphy, CEO of Driscoll's Inc., the California-based berry producer, said that private industry is currently spearheading research for mechanization, and he encouraged the government to support public-private partnerships and innovation in the next farm bill.

But until mechanization eliminates the need for people to hand-pick crops, immigration reform is a top priority to ensure an adequate and legal labor force, the witnesses said.

(Conaways opening statement and the written testimony of all witnesses can be found by clicking here.)

Link:
Witnesses push immigration reform, mechanization research at Ag panel hearing - Agri-Pulse