Few things frustrate me as much as hearing that Americans are unwilling to perform the “noble but arduous tasks” that define farm life.
And yet, that is the exact insult that House Agriculture Committee Chair GT Thompson — a Republican from Pennsylvania and my member of Congress — just leveled against my family and friends.
Thousands of farm families spent decades performing the noble task of feeding us only to be forced out of business because they could not compete with the mega-farms that flooded the market.
Family farms have been in a tough spot for decades. Profit margins are negative and 100-hour work weeks aren’t enough to make ends meet. Your farm falls further into debt and disrepair until either you’re the generation that loses the land that’s been in your family for a century, or you expand. Get big or get out.
Those that go the “get big” route can’t find local employees willing to work the hours or the pay that farms can afford. So, yes, they turn to immigrant labor. Even then, margins are tight, and most eventually end up on the “get big and get out” path.
I do not condemn those that took the “get big or get out” route. They did what they must, and their employees often take home more money than they do. The owner is the last one home and the last one paid.
Nor do we hate those that migrated here to work hard on a farm to support their family. We just prefer that they come and assimilate, maybe become farm owners themselves, and contribute to our local rural communities rather than transferring all their money out of the country.
We can and should, however, condemn the policymakers that got us to this point in the first place.
I would submit that the single biggest factor that destroyed our family farms is that we allowed cheap and illegal labor to undermine the family farm’s one competitive advantage. The family farm did not need to rely almost exclusively on outside labor to get the chores done. Mega farms don’t exist without it.
Sadly, our politicians seem bent on doubling down on destroying what’s left of our traditional family farms.
The border is now secure and the mega-farm cheap labor flow is threatened, so we now need the “Securing Agriculture’s Workforce Act of 2026″ sponsored by Rep. Thompson.
The Farm Bureau and their ilk will champion the bill because they represent the mega farms. In private, their leaders will also tell you that while they appreciate the quaint notion of the family farm, that is a bygone era and not the future.
As a bit of an aside — let’s disabuse ourselves of the notion that our food comes from a “family farm.” I know the official statistics say that almost every farm is a family farm, but that is misleading.
Assume there are 99 pig farmers with 100 pigs each, and one with a million. It is accurate to say nearly every pig farm is a small farm, but that is not where your bacon comes from. The million-pig farm probably qualifies as a “family farm” anyway, even if the owner never touches a pig, so long as he still manages the farm finances and employees.
That is not quite as much hyperbole as you think — even our largest dairy operations have more than a quarter-million milk cows.
The timing of this legislation is stupid. We now have robotic technologies that replace some of the “arduous” farm tasks that provide a lot of good service jobs to folks in rural communities.
Are we going to undermine those jobs now as well? Hopefully the Senate’s general practice of not doing anything will kill this bill, but I worry this is the one thing both sides might just rally around.
I’m not sure about the best path to unwinding nearly a half century of illegal labor hiring practices that have completely restructured our nation’s farms, but simply making unofficial bad policy the official bad policy is not the right answer.
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