Farm Bureau Survey on Labor Availability, Cost, & Farmers’ Actions to Secure Adequate Labor Available Now

Farm Bureau Needs to Hear from You!

For the last decade or more, California agricultural employers have struggled to recruit sufficient numbers of farm employees to perform the vast variety of pruning, planting, and harvesting tasks required by California’s $50 billion agriculture industry. Farmers consistently tell us that if they need 10 crews, they can fill out 8. Add on top of this very tight labor market employment costs that continue to be boosted by regulatory and legal mandates like tightening overtime requirements, the increasing minimum wage, and new employment costs like paid sick leave.

California Farm Bureau and researchers at the University of California, Davis and Michigan State University have created a survey for California farm employers to try to get your insights into a few important questions related to this problem:

Are you able to find enough employees to perform the work needed to operate your farm business?
Are increasing costs to employ people driving changes in your business practices?
Are you making adjustments (like increasing wages offered and other employment benefits, turning to automation or assistive technology, turning to the H-2A temporary agricultural worker visa program, or doing something else) to allow you to operate your farm at a profit?
Are you anticipating the need for an upskilled workforce to make use of technology and automation as the industry begins the shift to precision agriculture?
What employee shortage and cost mitigation strategies are you using to address this problem?

The results of this survey will be used for statistical purposes to inform the Farm Bureau, our members, community leaders and policy makers about the challenges faced by California agriculture, how these challenges are impacting our industry, and solutions that can assure the long-term viability of California agriculture.

Your responses will be anonymous and confidential and will be analyzed along with the responses of all respondents; your identity will never be revealed; in fact, you’ll notice we don’t ask you for personally identifiable information in the hope that you will feel more comfortable being as honest and forthright as possible.

Our ability to answer the questions above depends on your participation in this important survey. We anticipate it will require anywhere from 10 to 20 minutes of your time, depending on some of your responses that may prompt the survey application to route you to other questions to gather additional information and detail.

We hope you will help us with this important survey. You can start the survey here. If you have questions about or problems with the survey, please contact Bryan Little at California Farm Bureau (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.) or at 916-561-5622 or Carrie Alexander at UC Davis (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.).

Thank you in advance for your assistance!

DPR Licensing Glitch

Renewal packets recently mailed to individual license holders by the Department of Pesticide Regulation (DPR) included a space where the applicant was supposed to enter the number of hours continuing education hours completed. That space was inadvertently pre-populated with the number of CE hours required for renewal.

You can correct the form by crossing out the pre-populated number of hours and entering the correct number of hours actually earned.

Here is a link of the letter from DPR to the license holders explaining how to make the correction.

US EPA Announces Tightened Worker Protection Standard

On September 28, 2015, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced a new regulation to significantly tighten the federal Worker Protection Standard (WPS), setting new minimum standards for field worker and pesticide handler safety, hazard communication, and other topics related to pesticide safety in agricultural use.

While the revised standards will mean significant changes in many states, regulations of the California Department of Pesticide Regulation already meet most of the new requirements. The new EPA regulations "do not represent a major overhaul" for California but may require some "adjustments," said Charlotte Fadipe, spokeswoman for the Department of Pesticide Regulation.

Two particular areas of change in the EPA Worker Protection Standard will differ from California regulations:

Imposition of a minimum age of 18 years for workers who enter pesticide-treated areas prior to the expiration of the re-entry interval specified for the material applied and for pesticide handlers; California regulations (California Code of Regulations, Title 3, Section 6612) already impose a minimum age of 18 for handlers;
A requirement for annual training for field workers; under both California and federal regulations, field workers are required to be trained every five years.

Due to the need to permit states enforcement agencies, farm employers, and EPA time to adjust to the new regulations, many of the revisions will not become effective until 14 months after publication in the Federal Register.

FELS will keep you updated as more information becomes available.

Standards Board Approves Tractor Carrier Rule

At it's August 20 meeting, the Cal/OSHA Standards Board approved a regulation permitting in-field use of tractor-mounted personnel carriers, officially designated Agricultural Personnel Transport Carriers by the Board.Tractor-mounted personnel carriers have been used for more than 25 years in the southern Central Valley and the Central Coast for the purpose of transporting irrigators in a transportation unit usually mounted to the three-point hitch on the same tractor towing a trailer carrying irrigation pipe. This practice spares workers from walking long distances from pipe storage areas to fields, and in fields following the tractor towing the pipe trailer as the tractor moves through the field to distribute irrigation pipe.

The regulation was the result of years of consideration by the Standards Board. The final rule places significant limits on the use of tractor-mounted personnel carriers including:

In-field use only in low-lying crops; no use on farm roads. Farm Bureau and others had advocated for farm-road use to facilitate movement irrigators along with irrigation pipe from storage facilities to field;
Tractor carriers may only be occupied by workers in the furrowed area of the field;
The slope of field may not exceed 5%;
Occupants of the tractor carrier must exit the carrier when the tractor turns at the end of a row;
Occupants must exit the carrier when the tractor passes within 10 feet of a ditch, retention pond, unprotected edge of an embankment of levee, culvert or other overturn hazard.

You can review the final version of the tractor personnel carriers rule at this link.

Agricultural Personnel Transport Carriers Hearing Notice

NOTICE IS HEREBY GIVEN that the Occupational Safety and Health Standards Board (Board) proposes to adopt, amend or repeal the foregoing provisions of Title 8 of the California Code of Regulations in the manner described in the Informative Digest, below.

New Resources for Lead Hazard Communication

New lead warning signs and labels are now available to help employers comply with updated Cal/OSHA hazard communication requirements. The 2015 newsletter from the Occupational Lead Poisoning Prevention Program (OLPPP) alerts employers to the new requirements and offers the new OLPPP materials for free.

Heat Illness Standard Proposal Revised

On November 19, Cal/OSHA and the Cal/OSHA Standards Board released a revised proposal to change the Heat Illness Prevention Standard. The agency originally released a proposed revision on August 8, and held a public hearing on September 25. FELS parent organization, California Farm Bureau Federation and a number of other ag organizations testified at that hearing and raised a number of objections and concerns:

Cal/OSHA Standards Board Sets Hearing Date, Comment Period on Heat Illness Proposal

On August 8, the Cal/OSHA Standards Board released a proposed revision to the Heat Illness Prevention Standard, Section 3395 of Title 8 of the California Code of Regulations. At the same time, the agency set a comment period for the proposed regulation -- August 8, 2014 through September 25, 2014 -- and set a public hearing for September 26 in San Diego.

You can view the Standards Boards' notice, along with the Initial Statement of Reasons and the proposed revision at this link.

Cal/OSHA Submits Draft Heat Illness Regulation

On May 28, the Division of Occupational Safety and Health of the Department of Industrial Relations submitted a proposed revision to the Heat Illness Prevention Standard, Section 3395 of Title 8 of the California Code of Regulations. The agency indicates it has initiated this regulatory process with a goal of having a revised standard in place for the 2015 growing season.

Kicking-Off the 2014 Heat Season

Cal/OSHA recently reminded agricultural employers of the agency's upcoming Heat Illness Prevention standard enforcement activity. The goal of the program is to reduce the incidence of heat illness statewide and ensure compliance with California's heat illness standard.