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!