Food security, the American farm, and the people who make both possible
The tomatoes are in. The apples are coming down. Across Virginia and the rest of the country, the last cutting is being baled, and the pumpkins are turning on the vine. Fall is when the farm shows its hand. Everything planted in April, everything hoped for in the hot weeks of July, is now on the truck, in the packing shed, on its way to a table.
It looks effortless from the grocery aisle. It never is.
Every peach you’ll buy this month was picked by a human hand. Every head of lettuce, every bin of sweet potatoes, every crate of grapes headed for the crush. Machines do more than they used to, but they don’t climb ladders, they don’t judge ripeness, and they don’t show up before dawn when the forecast says frost. People do that. And for a growing share of American farms, the people who do that arrive on an H-2A visa.
Food security starts with a workforce
We talk about food security as a supply chain problem, a trade problem, a weather problem. It’s a labor problem first. A farm that can’t find hands doesn’t plant less. It stops planting. Acres go fallow, or get sold, or get converted to something that doesn’t feed anyone. Once a family farm leaves production, it almost never comes back.
The H-2A program exists because domestic workers are not available to fill these jobs, and the law requires farmers to prove it before a single visa is issued. Farmers who use the program are not taking the easy way. They are taking the legal way, the documented way, the way that pays a federally set wage, provides housing, and covers the cost of travel from home and back. They are the growers who decided the farm was worth fighting for. That’s who we work for.
Seasonal staffing solved
At másLabor, we don’t think of guest workers as a line item. Through our másMX recruitment operation in Monterrey and Tampico, our own team meets these men and women in their hometowns. We verify who they are. We confirm their experience. We walk them through the consular process and put them on the bus north. Many of them have made the same trip for a decade, to the same farm, for the same family, and they know the rows better than anyone.
They send money home. They build houses, put kids through school, start small businesses. And they come back the next season because the work is real, the pay is real, and the relationship is real. Nothing about this goes unchecked. That is the point.
Advocacy that shows up
Reliable execution is our job. Advocacy is our responsibility. Our General Counsel, Tom Bortnyk, serves on the board of the National Council of Agricultural Employers, championing a workable H-2A program in rulemaking, in litigation, and on the Hill. When wage methodologies shift or processing timelines slip, our clients don’t read about it in a newsletter. They hear it from someone who was in the room.
That’s why we support the Securing Agriculture’s Workforce Act. Introduced by House Agriculture Committee Chairman Glenn “GT” Thompson as H.R. 9535, the bipartisan bill targets the accessibility and cost of agricultural labor through the H-2A program, and if signed into law would be the first statutory reform to H-2A in 40 years.
Forty years is a long time to run a farm on a program written when Ronald Reagan was president. Growers deserve better. Workers deserve better. The country’s dinner table deserves better.
What fall asks of us
As we set the summer down and pick up the harvest, this is the season to see the whole picture. The farm that fed us. The family that kept it. The worker who crossed a border legally to help bring it in. And the policy that decides whether any of it happens again next year.
Food security isn’t abstract. It’s a strawberry field in Virginia with a crew that arrived on time. It’s an asparagus farm in Michigan where a returning crew snaps every spear by hand at the exact moment it’s ready. It’s a grower who sleeps at night because the paperwork was right, the workers were vetted, and the season is going to happen.
That’s the work. At másLabor, we’ve built a company on doing it reliably, every season, for the people who feed this country. If you grow it, we’re here to help you keep growing it.
