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Crops Going Unplanted Due to Visa Delays

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Brett and Jen Costanza are growing increasingly concerned about administrative delays involving the migrant worker population in Michigan's Great Southwest and the potential damage to their farm operations near Sodus. Federal bureaucracy is keeping workers from the fields of Berrien County and elsewhere in the state at a critical time of the year.

The Costanzas own and operate A&B Costanza farms, a vegetable operation near Sodus, and while Jen note's "We're still in the very early part of our season," she cautions, "We're basically to a point now where we need people here to get our stuff planted." As Costanza points out, "We have a very short time frame. We're not losing product in the fields yet, but we also aren't getting anything planted."

Zippy Duvall is President of the American Farm Bureau Federation, which recently coordinated a media teleconference featuring administrators from the state agriculture department and farmers from across the nation who are struggling for more timely feedback from federal labor agencies.

According to the Michigan Farm Bureau, the H-2A visa program was already clumsy enough in providing foreign workers for American farms, but the current administrative delays in the agencies that administer the program are "wreaking havoc with crop production schedules." The bureau reported today, "Unable to meet their own deadlines, delays at the U.S. Department of Labor and U.S. Citizenship & Immigration Services are threatening some farmers' abilities to even get their crops in the ground this spring, much less harvested months from now."

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Duvall opened the teleconference forum with a general description of the mounting crisis that's causing headaches across the country. He says both agencies are seeing delays in the processing of visa applications, and backlogs of up to 30-days are resulting in workers not getting to farms in time to do the work they've been contracted to do.

Duvall says, "The Department of Labor is supposed to be responding to our farmers before the crews are needed, and they are not doing that in a lot of cases." He adds, "Crops are not gonna wait for the labor to get there. Crops will continue to mature and rot in the field if we don't get something done and done quickly."

Ironically, the feds' own regulations require H2-A application approval at least 30-days prior to when the farmer needs his or her workers. Duvall says that deadline is routinely being missed.

Costanza's woes are even more  remarkable in that they advanced their requests from the July 1st start last year to a new contract for April, but the labor department wanted to know why. Jen told them they realized they wouldn't get workers in time for early season cucumbers last year so they moved it up to make a difference this year only to be confronted with a bunch of federal questions as to why. 

She told her telephone audience, "Our start of contract was April 11th. We still don't have our approval from USCIS so I still have no idea when our people are going to get here. We have workers who are trying to contact us and say, 'Hey, what's going on? We thought we were coming in April,' but we're basically at a standstill right now."

Jamie Clover Adams is the Director of Michigan's Department of Agriculture and Rural Development. She was on the call too, and she says, "Something needs to be done," to get the agencies to coordinate and work together. She adds, "Americans are eating more healthy foods, and here in Michigan we grow a lot of fruits and vegetables," but growers aren't putting crops in the fields because "they don't know whether or not they can get the labor to harvest them." She suggests if the crisis isn't resolved, "We could see farm families suffer terribly and see consumers paying higher prices for their products." 

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