The question that is on top of mind for local growers is whether or not they will be able to continue growing fresh cherries and fruits alike, or tap out to rising employment costs and growing foreign imports.
In 2023, Michigan farmers employed over 15,000 H-2A workers — the sixth-highest total in the nation — to hand harvest the state’s specialty crops. Leelanau represent a small number of the 15,000, but is one of the areas that need them the most.
The going hourly rate for H-2A workers is causing Leelanau farmers headaches and questioning the future.
“The deal that kills,” cherry grower Greg Williams said.
The required minimum wage farmers must pay, also called the Adverse Effect Wage Rate, has ballooned 61% since the 2014 wage of $11.49.
In the past two years, wages rose over 13% in 2023, and farmers are expecting another 6.7% increase in 2024, bringing the minimum wage to $18.50.
For Williams, who uses a labor service that provides transportation and lodging, that hourly cost rises to $26.70 per employee.
“I’m backed up against the wall and trying to get out the business,” he said.
Administered by the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL), H-2A allows legal non-immigrant guest workers from other countries to temporarily work in otherwise unfilled farm jobs on a seasonal basis.
Williams continues saying that inflation, operation interest loan costs rising from 4% to 9.5%, and “Biden's economic failures” are the reason for his future outlook.
Williams, 60, says he is working harder than ever when it comes to farming tart and sweet cherries.
Williams left more sweet cherries and apples out in the field than he ever did in his 42-year farming career during the 2023 growing season.
“I’m glad I’m not a young farmer,” he said. “They import more than we can grow.”
Williams also pulled nearly 40 acres of cherry trees in 2023, which equals roughly 600,000 pounds of cherries. Williams currently leases two of his farms out, and he tends to one himself.
“It’s pretty far gone,” he said. “It’s so hard to plant an orchard and sit on it for seven years ... How could you invest in an orchard when there is no guarantee? It’s not a good investment.”
Williams said he got seven cents a pound for his sweet cherries when it cost 15 cents to produce. He let a plot of dark sweet cherries equivalent to 40,000 pounds rot out in the orchard, and four to five thousand apples left to rot.
“If it was a normal crop, I would have left a million pounds,” Williams said.
Ben LaCross, the District 9 Director on the Michigan Farm Bureau board of directors is a second-generation farmer of tart and sweet cherries, plums and apples, is also concerned about the increase of wages for much-needed help.
“The continual increase in the adverse effect wage rate has caused tremendous harm to farmers in Michigan because wages are normally a farmer’s number one biggest cost to produce our crops,” he said. “It’s a recipe for disaster and un-profitability when our costs continue to rise year over year, but the amount of money that we receive for our crops stays the same or goes down year over year.”
Farmers have long struggled finding adequate labor to tender their crops, and over the past 5-15-15 years things have changed with hiring practices focused on domestic to foreign workers.
A lot of farms in Leelanau have gone to the business model of hiring H-2A workers. As the labor rates have continually risen year in and year out, it’s making that business model of using H-2A workers unsustainable for those farmers, according to LaCross.
“It’s up to the individual farmer to decide if he needs to stay in that program. But unfortunately, there isn’t another option for a lot of our farmers. There aren’t domestic workers who would just travel from crop to crop to harvest like they did 20 years ago,” he said.
Farmers in Washington state, which is the number one apple growing region in the country, will pay substantially less $16.28 just to use the same program because the wage rate is that much lower than Michigan’s as determined by the adverse effect wage rate, according to LaCross.
“When we are competing in a world market against countries like Turkey and Poland, who want to sell their products, their cherries in the United States, they don’t have these artificially high wage rates that we do ... we really feel (this wage) isn’t reflective of the actual market conditions for agricultural jobs,” he said. “We want to make sure that those workers are paid appropriately, but that farmers don’t have to bear the brunt of some.”
LaCross continued that an increase of 1.5 to 3.5 percent every three years or even every year would be a better model than what the federal government is doing now.
Foreign workers are also growing substantially in the restaurant sector of Leelanau commerce as Cherry Republic is known for using a wide variety of different types of workers, especially during summer.
“We are continuing to use the J-1 workers and they are really helpful because they have an extended visa. They can come to work for us for 3.5 months .... they’ve been great to work in the kitchen and also out front with the customers,” Cherry Republic owner Bob Sutherland said.
Different countries come at different times as Caribbean countries come in May, and European countries come in mid-June.
Even though J1 workers are needed, Sutherland says they are college kids at the end of the day, and need a little more parenting.
That is why the use of H-2B workers has been another avenue because of their maturity and scarcity.
“It’s a by chance lottery system with more expensive paperwork and the upside is they come for longer ... there’s a risk you don’t get one. ” Sutherland said.
Another type of worker used is an “Arm worker” that are documented domestic agricultural workers (green card). One weakness with this method is that they don’t speak English. Their strength is their motivation to work as many hours for as much money as possible to send back to their families in Mexico, mostly. Cherry Republic typically hires four to six of them, but an influx of 50 help with the establishment’s Christmas push. The restaurant will also bring in four students from Holland Intermediate School District Culinary program to work in the bakery and the pub house.
Cherry Republic houses its J-1 workers in two places that have six bedrooms each in Kasson and Glen Arbor Townships. J-1 workers are paid between $17 to $18 dollars an hour.
Sutherland acknowledges the company’s need to build more apartments in the next five years that can sustain seasonal, and even permanent, employees in the Empire area where the headquarters are located.
