An agricultural labor shortage is starting to have dire impacts on local farms, with growers increasingly unable to find workers to plant, tend and harvest their crops, farmers told Rep. Tim Bishop at an annual meetup Saturday morning at L.I. Farm Bureau’s Calverton offices.
“Labor is very, very tight,” L.I. Farm Bureau executive director Joseph Gergela said. The shortage is driving up the cost of farm labor. The going rate is now $15 per hour, he said. The shortage is affecting not only agriculture, but other important segments of the regional economy as well, Gergela said.
Gergela asked why Congress can’t pass an ag worker visa program, even if it is unable or unwilling to attack immigration reform on a comprehensive basis.
There’s no chance of any relief coming from Washington any time soon, Bishop told the farm bureau board members and a smattering of others during Saturday’s meeting.
The Senate adopted a comprehensive bill, but the House won’t pass any incremental legislation because House leadership wants to avoid having to come to the conference table on the comprehensive reform measure approved by the senate.
That stalemate will be the status quo until at least after the November election, Bishop said, because the Republican majority in the House of Representatives won’t do anything that may detract from the focus on Obamacare, which the Republicans see as the “silver bullet” in this midterm election, according to the congressman. That’s true of a host of other issues besides immigration, he said.
“They believe that they hold the trump cards for the election in November because they are going to make the election about Obamacare,” Bishop said. “So we have a public policy issue in immigration reform that we’re simply walking away from because of the political implication of dealing with it.”
According to the First District congressman, Democrat of Southampton, the same is true of many other issues that Congress should be addressing but is not.
Bishop, now in his sixth term, said partisanship in Congress is worse today than it’s ever been. He blames the “fringe” right-wing of the Republican party for the paralysis.
“The influence of the Tea Party class of 2010 that came to the Congress has been corrosive,” Bishop said. “The polariazation and the anger in Congress is rooted in the people that came to the Congress in that election.” Anger, he said, “is a pretty debilitating emotion. Ask yourself, the last time you made a decision rooted in anger, how well that decision worked out. That’s where we are. We are formulating public policy in anger, acting on it in anger and that’s why we’re really struggling,” Bishop said.
The congressman said even issues that used to be noncontroversial are victims of the stalemate.
“The farm bill — that used to be a layup, right? The surface transportation bill passed the House in 2007 with 12 dissenting votes. Now we get more than 12 dissenting votes when we’re naming a post office,” Bishop said.
The farm bureau’s breakfast with the congressman has become a late winter ritual on the East End, when farmers gather one Saturday morning in March for a freewheeling discussion of issues affecting the agricultural industry on the island.
Other issues discussed this year included the need for an estate tax deferment for land in agricultural production, tax reform in general, the push to raise the federal minimum wage, pending changes to the federal regulations governing the payment of overtime, spiraling energy costs, food safety inspections and the potential impact of new Clean Water Act regulations.
On estate tax: The current federal estate tax exemptions of $5 million for an individual an $10 million work for everyone but farmer-landowners on the East End and the “gold coast of Florida,” Bishop said. There is no incentive to change it in the immediate future.
On the federal minimum wage and overtime issues: The administration is considering raising the weekly wage threshold at which overtime must be paid, irrespective of whether the employee is a managerial employee, Bishop said. (Managerial employees above the threshold are exempt from the overtime requirement.) The wage threshold was raised to $450 per week in 2004 by President Bush; if adjusted for inflation, it would be set at $550 or $575 today, Bishop said. The threshold was first established by President Gerald Ford at $250 per week; if that were adjusted for inflation it would be $1,000 today, he said. Any employee who earns a weekly wage below the threshold is entitled to overtime (time-and-a-half) for hours worked above 40 hours per week. Agricultural workers are exempt from the overtime provisions anyway and there is no talk of changing that, he said.
On energy costs: The congressman said the U.S. is now a “net exporter” of energy, thanks in part to fracking resources. Questioned by Jim Waters of Waters Crest Winery about why the cost of oil and propane keeps rising, Bishop said it’s because of the commodities market.
“Goldman Sachs says 30 percent of the cost of a barrel of oil is unrelated to supply and demand,” Bishop said. It’s speculating on the commodities market that drives the cost of energy up and little can be done to control that without a radical overhaul that will never come to pass.
On the economy: Bishop advocates additional stimulus spending to replace “crumbling infrastructure” and create jobs. Now that the dust has settled, he said, most people recognize that the stimulus spending following the economic crash of 2008 was too small, he said. Even so, the Congressional Budget Office credits stimulus spending with creating 3 million jobs, according to Bishop.
On food safety: Farmers are very concerned about the lack of inspection being done on food products being imported into the U.S. Only about 1 percent of all food imports are inspected today, said George Proios, of the Suffolk County Soil and Water Conservation District office.
“Nobody tests our food supply,” Proios said. “Every pesticide we’ve banned is exported to third world countries. They apply it to food that’s then imported into this country,” he said.
“Anything that’s banned for use because of health issues in this country should not be sent to other countries for them to use,” Proios said.
Former LIFB president Charlie Schaer said he’s very concerned about insects and pests being imported to the U.S. with food products because food imports are not being inspected since the responsibility for inspections was shifted from the USDA to the Department of Homeland Security following 9/11. Inspectors are pulled off food inspection to inspect bagges, Schaer said.
“Can’t we move that inspection responsibility back to the USDA?”
On Clean Water Act regulations: Bishop said farmers have little to be concerned about in terms of irrigation ditches and the like coming under new federal Clean Water Act regulations now being formulated to comply with two recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions.
“There are already huge ag exemptions in the Clean Water Act that would not be touched,” Bishop said.
There are two tests for federal regulation, he said: “It has to have an essentially permanent relationship to waters of the U.S. and it has to have a nexus to navigable waters of the U.S.,” Bishop said.
“It’s something, at least at this point, that farmers don’t need to be worried about.”
