Amid the ongoing trade war brought about by President Donald Trump’s unprecedented use of emergency powers to impose sweeping tariffs on most nations throughout the world, few industries or businesses have been more impacted than agriculture and U.S. farms.
President Trump’s tariffs have cost farmers upwards of $33 billion this year in increased input costs, a December report by the North Dakota State University’s Agricultural Trade Monitor found, and that’s before taking into account declining sales of key crops to nations that have imposed tariffs on U.S. exports in response to President Trump’s moves.
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To mitigate such concerns, the president earlier this month announced a $12 billion aid package designed as a “bridge” payment to help farmers offset increased production costs. Such aid is expected to begin going out in late-February of 2026, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins told Scripps News when it was announced, and will be capped at around $155,000 per firm with a focus on smaller family farms.
But while farmers and agricultural industry groups have been broadly supportive of the announcement to help offset tariff costs, many are pointing to a different economic challenge they say is more urgently eating into profits and driving up food prices: a growing farmworker labor shortage.
“Farmers can't simply slow or stop production. That fruit, it just keeps growing, whether there are enough workers or not,” said Lisa Tate, a fifth-generation citrus and avocado farmer in Southern California. “Less workers doesn't mean less work. It means more costly work, and it means that we're paying overtime.”
“We lost two-and-a-half million pounds of blueberries last year fallen on the ground just due to the fact that we couldn't harvest that,” echoed Brandon Raso, a blueberry farmer in New Jersey. “The [labor] crisis is something we need to really figure out here.”
A new report released Wednesday provides further empirical grounding for such anecdotes. Zachariah Rutledge, a longtime farm labor researcher and assistant professor of agricultural policy at Michigan State University, sought to quantify the financial impact of farm labor shortages on food prices. The new study was produced in collaboration with Grow It Here, a farmer-led advocacy group highlighting farmers’ challenges finding and maintaining employees and advocating for policy changes to promote more farm employment.
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Using a complex formula incorporating variables like U.S. demand for specialty crops, price elasticity and production share, Rutlledge found that labor shortages directly and causally drive up Americans’ food prices by a statistically-significant margin: a 10% decrease in domestic farm employment amounts to a nearly 3% increase in food prices, equivalent to about $3.4 billion dollars.
“The US fresh produce industry is approaching a pivotal moment. Without meaningful labor-focused policy reforms, labor-intensive agricultural production will likely continue to face growing labor costs, narrowing the diversity of American agriculture and increasing vulnerability to supply chain shocks,” Rutledge wrote. “The decisions made today will influence not only the competitiveness of U.S. producers but also broader national security considerations.”
The farm labor shortage is nothing new. Indeed, according to surveys of farmers Rutledge and other scholars have conducted over the past decades, the share of farms reporting a labor shortage has risen from 14% in 2014 to 53% in 2021, and is likely even higher today. Moreover, the intensity of the labor shortages have also increased; the average farm is now staffed only at about 79% of its desired capacity, Rutledge found.
Various factors account for this growing problem, including an aging agricultural workforce lacking commensurate replacement by younger workers, increasingly-stationary workers no longer interested in seasonal travel and rising labor demand overall.
But President Trump’s immigration enforcement crackdown is almost certainly making the issue worse, too. According to the U.S. Department of Labor’s National Agricultural Workers Survey, approximately 70% of domestic farm workers are immigrants, and nearly 40% of those individuals in the country without proper legal documentation.
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The Trump administration’s mass deportation efforts are further constraining the farm labor force, farmers say, even for immigrants in the country legally.
“Even people that were documented, had everything that they needed and should have, were still concerned,” said Linda Pryor, a North Carolina farmer who grows apples, corn, hay and beef cattle. “People were apprehensive about moving around and going about their normal day to day, just because they didn't know what to expect, even if they had everything in order and had every right to be here, they were still very cautious and apprehensive about it.”
In an interview with Scripps News on Tuesday ahead of its publication, Rutledge suggested efforts to address the farm labor shortage would benefit both food producers and consumers, whereas other measures like tariffs or supply restrictions tend to prioritize one group over the other.
“It turns out that policies that are aimed at allowing there to be more employment on farms are both good for producers and consumers,” Rutledge said.
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Earlier this year, the Trump administration took steps to address one part of the issue by issuing new guidance for the H2-A visa program, which allows U.S. agricultural firms to hire foreign workers for temporary or seasonal farm jobs when they can't find enough U.S. laborers.
The new rules created a novel formula to calculate the Adverse Effect Wage Rate — akin to the minimum wage such workers must be paid — which was expected to reduce farm employers’ wage costs significantly.
Farmers who spoke to Scripps News said they were “cautiously optimistic” about the new rules helping to lower labor costs, but retained concerns about their longevity and the broader impacts of President Trump’s immigration crackdown. Indeed, earlier this year a coalition of farm workers sued over the rules, arguing they violate federal law.
“While we do appreciate this new rate being lower, we don't really know how it's going to change over time,” said Brandon Batten, a row crop farmer in North Carolina.
“Anything that helps reduce our costs is going to be beneficial, but, but I don't necessarily think that this is the solution, or this is going to solve to the extent that we need in order for us to be competitive with other foreign countries and their ability to produce food much cheaper than we can,” echoed Tate.
Officials with the Departments of Homeland Security and Labor didn’t immediately respond to inquiries about farmers’ concerns with the president’s immigration agenda
Yet in documents shared publicly by the Trump administration earlier this year, officials conceded that the “the near total cessation of the inflow of illegal aliens” is threatening “the stability of domestic food production and prices for U.S. consumers.”
“Unless the Department acts immediately to provide a source of stable and lawful labor, this threat will grow,” officials wrote.
Even if the Trump administration changes course with regard to its aggressive deportation tactics, farmers predicted the damage may be long-lasting.
“There's been some long-lasting, I don't know, just a culture change that has started here,” Tate said. “We should really value being the people who are harvesting our crops and taking care of our food and getting it to us. They shouldn't be scared to be in their own communities.”
