The agricultural community in South Carolina is facing stiff regulatory headwinds, which have contributed to more than 1,000 farms disappearing in the state over the past two decades. As the co-owner of a fourth-generation family farm that grows everything from peaches to pecans to asparagus to timber, I am working to ensure our business doesn’t become another casualty.
The main cause of disappearing farms is federal wage regulations that negatively impact American agriculture and American consumers. South Carolina’s elected officials in Washington need to lead the charge to remedy the tilted playing field.
Unlike many farming operations that rely heavily on machinery to harvest food, peach orchards and other specialty crops require a great deal of manual labor. And given that most homegrown South Carolinians — or any Americans more broadly — are unwilling to perform this type of work, farmers are forced to turn to an alternative workforce for help: immigrants who are here legally.
That’s why I hire employees through a temporary visa pathway that is specific to the agriculture industry called the H-2A program. And I’m not alone. The number of workers using the H-2A program has grown at least six-fold during the past 20 years, as it becomes an increasingly popular mechanism to address farm workforce shortages.
Legal immigrants are the only feasible option. My business, for example, has advertised open positions to U.S. citizens in South Carolina and surrounding states to little avail.
Under the visa program, farmers like me are obligated to pay nearly $15 an hour to these workers — more than double the minimum wage that applies to other businesses such as restaurants or manufacturing plants. To add insult to injury, that mandated earnings figure doesn’t even account for additional expenses that employers are also on the hook to cover, including housing, visa costs and three meals a day or provision of convenient cooking facilities.
The earnings floor is out of touch with economic realities because it’s calculated by bureaucrats more than 500-miles away in Washington. The equation to determine the compulsory wage rate has built-in escalators that all but ensure it balloons every year. In fact, the wage has risen more than 30% since 2019.
For peach growers like me — who contribute a collective $400 million to the state economy annually — the situation is dire. With labor costs growing like a weed, it’s difficult to remain competitive because produce is being imported from abroad. Peach farms in Chile, for example, pay their workers a small fraction of what we do here, while employees in Mexico earn roughly one-ninth the S.C. rate.
The wage disparity trickles downhill to consumers at the grocery store who choose cheaper imported goods over locally grown food, undermining community farming and the viability of food production in the United States long term.
This regulatory environment is contributing to a grim economic landscape for the broader U.S. agriculture industry. Farm production expenses have more than quadrupled since 2020, with key inputs such as fertilizer and pesticides seeing price increases of 78% and 66%, respectively. Meanwhile, net farm income is expected to plummet by 25% this year compared to last, according to the federal government.
The implications extend well beyond farms and the rural communities they support. A shrinking domestic agricultural footprint jeopardizes the stability of our food supply and increases U.S.-reliance on foreign actors. Given the current geopolitical instability, that’s not a favorable position to be in.
The S.C. farming community is being forced to compete against foreign produce with one hand tied behind their backs — a brewing storm that threatens American food security. Our elected leaders in Washington need to step up efforts to reduce the federal regulatory burden placed on family farms like mine.
The status quo isn’t so peachy.
Chris Yonce is a co-owner of JW Yonce & Sons Farms in Johnston and is the president of the South Carolina Peach Council.
