The House Agriculture Committee’s newly-formed Agricultural Labor Working Group has released an online survey requesting input from the agricultural community about workforce issues. Feedback from dairy farmers, employees and other stakeholders is requested to provide insight into dairy’s significant workforce challenges, including its exclusion from the H-2A farmworker program.
The bipartisan panel will use the responses from this anonymous survey to identify problems and weaknesses to the current system, with the goal of releasing recommendations for improvements and solutions. NMPF has fought for dairy farmers throughout this debate, including a group briefing with members of Congress serving on the panel to spell out dairy’s workforce challenges and explain why the current H-2A program is unworkable for producers, in addition to individual lawmaker meetings to make dairy’s case in greater detail.
To supplement NMPF’s work highlighting dairy’s acute workforce challenges, the working group and its members are requesting direct feedback and real-world examples of how the labor crisis is affecting producers.
The brief survey includes mostly multiple-choice questions with a couple of open text boxes where you can share more detailed experiences and opinions. Please contribute to the survey by Friday, Sept. 15 and contact info@nmpf.org with any questions or concerns.
Take the survey here: House Committee on Agriculture Bipartisan Agricultural Labor Working Group (office.com)
