Summary

The average employment of hired workers in US agriculture is about 1.5 million. Farm labor markets are significantly different from most other labor markets. For example, they are spread out over a wide geographic region, and the demand for labor depends upon a number of factors, including weather, wages, and the price of goods in some cases.

Due to the seasonality of agricultural production and job turnover, some 2.5 million people are employed for wages on US farms sometime during a typical year. The employment of hired farm workers is concentrated in three interrelated ways: by geography, commodity, and size of farm. The 10,000 largest fruit and berry, vegetable and melon, and horticultural specialty (FVH) farms in California, Washington, Florida, and Texas account for over half of US farm worker employment, including a third in California.

Two million farm workers, 80 percent of the total, are employed on crop farms. The National Agricultural Worker Survey (NAWS) finds that 70% of non-H-2A guest workers on US crop farms are Mexican-born men who have settled in one US place. Some 60 percent of these Mexican-born crop workers are unauthorized, making over 40 percent of non-H-2A crop workers unauthorized. If we consider all farm workers, including H-2A guest workers and hired workers employed in animal agriculture, the unauthorized share is lower, between 30 and 40 percent. Most settled Mexican-born farm workers have US-educated children who shun their parents’ seasonal farm jobs. According to US Census data, since the turn of the Great Recession, the non-citizen Mexican immigrant population has been declining, while the total number of Mexican immigrants started declining in 2016 (see Figure 1).