In recent years, farmworkers have become more settled, fewer migrating long distances from home to work, and fewer pursuing seasonal follow-the-crop migration. Many hired farmworkers are foreign-born people from Mexico and Central America, with many lacking authorization to work legally in the United States. Many industrywide employment estimates also include support personnel on farms, such as human resource managers, sales agents, and truck drivers. The majority are wage and salary workers, hired directly by farmers, but some are employees of agricultural service companies, including farm labor contractors, custom harvest providers, and management service providers. Hired farmworkers are found in a variety of occupations, including field crop workers, nursery workers, livestock workers, graders and sorters, agricultural inspectors, supervisors, and hired farm managers.
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According to data from the 2017 Census of Agriculture, wages and salaries plus contract labor costs represented just 12 percent of production expenses for all farms, but 43 percent for greenhouse and nursery operations and 39 percent for fruit and tree nut operations. wage and salary workers, but they play an essential role in U.S. Hired farmworkers make up less than 1 percent of all U.S. (Information on the well-being of the self-employed farmers and their families may be found on the ERS topic page on Farm Household Well-being.) The rest of this page describes the employment, earnings, demographic characteristics, and other information for the hired farm labor force only. As a result, the proportion of hired workers has increased over time.ĭownload higher resolution chart (4167 pixels by 3333, 600 dpi) Over this same period, average annual employment of hired farmworkers-including on-farm support personnel and those who work for farm labor contractors-declined from 2.33 million to 1.15 million, a 51-percent reduction. According to data from the Farm Labor Survey (FLS) of USDA's National Agricultural Statistical Service (NASS), the number of self-employed and family farmworkers declined from 7.60 million in 1950 to 2.01 million in 1990, a 74-percent reduction. The reduction in self-employed and family labor through 1990 was more rapid than the decline in hired labor. Since 1990, employment levels have stabilized. Both types of employment were in long-term decline from 1950 to 1990, as mechanization contributed to rising agricultural productivity, reducing the need for labor.
agricultural workforce has long consisted of a mixture of two groups of workers: (1) self-employed farm operators and their family members, and (2) hired workers. Legal status and migration practices of hired farmworkers (crop agriculture only)įinally, we provide links to key data sources with summaries.