Coast to Coast, Farm Families Stand With Their Employees

Mar 17, 2025

By Bryan Little and Peter Furey

With new administrations come new leadership, new priorities and new regulatory approaches. The recent transition has highlighted policy changes throughout the federal government, including interior enforcement of existing immigration laws. In farming communities throughout the United States, there is widespread concern about potential workplace disruptions.

We’re pleased to report that from our perspectives on the West and East Coasts, thus far, large-scale disruptions have not materialized. We recognize that some workers feel uncertain right now, and we want to be very clear: American agriculture depends on and values its workforce. Farm employees are not just workers—they are partners with our nation’s farmers and ranchers. They are people with families, dreams and an incredible work ethic who keep food on tables across America.

As veteran staff of the California and New Jersey Farm Bureaus respectively, we know how high the stakes are.

With one-third of the nation’s agricultural workforce located in California, farm employees play an indispensable role in food production. These skilled workers plant, cultivate and harvest the crops that make California the leading producer of fruits, vegetables and nuts in the United States. Without these employees, crops would go unharvested, rural businesses would suffer and food prices could rise for families across the country. This is not just a farm issue—it’s a food security issue, an economic issue and a community issue.

In New Jersey, the agriculture industry is much smaller in scale, but no less significant in its contributions to local communities and the state’s economy. With over 100 fruits and vegetables, along with other specialty crops, nurseries, vineyards, fisheries and livestock farms, a highly diverse agricultural economy in the Garden State boasted cash receipts of nearly $1.5 billion in 2022. How does that come to be? - in large part, through the toil and diligence of a stable and healthy agricultural workforce.

These examples are among many that demonstrate the interdependence of agriculture and rural economies. Thousands of employees in farming and ranching-adjacent industries—including food processing, transportation and equipment suppliers—depend on the steady flow of agricultural production to sustain their livelihoods.

Although today’s agricultural workforce challenges are not new, they reinforce the sustained urgency to deliver durable reforms that provide the certainty owed to farmers and their employees.

Farmers and ranchers have struggled with chronic labor shortages for years, and uncertainty surrounding immigration policy only exacerbates the problem. Farmers, ranchers and Farm Bureau are ready to work with the administration and Congress to advance real, bipartisan workforce reforms this year. This isn’t just about filling jobs—it’s about ensuring security and stability for the agricultural workforce and the farmers who depend on them.

To provide a long-term solution, three key priorities for workforce reform must be implemented:

Modernizing the H-2A agricultural visa program to make it more flexible and responsive to the labor needs of farmers and ranchers;
Providing earned legal status for current agricultural workers, recognizing their longstanding contributions to U.S. food production and society; and
Crafting policies that reflect the reality of agriculture and recognize that workforce stability is essential to feeding the nation.

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Video: Why Your Food Future Could be Trapped in a Seed Morgue

In a world of PowerPoint overload, Rex Bernardo stands out. No bullet points. No charts. No jargon. Just stories and photographs. At this year’s National Association for Plant Breeding conference on the Big Island of Hawaii, he stood before a room of peers — all experts in the science of seeds — and did something radical: he showed them images. He told them stories. And he asked them to remember not what they saw, but how they felt.

Bernardo, recipient of the 2025 Lifetime Achievement Award, has spent his career searching for the genetic treasures tucked inside what plant breeders call exotic germplasm — ancient, often wild genetic lines that hold secrets to resilience, taste, and traits we've forgotten to value.

But Bernardo didn’t always think this way.

“I worked in private industry for nearly a decade,” he recalls. “I remember one breeder saying, ‘We’re making new hybrids, but they’re basically the same genetics.’ That stuck with me. Where is the new diversity going to come from?”

For Bernardo, part of the answer lies in the world’s gene banks — vast vaults of seed samples collected from every corner of the globe. Yet, he says, many of these vaults have quietly become “seed morgues.” “Something goes in, but it never comes out,” he explains. “We need to start treating these collections like living investments, not museums of dead potential.”

That potential — and the barriers to unlocking it — are deeply personal for Bernardo. He’s wrestled with international policies that prevent access to valuable lines (like North Korean corn) and with the slow, painstaking science of transferring useful traits from wild relatives into elite lines that farmers can actually grow. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. But he’s convinced that success starts not in the lab, but in the way we communicate.

“The fact sheet model isn’t cutting it anymore,” he says. “We hand out a paper about a new variety and think that’s enough. But stories? Plants you can see and touch? That’s what stays with people.”

Bernardo practices what he preaches. At the University of Minnesota, he helped launch a student-led breeding program that’s working to adapt leafy African vegetables for the Twin Cities’ African diaspora. The goal? Culturally relevant crops that mature in Minnesota’s shorter growing season — and can be regrown year after year.

“That’s real impact,” he says. “Helping people grow food that’s meaningful to them, not just what's commercially viable.”

He’s also brewed plant breeding into something more relatable — literally. Coffee and beer have become unexpected tools in his mission to make science accessible. His undergraduate course on coffee, for instance, connects the dots between genetics, geography, and culture. “Everyone drinks coffee,” he says. “It’s a conversation starter. It’s a gateway into plant science.”