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https://familyfarmers.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/FFD-Defender-•-summer-2026.pdf
By Elizabeth Henderson, Northeast Organic Farming Association (NOFA) of New York
(Note: Family Farm Defenders opposes this expansion of H2A – our position is that we need a secure path to citizenship for ALL undocumented farmworker immigrants in the U.S.)
This bill, recently introduced by House Agriculture Committee Chairman Glenn “GT” Thompson (R-PA), claims to correct the problems for agriculture that current administration policies on immigration have created.
But it goes much further to cement the exploitative working conditions, low wages and disempowerment of farmworkers that undermine the sustainability, not to mention the social justice, of agriculture in the US. SAWA include processing workers as well as farmworkers in the H2A category, expands contracts from a maximum of 10 months to 3 years, allows staggered entry of workers to suit a farmers’ schedule, permitting them to shift from one certified farm or Farm Labor Contractor to another, and streamlines the whole application process that has taken up to 3 months involving contacts with five different government agencies into one on-line platform. To further consolidate and rationalize the system, SAWA charges the Secretary of Labor with creating an on-line registry of farm jobs and database of all H2A jobs.
One big plus, unlike the Farm Workforce Modernization Act on which it is based, SAWA does not require mandatory E-verify for all of agriculture that would have led to the deportation of many farmworkers.
The article on SAWA in Civil Eats (https://civileats.com/2026/06/30/house-agriculture-chair-introduces-controversial-farm-labor-bill/ ) does not give a full picture of how bad it is for farmworkers. SAWA builds on the reduction in wages already implemented by the Department of Labor that changed the method for calculating the Adverse Effect Wage Rate (AEWR) cutting H2A wages by $3 to $5 an hour, depending on the state.
SAWA does provide a way for farmworkers who have been working without full legal status to qualify as H2A workers without leaving the country. However, to qualify for a waiver of deportation, current farmworkers not only have to document with the help of their employer that they worked 5.75 hours a day for 180 days over 2 years, they must also never have accessed any public benefits or have any record of other crimes besides working illegally. There is no mention of the fate of other members of farmworker families.
The bill lets employers who previously employed undocumented workers off the hook for the felony charge this would currently entail.
Upon termination, H2A workers have 30 days to leave the country.
Responding to farmer complaints during the most recent government shut-down, processing of H2A applications will continue even if the government does not pay DOL bureaucrats and shuts down!
On wages, SAWA establishes two tiers – entry level with a lower base wage and specialized skills with a higher wage, but there is an additional nasty twist. If an employer would have hired an unskilled person for a job classified as entry level, but hires someone with years of experience, they can still pay the wage they would have paid to a totally inexperienced worker. (You have so stay up late at night to conjure up these miserly measures.)
In Thompson’s introduction to the bill, he responds to farmer complaints of uncertainty about the required wage rate: “Wages for H-2A workers are calculated based on the Adverse Effect Wage Rate (AEWR), a minimum wage originally designed to ensure domestic workers were not undercut by foreign laborers. Dubious methodologies saw this rate skyrocket from 2010-2025—in this time period, the increases to the AEWR outpaced inflation by 70%.” The historical record show, however, that DOL under Biden was making an effort to raise farmworker wages from the federal minimum of $7.25 to something resembling a living wage. The loudest complaints came from farmers and especially Farm Labor Contractors who had been enjoying their freedom to outrageous exploitation. The bill also responds to complaints of uncertainty about the required wage rate by requiring that the wage rate cannot go more than 1.5% lower or 3.25% higher than the previous year.
As under the current system, employers must provide housing and the housing must be inspected by state entities using state standards for health and safety if they exist or, in the absence of state standards, the federal requirements. However, the employer is longer required to provide the housing free of charge. The Secretary of Labor will set the maximum daily charge with a formula for calculating it (See text of bill p. 6: section E Provision Expense).
Requiring that employers demonstrate some attempt to hire locals, SAWA continues the fiction that H2A workers are not taking jobs from US citizens. And if a local pops up before the H2A workers start their journey, the farm must cancel the H2A visa. The huge growth in H2A visas to over 400,000 in 2025 suggests that no one is making a genuine effort to make farmwork a respected vocation that attracts citizens.
Employer certification to hire H2A is renewable and may be filed by two or more employers in association or by cooperatives. If a group is the “permitted filer” and is barred from certification by abusing workers, the individual farms in the group can still continue in the program.
The bill does not require employers to provide a set number of hours of work. There is no weekly minimum or maximum – but does requires at least 1 hour during every 30-day period.
Thompson responds to news of worker deaths from heat exposure by requiring that H2A certified farms have a heat plan. With unabashed cynicism, the bill calls for “prevention measures that are at least as protective as the applicable Federal and State requirements” and post it where workers can see it. The authors are surely aware that neither the feds nor most states have heat protection legislation. No enforcement of the heat plan is required either.
In the definitions section, SAWA expands agriculture by modifying the definition in the Fair Labor Standards Act which reads:
“The definition of agriculture under the FLSA has two distinct branches: primary agriculture and secondary agriculture.
Employment that is not within the scope of either primary or secondary agriculture is not employment in agriculture under the FLSA.”
SAWA, separates agricultural activities from the farm and would seem to include trucking, seafood processing and meat processing:
‘‘(C) the handling, planting, drying, packing, packaging, processing, freezing, or grading of any agricultural or horticultural commodity in its unmanufactured state, without regard to the ownership or location of such facilities or activities;
‘‘(D) the transportation and preparation for transportation of any agricultural or horticultural commodity, in its unmanufactured state from the farm to the place of storage, first processing or first marketing;
‘‘(F) aquaculture activities, including the primary processing of seafood;
‘‘(J) the harvest and processing of meat and poultry, which shall only include the slaughter of animals and the breakdown of carcasses.”
There is no question that Thompson’s bill responds to the urgent requests of mainstream agriculture. The American Farm Bureau and an assortment of 400 agriculture organizations endorse it. Like sugar, exploitation is addictive. Yet like too much sugar in your diet, stealing from the most marginalized makes US agriculture sick. How collaborative do you imagine relations will be on the farms that invite the H2A workers they depend on to return for a lower wage? The growing movement of workers across the food chain and the many people who want healthy food must reject SAWA along with the Republican House and Senate draft Farm Bills. Another agriculture is possible!
Price floors and supply management programs seem common sense to policymakers when it comes to oil and minerals, but what about US farmers and our overall food system?
By: Patti Naylor, FFD president, George Naylor, FFD board member, and Laurel Levin
Originally published by Common Dreams, June 3, 2026
The race to obtain critical minerals and the war in Iran have not only exposed a dangerous dependence on fossil fuels and mining, but they have also uncovered something more surprising—Republicans in Congress actually understand progressive agriculture policy. They just don’t want to admit it.
In February, Vice President JD Vance announced at the State Department that the administration must institute a price floor to protect the US critical mineral market. “This morning, the Trump administration is proposing a concrete mechanism to return the global critical minerals market to a healthier, more competitive state: a preferential trade zone for critical minerals protected from external disruptions through enforceable price floors,” Vance explained. Meanwhile, the US—and other countries around the world—are deploying oil reserves to buffer price shocks caused by the Israel-US attacks on Iran. Price floors and supply management programs seem common sense to these policymakers when it comes to oil and minerals, but what about US farmers and our overall food system?
Like oil and critical minerals, food and agriculture supply chains, such as corn, soy, and dairy, are vulnerable to global shocks, including extreme weather events, wars, and other supply disruptions. The public also needs to understand that without inflation-adjusted price floors, agricultural commodity prices may sink to disastrously low levels, leaving farmers no choice but to increase production with more chemicals and GMO seeds at the expense of our land and water. Congress and the US Department of Agriculture can avoid low prices by creating reserves accumulated during large harvests and, just like the federal petroleum reserve, bringing them back on the market to stabilize prices in times of shortage. We can all agree that food shortages would be disastrous, so guaranteeing its citizens food security should be imperative for any democratic government.
So while Republicans can recognize the importance of price floors and supply management during this administration, Democrats should look at history to understand how the same instruments were developed for agriculture during the Great Depression under the Democratic Party’s New Deal. The twin crises of farm bankruptcies and the Dust Bowl spurred militant farm organizations to demand a response from the federal government. The response was parity farm bills that stopped farm bankruptcies and stabilized the farm economy so that conservation measures and preservation of diversified farming could lead to food security and a balanced economy. Federal leadership in the White House and Congress recognized that price and supply management benefited both farmers and society as a whole. The policy was simple and transparent: The farm bill would ensure that during years of good harvests, public grain reserves would purchase the surplus at the parity rate (price floor adjusted for inflation) and store it to protect consumers in future times of shortage.
However, both parties abandoned this common-sense approach to farm policy in the early 1950s, so that costs of farming have totally outpaced commodity prices. Subsequently, headlines warning of a farm crisis in 2026, like during the Great Depression and the 1980s, are not uncommon. The prices paid to farmers for commodities such as corn, soybeans, wheat, and dairy have dropped to record lows in real dollars. Over the years, this imbalance has led to the loss of family farms, the consolidation of agribusiness and food processing monopolies, along with their profits benefiting handsomely. Stabilizing the ratio of farm prices to farm costs (the correct goal of any Farm Bill) is the key to a sustainable agriculture that avoids soil loss, water pollution, and the decline of rural communities.
A supply management program would not only help revive family operations and rural economies but would also be essential to combat the expansion of confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs) and lower costs for taxpayers. As reported by Food & Water Watch, CAFOs are a disaster for our climate, air, and water, especially for nearby communities. CAFOs are among the most egregious features of today’s low-price, commodity-based industrial agriculture. Thousands of livestock (owned or vertically integrated with large food processors) are confined in small facilities without fresh air or sunlight and fed cheap corn and soy.
CAFOs have been replacing conscientious family farmers who are stewards of the soil and their animals. When family farmers are forced out of livestock production, they face the dilemma of “get big or get out” and often have no farming alternatives other than to tear up their pastures to grow corn and soybeans that will end up feeding animals in CAFOs.
The Trump administration is applying often-forgotten policy instruments to sustain our fossil fuel dependence and our high-tech future, rather than prioritizing a resilient, sustainable economy. Managing a price floor and creating federal food reserves in the agriculture sector are necessary to combat the adverse effects of food processor monopolization, farm consolidation, soil and water degradation, and external shocks, such as wars.
A productive agricultural economy that conserves our resources, challenges agricultural consolidation, and offers economic opportunity in rural communities should be a top priority for all our citizens. “We love farmers” and “We put America’s farmers first” are just political slogans to get votes with no substance behind them. These slogans lead to the usual sleight of hand to send taxpayer dollars to get some farmers through the next planting season. This policy leaves the disastrous cheap commodity regime in place—encouraging CAFO production and exporting commodities at a loss.
The administration’s discovery of the logical policy of price floors and reserves for oil and minerals must open new doors to applying these logical and transparent mechanisms to agriculture to restore the security of family farmers and conservation of our precious resources—after all, we can’t eat petroleum or precious minerals.
By: Anthony Pahnke, Vice President of Family Farm Defenders and an Associate Professor of International Relations, San Francisco State University
Originally published in Fortune Magazine, 3/14/2026
Tucked inside the 2026 Farm Bill is a provision that would reimburse farmers 90% of the cost of adopting AI and precision agriculture technologies — 15 percentage points above the normal EQIP cap. The private sector standards governing those technologies would be set not by the USDA, but by the tech industry itself. This could be a Trojan horse of sorts for something called “precision agriculture” and artificial intelligence (AI), which big tech firms will be able take advantage of farmers and further wrest control over the food system from them.
Agri Drone Sprayer – photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
Besides receiving the attention from the ever-dwindling number of farmers in our country, the Farm Bill cycle usually comes and goes every five years without anyone raising much of a fuss. In fact, the 2018 Bill expired in 2023 and has been renewed three times since without much commotion.
This cycle portends like those others, as parts of the legislation’s most costly and contentious sections, or titles, like Nutrition, were shoehorned into Trump’s ‘One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB)’ last July.
But closer inspection of the current Farm Bill that is now meandering through Congress —entitled The Farm, Food, and National Security Act of 2026 — reveals some potentially troubling inclusions worth digging into.
A quick review of the current House version of the Farm Bill doesn’t reveal anything too unusual. The legislation’s 11 titles is the same number as what was in the law back in 2018. Still, how “precision agriculture” appears in the Conservation Title should raise some eyebrows.
Not only is precision agriculture defined, but it is complemented by a list of what are deemed appropriate technologies, including GPS, yield monitors, data management software, and the particularly strange sounding, “Internet of Things and telematics technologies.”
That last bizarre phrase, which most would probably consider a typo, is actually a concept that abounds in tech company circles. One definition from an industry leader notes that the “Internet of Things,” or IoT, is the “network of physical objects — “things” — that are embedded with sensors, software, and other technologies for the purpose of connecting and exchanging data with other devices and systems.”
Paired with this definition is the government opening the way for corporations to have, well, a “field day” with precision agriculture, including for AI. Tucked away in the Rural Development Title, is the “promoting precision agriculture” subsection. AI, we are told particularly, is to be guided by “private sector-led interconnectivity standards, guidelines, and best practices.”
This language lays the groundwork for the Farm Bill to funnel taxpayer dollars to make AI an integral part of our food and farm system. Specifically, for farmers who adopt precision agriculture as part of conservation practices, particularly through the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP), they will be reimbursed for 90% of the cost. This exceeds the normal percentage of what is provided by EQIP cost-share grants, which usually max out at 75% of what a farmer spends on practices like setting up a greenhouse or improving their irrigation system.
The irony should be noticed that EQIP, a program with the purpose of bringing conservation into farming, is now being used to fund forms of technology powered by data centers that drain our water, cause air pollution, and gobble up farmland.
Farmers are no strangers to technology. From installing robotic milkers on dairies, to purchasing tractors and replacing horses at the start of the twentieth century, they have always had to get their products to market while factoring in the costs of the inputs that make that journey possible.
But in terms of the current Farm Bill, the incentives for big tech are new. It’s true that precision agriculture first appeared in the 1985 legislation, but without any specific technologies listed. Subsequent Farm Bills also refer to technological change and modernization, but either in more general terms, or for the USDA to improve its accounting practices.
Such favoritism of one form of technology, being developed by firms not traditionally involved in food production, stands to further wrest decision-making from farmers as it exposes them to privacy concerns.
In terms of producer control, consider the ongoing debates about right-to-repair laws. Here, corporations retain proprietary technology on the parts of machines they sell, leading farmers to pay for their assistance if something breaks down. Such use of corporate power limits farmers’ ability to use machinery that they purchase outright while subjecting them to unnecessary service charges.
Control concerns have also been at the center of seed technology debates.
One controversy on genetically-modified organisms (GMOs) is how with their use, instead of farmers retaining seeds year after year and controlling their development, producers become dependent on companies for receiving this necessary input. There are also cases where companies have prosecuted farmers who unknowingly find GM plants in their fields, and who then became the target of expensive lawsuits.
Detractors will note the labor-saving advantages of using AI. Secretary of Agriculture, Brooke Rollins, made this point last year during a press conference that was meant to address worries of ongoing labor shortages as Trump’s mass deportation campaign ramped up.
But AI still needs knowledge from practitioners. Changing climate conditions, along with standard run-of-the-mill challenges that arise from dealing with animals, requires a new generation of farmers who are versatile and resilient. Put otherwise, we need more producers, trained in diverse production practices and supported by government policies that promote local markets more than cloud computing initiatives that pad the pockets of rich elites and further damage our environment.
Instead programs like the Local Agriculture Market Program (LAMP), which do appear in this latest Farm Bill, should receive more attention and funding, along with other proposals like the Justice for Black Farmers Act that creates a pathway for young people to get on the land and stay there.
The Farm Bill is meant to promote agriculture. This latest version will grow not our food system, but corporate profits. Not more fruits and vegetables, but data will be harvested. Trump often professes his support for farmers. It’s time for his administration to actually help them, forwarding a Farm Bill that keeps producers on the land and brings new ones to the industry rather than enriching tech billionaires.
The Senate Agriculture Committee has a straightforward choice: redirect the EQIP precision agriculture premium back into programs that actually put farmers on the land. Reallocating even half of those enhanced cost-share dollars to the Local Agriculture Market Program would more than double LAMP’s current budget — and fund the next generation of producers rather than the next generation of data centers. The Justice for Black Farmers Act offers a parallel path: land access, not algorithmic dependency. If Trump’s administration wants to prove its support for farmers is more than a talking point, the markup table is where that proof gets written.
Food sovereignty is critical for any community’s survival – and this is especially true in times of armed conflict, land grabbing, and forced relocation. Thankfully, there are many ongoing efforts to preserve the diversity and vitality of Palestine’s amazing agricultural heritage. You, too can support Palestinean food sovereignty by planting seed and sharing the bounty this coming 2026 planting season.
Each solidarity seed package contains a brochure, button, and five heirloom varieties: ‘Small Jadu’i’ watermelon; ‘Yakteen’ bottle gourd; ‘Kusa’ squash; ‘Abu Al-Rub’ coriander; and ‘Molokhia’ greens.
Suggested donation $75 (includes postage). Proceeds will go to support food sovereignty work in Palestine through affiliates of La Via Campesina. You can make a donation on our website and/or email familyfarmdefenders at yahoo.com for more info.
