martin and i'm the office administrator for john b martin and sons farms we are a three thousand acre fruit and vegetable farm and have a small onfarm processing operation for cabbage and winter squash both our cabbage and squash operations are labor intensive and we require approximately one hundred employees on a seasonal basis and forty fulltime employees my job has oversight of all aspects of office procedures for the efficient daytoday running of our farm in the past few years the most difficult and timeconsuming aspect of my job has been working to require legal employees from the federal ha visa program i'm here today before you to discuss the regulatory impediments to job creation in the northeast new york has become one of the most heavily taxed and regulated states in the us and many farms are struggling to stay in business with all the complications that are currently endured short growing seasons extreme and unpredictable weather and labor shortages it continues to become more difficult to keep farms in business with the however the complications within the program have largely increased growing to a level that is causing the program to become unusable the ha program was created in one thousand nine hundred and eighty seven and was not updated until two thousand and eight when the bush administration made changes that helped growers by streamlining the application process and making the program easier for farmers to use however with the new administration coming forward in two thousand and nine these changes were quickly reversed and an even harsher environment for using the program was created with excessive time delays and paperwork burdens while emigration issues have become a growing concern across the nation agriculture still needs access to a liable stable legal work force through a federal guestworker program it is vital to my farm that when my application is submitted for use of the ha program that there is a consistency accuracy and timeliness in execution of the program and process at this point there are different interpretations of the program rules and this has made compliance increasingly difficult while i understand there must be proper paperwork and documentation in this process when i specify a date of need for my workers on the application it is often overlooked and not met by the u s department of labor these extreme delays have caused a lo ofh loss in my crops as workers have not been available to plant pick or do essentially work on the farm that is crucial to staying in business processing problems have repeatedly occurred in the national processing center in chicago within the past year there ha and seasonal work and a differing interpretation based on prevailing practices surveys that are conducted by the state department of labor with inconsistent results these difficulties cause delays in the process and force farmers in desperate need of workers to engage in costly stressful and timeconsuming administrative appeals this is a huge burden on the farmer especially when most of these appeals have been ruled in favor of the farmer when an employer is filing their ha job order there are sections that include a description of the employee's job duties also included is a section stating the level of experience required to be able to sufficiently complete the job description these types of employee requirements can vary from farm to farm and depend on numerous factors the farm is able to provide more training therefore they are able to lower the amount of experience required by the farmer different modes of production vary from farm to farm and not all requirements are the same for example when apples are picked for fresh market it requires more experience a delicacy than when applies are picked for processing and similar to other job qualifications outside of farming there are times when a job description may have different requirements from year to yearh job expectations can change and farms should be allowed to determine what is necessary on their farm however when applications are sent through the regulatory requirements of this program force farms into a one size fits all scheme that makes it extremely difficult for my farm to fulfill requirements for the application process and ensure that we will have access to labor that will accurately and safely complete the job order farmers must advertise for workers in three separate states to demonstrate that they cannot find domestic labor advertisements in newspapers must be for a specific number of days and on specific days of the week this advertising adds expense and time to the application process farmers seldom recruit domestic workers through this process and almost never from further away than the local area even given the recent high rates of unemployment w i understand the need of foreign workers must be demonstrated to access the program these advertising requirements must be adjusted to be a procedure that actual employers would reasonably undertake with an ability to recruit potential domestic workers a dairy and other livestock farmers who have a year round rather than a seasonal need for labor are not able to access the program because they're not included in the agricultural employment definition however they face the same challenges in recruiting reliable workers as fruit and vegetable farms additionally farmers cannot use ha workers for incidental employment on my farm there are a large variety of tasks that must be done to keep the operation running it is unrealistic to expect one worker to only complete one task throughout his or her entire employment period coupled with illnesses or days off for other employees at times there are situations that require workers to pick up extra tasks to get the needed jobs done allowing ha workers to do these incidental tasks while employed by a farm would be extremely helpful and common sense expanding these definitions will allow for a stronger and more efficient use of workers during their employment while at the same time creating stronger workforce on the farm prevailing practice surveys are distributed yearly by each state in the united states as required by the ha programh to farmers based on their commodity asking detailed questions about farm practices and labor experience these surveys have caused complications  the state and the u s department of labor as the survey develops a standard for employment and allows applications to be denied if farms deviate from the norm it is not appropriate to determine that all agricultural operations will have standard needs across an entire state every farm is unique and will have different requirements and job positions in its application depending on its needs all these factors including others have caused great complications within the ha system through the past years and specifically over the past three years the regulatory burdens that complicate this program have hindered job creation not helped to create a usable workforce within agriculture while farms utilize all attempts possible to bring in domestic workers there comes a point for every one job on a farm there's a ripple effect that creates three more jobs off the farm with coordination these are problems that can be fixed to create a useable guestworker program for agriculture as these problems are fixed farms will be able to spend more time directly working with their employees and tending to the crops and animals this opens up opportunities for a strong business environment and a successful workforce on my farm and off the farm as well i look forward to working with t committee on these important issues i truly appreciate the opportunity to express these concerns with you and hope to continue this dialogue in the future during a time of such economic concern it is important to discuss the potential for a stronger more reliable agricultural regulations that demand extremely high compliance costs from family farms with very little environmental public health or any other beneficial gain new york's family farms are experiencing an unprecedented level of federal regulatory and agency oversight in the sectors of environment onesizefitsall federal practice standard cannot replicate nutrient use efficiencies optimum crop response and environmental gain that cornell university onfarm research and trial results have provided to new york farmers to inform their farm management  farms with twenty five cows or more would be considered a major source of emissions forced to pay an annual permitting fee of one hundred and seventy five dollars per cow the average dairy size in new york is one hundred cows so we have more than th three hundred dairy farms in new york state that would have to pay this tax under the epa greenhouse gas ruling epa itself estimates that thirty seven thousand farms nationwide would be impacted at an average annual fee of twenty three thousand dollars in new york we have farms that w excess yearly of three hundred thousand dollars for this tax it's really difficult if not impossible for farmers to control the amount of emissions from their animals a natural process for this regulation penalty just for growing food this kind of regulation by the epa on farms is not going to provide a positive impact on greenhouse gas on this country instead it's going to be another barrier another expense for farmers like myself who are just trying to put milk or us in your consideration and hold our farm businesses harmless from overreaching policy if my children choose to carry on as the fifthgeneration family farm to produce food i hope together that we can work to make that happen some of the concerns of the apple industry my name is john teeple we are apple growers in wayne county we have been in business for over fifty years i'm the third generation i have two nephews who are going to be fourth generation  fruit and vegetable farms in the united states we need a reliable legal labor force in this country the apple industry is a world market we ship apples all over the united states as well as export apples to other countries if we are to keep the apple industry in new york we must remain competitive new york state needs approximately eight thousand workers for about eight weeks to harvest the hmillion bushels we need a unique labor force to harvest these apples it must be physically fit picking apples is hard work they must be dependable and work eight to nine hours per day six days a week apple are very timesensitive and must be picked at the proper time they must have the ability to spot pick apples for color and size and not to bruise them so it's a specialized labor force there's not many people that meet that criteria and are waiting for us to give them a job for eight weeks in the fall and certainly not eight thousand when we need them at the same time that we are starting the apple harvest all of the other apple related businesses are also gearing up the packing lines the storages the processing plants like motts most of our local people prefer these jobs as they're more longterm usually forty five to fifty weeks needs we have to attract migrant labor workers from around the country we do this by paying them well and giving them free housing we pay bythepiece rate which equates to about ten to fifteen dollars per hour plus the value of free housing and utilities which is another three dollars per hour much of the employment documentation we are given at the time of hiring turns out later to be inadequate this puts the employer in a position of having to department of labor is very expensive it's cumbersome it's very restrictive as to the use of the workers and it's unpredictable as to the timing of when we will receive our workers we need agricultural labor reform in this country something like the agjobs bill that has been introduced in the past we need a legal migratory workforce that's willing and able to move where the crops need to be harvested we are quickly approaching the turning point in this country if we are not allowed to import labor to harvest our fruits and vegetable we will be importing our fruits and vegetables my second point exports play a critical role in the economic vitality of the america apple industry promotion programs established under the farm bill help maintain and increase overseas apple sales under these programs the us apple growers partner with u s department of agriculture to increase consumption of us apples overseas american apples are grown from exports our overseas apple sales are critical to our orchards and the entire apple industry the america access program referred to as map and the technical assistance for specialty cr program and the emergency emerging markets program are part of usda farm bill the industry provides matching funds for the map program these are good programs vital to our yield myself five minutes for questions because for many months now really it's been a recurring theme from the dairy industry from agriculture from the apple industry we need a reliable legal workforce what would that process look like and how can we help to achieve that and we can start with each one of you i'd like to hear your comments ms martin i think agriculture is very different from most  other industries we have as mr hteeple mentioned we have a short period of time that we need workers the feeling in the united states is that those workers are there because there is unemployment but you're not going to get somebody to give up their unemploymenth what they may make from unemployment to come to work on your farm for a short period of time and the work is very very hard it's been documented i had workers last year  but because that is generally what happens we need a program that allows me to bring workers in the ha program is the only legal program that i have available to me at this point the federal government hash it's not a wellrun program you can do one thing one year and then the next year you do the same thing when you put in your applications and they'll turn it down that's what's called a deficiency letterh and for no reason we just had a conference call year before for example and they just automatically threw it out when we pointed that out to them why did that happen they said well you didn't tell us why well where on the form does it ask us to tell us why we just answered the questions on the form and their answer was well there's no place on the form you have to write a letter to us well that kind of thingh and you're also given three days to get this done so when you receive a deficiency letter you have three days to correct it and get it back to them it's an impossibility  ten days or thirty days you're going to hear back with a determination ms martin there is a time frame and there is an expectation we are held to the time frame we are hopeful in our expectations of what's going to happen the u s department of labor does not respond consistently or fairly that's the biggest part of the problem we don't know and in agriculture when you have a product or something that needs to be planted or harvested or cared for and you count on your employees to be there and they hold you up for six weeks everything on your farm has been planted everything has been ready to go and they don'th for no good reason that we can figure it out don't send you the workers and hold you up you've got six weeks of  in the last four years we've had three domestic workers come to the farm and ask for jobs two high school young ladies are helping on the farm have taken those jobs and are happy to have them the other person was not even remotely qualified and that's kind of a misnomer with agriculture a lot of times people feel these jobs are unskilled and anybody can do them and it's not true at all there's a tremendous amount of technology involved we need a skilled labor force and  regardless of pay which is another misnomer a domestic laborer does not want to take jobs on farms unfortunately so the challenge for us is to find a labor force and many times they turn to migrants for that one of the look like we need a visa program whatever you want to call it a visa program maybe a threeyear visa that would have to be renewed for terms of three years we need to bring these people out of the shadows unfortunately the need for people to work here has been rolled into the whole immigration discussion and it almost seems like it will never be solved because there's so many factors with it in agriculture we need a visa program we can't send them all back at once weh simply farms would have to shutdown because they could not continue without a labor force if you bring them in make them pay a fine get a visa the ones who do not come in those are the ones you need to chase if there is an issue working here in the united states while we had almost full employment in this country it's a different labor force than the labor force that's currently unemployed especially for fruits and vegetables where we need this migratory labor trade but my experience has been the people that come in to talk to me never had any experience in what it is that i do and they've never actually done the job nor been involved with anything of that job they may be  laptops but when it comes to actually doing the job and understanding what it is the challenges that you all go through if you could just help us the people that you talk to any of them have any experience anybody ever sit down with youh and we have something in the automobile industry called teachers they're not in agriculture and they look at me kind of really like if i have a thought that's important it's like wow you know so you kind of have to overcome that a bit but the other thing is no i think most people think we pay minimum wage or we try to pay less than minimum wage that's not true the adverse effect wage rate which is the required wage for an ha worker is ten dollars sixty five cents i pick my workers up at their house in mexico i get their visas i pay all their expenses up to my house i pay for their food even while they travel i provide free housing take them to the store take them to the doctors whatever they need and that's in  additionh and then i send them home and lately we've been flying them home because of the border problems in mexico that's in addition to the ten dollars sixty five cents an hour that they earn here that may not seem like had a great deal in industry but when you add in all the other things it's really not ah it's not an inexpensive way for us to run our business and it's not a cheap wage for the workers so no i don't think people do know what we do and we're really too busy to do what we do to get ourselves district especially now we're dealingh especially on environmental issues the nonfarm community at large doesn't understand what we do and why we need to do it and the amount of regulation that we're under we have individuals in communities of time have a lot of time sending us this message against agriculture a number of us in the ag community have stepped up and tried to hold community meetings to educate them we've brought in people from cornell this saturday we just had we aren't doing anything one thing that i did talk about at the chesapeake bay one interesting fact about that new york is far and above a lot of other states in the country in its environmental protection and we're thankful for that and farmers have worked to embrace that bay the bay would not be impaired and we would not be facing this chesapeake bay clean up so we've always tried to point out to people we're doing everything we can but sometimes it's a very difficult message for us to get through and get people to understand if we are going to grow food in this countryh and we have a tremendous ability to grow food in this country globally in less than forty years we have to increase our food production globally by hpercent that's the way we need to look at our food  will be over nine billion on the planet and how are we going to do it this country is positioned to do that we are environmentally sound we have good management practices we produce a highquality product and it's safely done other countries like china mexico and brazil if we don't do it they're going to do it for us and they will feed the world and i don't think we want that so we certainly do have a number of challenges getting people to understand what we're doing it and why we're doing it and the need for us to be able to do it you can't move my farm to china but china will do the job for us so i think it would be better suited for us to realize that we can protect the environment  we can go the same way that the garment industry did in this country in the northeast we used to have a lot of garment factories they didn't just all disappear overnight slowly they started moving the buerkle if i might i just have a couple more questions i want to flesh through a little bit more this labor issue because it seems to be something that i've heard about and is a big issue in new york state we have lost so  we are fortunate to have agriculture and dairy farming the industriesh that's one of the leading industries in this state so we need to work hard to ensure your success and as we talked about in the previous panel to get the government out of the way so you can do what you know how to do and what you do best regarding the labor issue what are you hearing is the impediments why can't this be streamlined the department of labor or who you have talked to what is the impediment why won't they talk about reforming the process so you can get people here reliably get them back home when the season is over with and get what you need rather than the situation as it is what are the obstacles what are you hearing mister teeple it's a huge problem we're talking comprehensive immigration and it becomes larger it's like the comprehensive health care plan would like to go home usually in the apple industry speaking for apples these folks have worked in other areas of the country working with sweet corn in some places watermelon peppers and blueberries and apples our feeling as farmers is that is only legal option we have to get go legal workers here we're trying to work within the system immigration if you took immigration aside and didn't even deal with immigration we're just asking for a legal workforce anyway we can do it the impediments that the federal government is putting out there to us make no sense there's no reason and we actually askh i personally ask the department of labor the u s department of labor give me the name of someone  can contact when i have a questionh i had trouble between the state department of labor and the federal department of laborh just give me a name so i don't have to just keep trying to work my way up to an answer and their answer to me was well on our web site we have a that says help and you click the box and then you'll get help well it doesn't work in an ideal world it would work but there's no one there who really is answering and there's no one who wants to say my name is so and so and i'm going to give you this answer i think that may be the way the agencies work but we have no answers and that's what we would like to get to the bottom of just give us a program that worksh make the program work ms buerkle have your organizations  one example of something in ha that's really absurd workers are required to apply online in other own country most countries that these workers are coming from to find a computer and then to understand how to use  cabbage line we have processing i think the minimumhthath and they all receive free housing too so i would say that normally on a farm you're probably paying for a parttime worker you're probably paying twelve and probablyh and some of our supervisorsh you're probably payingh and they get houses i mean these are not small little places so if you figure that in they're probably getting thirty dollars an hour i mean some our supervisors who started out as a migrant labor are making about seventy two thousand dollars a year and that is before you get to their housing before you get to all the things that farms do i don't thinkh i don't think that'sh i don't think that's out of line with what other people pay but because we aren't out there speaking for ourselves andh actually we've learned in agriculture that you have to fly a little bit below the radar that's unfortunate i want to stand up and say hey look it i'm proud to be a farmer and this is what we do and this is lets build a little bit of self esteem for them also they're hard workers they work harder than most americans i have had on my farms so i think they are well paid and i think that they're extended family i don't think they jobs just because it's posted as seven point two five an hour that's not what you pay you pay what the market in your area demands that you pay and i thinkh i mean we've got a huge problem in our country branding it for what it is and marketing