Opinion ID: 164327
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Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The Fair Labor Standards Act and the Agricultural Exemption

Text: 12 The Fair Labor Standards Act establishes various labor requirements, such as a minimum wage and overtime pay, for employees in those workweeks when they are engaged in interstate or foreign commerce or in the production of goods for such commerce. 29 C.F.R. § 780.1. One of the Act's requirements is the payment to employees of one and one-half times the regular rate for hours worked in excess of forty in a single workweek. 29 U.S.C. § 207(a)(1); see also id. § 215(a)(2) (making it unlawful for any person to violate the provisions of § 207). Employers must satisfy the Act's requirements unless the Act provides an applicable exemption. One such exemption exists for any employee employed in agriculture. Id. § 213(b)(12). Agriculture is defined at 29 U.S.C. § 203(f) (emphasis added): 13 Agriculture includes farming in all its branches and among other things includes the cultivation and tillage of the soil, dairying, the production, cultivation, growing, and harvesting of any agricultural or horticultural commodities ..., the raising of livestock, bees, fur-bearing animals, or poultry, and any practices (including any forestry or lumbering operations) performed by a farmer or on a farm as an incident to or in conjunction with such farming operations, including preparation for market, delivery to storage or to market or to carriers for transportation to market. 14 This definition of agriculture contains two distinct branches, and includes farming in both a primary and a secondary sense. Bayside Enters., Inc. v. NLRB, 429 U.S. 298, 300, 97 S.Ct. 576, 50 L.Ed.2d 494 (1977); see Farmers Reservoir & Irrigation Co. v. McComb, 337 U.S. 755, 762-63, 69 S.Ct. 1274, 93 L.Ed. 1672 (1949); NLRB v. Karl's Farm Dairy, Inc., 570 F.2d 903, 905 (10th Cir.1978); 29 C.F.R. § 780.105. The first contains the primary meaning of agriculture, which includes farming in all its branches and includes the raising of ... poultry. 29 U.S.C. § 203(f). The definition also includes a second, broader meaning of agriculture. This secondary meaning includes other practices that do not themselves fit within the primary meaning of agriculture, but that are nevertheless performed by a farmer or on a farm as an incident to or in conjunction with such farming operations. Id. The agricultural exemption was meant to apply broadly and to embrace the whole field of agriculture, but it was meant to apply only to agriculture; thus the critical issue is what is and what is not included within that term. Maneja v. Waialua Agric. Co., 349 U.S. 254, 260, 75 S.Ct. 719, 99 L.Ed. 1040 (1955). 15