Page 30 2024 Fall Farm Outlook Lincoln Daily News Oct 2024 There is a labor shortage in the agriculture industry. For some, that statement may be new information, especially if you do not keep an eye on the agriculture industry. For those who do, on the other hand, that statement is likely a fact of life by now. For farmers and those actively involved in the agriculture industry, this is likely a great source of stress and anxiety. Labor shortages in the agriculture industry are nothing new. A brief Google search on the topic brings up many articles. “Finding good farm help has gotten tough,” reads the sub title of a 2018 article from the website Successful Farming. The title of a 2021 article from USA Today reads, “Finding workers was already hard for the ag industry. Now it’s even worse, farmers say.” A Farm Bureau Financial Services article from 2022 calls finding good employees for farms “more difficult than ever.” Brian Duncan, President of the Illinois Farm Bureau, published an opinion piece earlier this year stating the need for a stable workforce in the agriculture industry. Clearly, this is nothing new for farmers. What are some of the repercussions of not having a stable workforce on your farm? What about Labor Shortages in the Agriculture Industry the effects on the agriculture industry as a whole? What are some of the things you can do if your farm is also struggling in this manner? Read on to learn more. A Newsweek article published this year states that the agricultural industry has “2.4 million farm jobs needing to be filled.” They got this number from the American Farm Bureau Federation. This extremely high need for labor comes with its consequences. According to the same article, between 2017 and 2022, the United States saw a seven percent cutback in farms. Zippy Duvall, the American Farm Bureau Federation President, blamed this partly on the labor shortage. “‘There is no question that our broken workforce system is partly to blame,’” Duvall said while commenting on why the U.S. is losing farms so fast. One of the major fallouts of this labor shortage is the spoiling of perfectly good produce. A 2019 study out of California found that over thirty percent of the crops that were ready to harvest were left in the fields at the end of harvest time. This leads to a large loss in potential revenue for the farmers as well as the Continued --
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