The following Letter to the Editor is from the January 2025 issue of The Lenawee Voice. Letters should be 350 words or fewer and may be emailed to [email protected]. If space is limited, preference will be given to local authors and local topics. Please include your town of residence and a phone number for verification.

Current wage mandates harm vegetable growers

As a vegetable grower in southeast Michigan, my family has worked to provide safe, affordable and healthy food for our communities for over 63 years. Unfortunately, we are not sure how much longer we will be able to continue to grow vegetables on our farm with outdated government policies pushing us and many other fruit and vegetables growers out of business throughout Michigan and in states across the country.

We’re in an impossible position. We need labor through the federal H-2A program to produce fruits and vegetables in the U.S. The problem is the mandated wages for these workers are unsustainably high.

Current mandated wages, under the Adverse Effect Wage Rate provision, in Michigan are over $18 per hour, nearly 80% higher than Michigan’s current minimum wage ($10.33). And it keeps increasing — nearly 60% in the last 10 years. This is an unprofitable level to sustain business.

Our farm needs over 90 workers each year to harvest our crop. We, the farmer, must pay the workers’ travel expense to and from their country of origin and visa costs to enter the United States, approximately $2,000 per person. We then provide clean, safe housing, electric, heat, water and laundry.

We must help our elected officials in Washington understand that the time to act is now. If we don’t do something soon, we’ll continue to lose the production of fruit and vegetables to foreign countries.

The time is now to Protect Our Produce.

—­ Michael Iott, Iott Ranch & Orchard, Petersburg