August 2025

Young farm workers in agriculture can expect to work 12-15 hours per day, all while struggling with anxiety, depression, and worries about crop yields due to weather, crops diseases, and subsidies and finances not coming through as expected. Entire farms, as a work place, often feel isolated, with problems seeming idiosyncratic and not always easy to seek help from counterparts to address.

Farm workers express that farming is a "commodity industry," where it's difficult to make a decent living without inheriting land or equipment. The sentiment is that while the work is a "labor of love," it's often a struggle for survival, with little financial reward trickling down from large food corporations to small farms.

The labor shortage in the agricultural sector remains a critical and intensifying issue. The industry faces an estimated need for an additional 2.4 million farm workers in 2025. This shortage is primarily driven by an aging workforce, a lack of interest from younger generations, and the increasing costs and complexity of temporary foreign worker programs like the H-2A visa. Rising labor costs are squeezing farmers' profitability, with some specialty crop growers seeing labor expenses reach nearly 40% of their total costs.