SPRINGFIELD, Ill. — The beginning of the growing season is an ideal time for the USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) to examine farm labor, said NASS Illinois Field Office Director Mark Schleusener.
Data collected during this time will allow Illinois and federal policymakers to establish labor rules based on up-to-date information, and it would allow farmers and ranchers to hire sufficient labor for their operations.
"There are agricultural guest worker programs where people have to cross the border to do jobs," Schleusener said. "How many are needed, and what should they be paid? These are questions that legislators will be tackling, and we’d like them to tackle these questions (armed) with some facts."
Though the Corn Belt is not comprised of Southern border states, many guest agricultural workers will travel from state to state seeking employment and sometimes wind up working in Illinois or its neighboring area, Schleusener said.
"They should be treated fairly," Schleusener said. "There are rules that need to be followed, and this (survey) is one way to measure – to trace – how many of these workers there are."
More than 380 Illinois farm and ranch employers will be contacted for the survey, along with 305 from Indiana, 405 from Kentucky, 315 from Michigan and 310 from Tennessee. Across the country, 14,000 farm and ranch employers will be asked to participate in the survey, with their responses kept confidential by federal law.
"We select a random sample of farms, including large, medium and small. A typical farm could be a poultry operation that employs a number of people, or a livestock operation. Nursery or greenhouse-type farms or orchards tend to hire a lot of people for manual labor," Schleusener said. "When we can tabulate data from hundreds of farms in Illinois, we can publish reports that are helpful to producers and others in many ways."
The survey tracks the number of hired workers (more or less than 150 days of employment per year) and U.S. wage rates during four target weeks in a year. The last period reported, Oct. 12-18, 2014, showed that farm employers paid combined field and livestock workers an average of $11.46 per hour nationally. The estimate does not include cash bonuses, housing, meals or other "perquisites" associated with workers’ agreements with employers.
USDA breaks down the data into 16 U.S. farm labor regions, including Corn Belt 1 (Illinois, Indiana, Ohio) and Corn Belt 2 (Iowa, Missouri) regions. In Corn Belt 1, general farm workers took home an average of $12.30 per hour in 2014, up from $9.79 per hour in 2005, when USDA began tracking farm labor wages.
Farm labor proved a little more profitable to workers west of the Mississippi River. In region Corn Belt 2, they received an average of $13.69 per hour in 2014, up from $10.16 ten years ago.
This year’s reference weeks are April 12-18 and Jan. 11-17. Schleusener is asking farm employers to have their farm labor data ready to submit when USDA-NASS contacts them.
"We will be mailing questionnaires around April 3," he said. "After April 20, we will begin making phone calls and doing personal interviews."
Data collection will conclude on May 2, with survey results published in the USDA-NASS Farm Labor report on May 21. NASS will ask participants to answer a variety of questions about their hired farm labor, including total number of hired farm workers, the average hours worked and wage rates paid.
For their convenience, survey participants may provide their answers online.
For more information about the USDA-NASS Agricultural Labor Survey, call the NASS Heartland Regional Field Office at 800-551-1014.
