Finding enough workers remains a challenge across agriculture. Still, House Agriculture Committee Chairman G.T. Thompson says the federal guest worker program has not kept pace with the changing needs of farms and livestock operations.
Thompson is pushing the Securing Agriculture’s Workforce Act, or SAWA, a bipartisan proposal aimed at modernizing the H-2A agricultural guest worker program. During an interview at the Iowa State Fair, Thompson said the program was created to supplement a largely domestic agricultural workforce.
Thompson says reliance on the program has changed dramatically over the past several decades. He said about 11,000 agricultural positions were advertised nationwide in 1995. By 2025, that number had climbed to more than 400,000.
Employers using the program are required to advertise available jobs to domestic workers before filling them with foreign workers. Thompson said he was told fewer than 200 American citizens applied for those more than 400,000 positions last year.
For Iowa agriculture, one of the more significant pieces of the proposal involves livestock and dairy operations.
The existing H-2A program generally requires agricultural jobs to be temporary or seasonal. That structure works more easily for operations needing additional workers during planting, harvest or other defined periods, but it has historically prevented many livestock and dairy farms from using the program because their labor needs continue throughout the year.
Thompson says SAWA would replace the seasonal requirement with a new definition of temporary agricultural employment. That would open the program to additional sectors with year-round labor needs, including livestock, dairy, greenhouses and agricultural processing.
The proposal would allow qualifying workers to remain in the United States for up to 350 days before requiring them to leave the country for a period of time. Supporters argue that the approach would give year-round agricultural employers access to a legal workforce while maintaining the temporary nature of the visa program.
Thompson says the legislation has attracted support from lawmakers and hundreds of agricultural organizations. However, the proposal has also faced criticism over concerns that changes to the guest worker system could provide a form of amnesty for people already living in the country illegally.
Thompson rejects that characterization.
Thompson says workers would still have to meet the legal requirements of the program, and he views the legislation as a way to create a more reliable legal workforce for agricultural employers struggling to fill positions domestically.
The legislation could have particular significance for livestock-heavy states such as Iowa, where many hog, cattle, and dairy operations require workers every day of the year rather than during a defined growing or harvest season.
Iowa Representatives Randy Feenstra and Mariannette Miller-Meeks are among the lawmakers supporting the proposal as Congress continues considering changes to the agricultural workforce system.
