Agricultural Labor in America

"Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God …" – Thomas Jefferson

When the first U.S. Census was carried out in 1790, 90 percent of the country’s 4 million residents were farmers or farmworkers. As the nation’s oldest business, everyone from presidents to slaves were intimate with farm life and agricultural production.

But in less than a century, the United States was on its way to becoming an industrial power and an urbanized nation. Today, less than 2 percent of the population is involved in agriculture. While we may still possess folkloric visions about farms and enjoy the bounty of agrarian life, most of us don’t want to participate in it.

The country was founded on the ideal of the family farm, but the Civil War and the completion of the transcontinental railroad in the late 19^th century meant that family-based farm labor couldn’t meet the needs of growing agricultural operations seeking to supply larger portions of the population. Increasingly driven by technological change and growing national and international markets in the 20^th century, farms grew and became mechanized as machines replaced animals (and later, people).

This part we know.

What is less understood is that while farms became mechanized during the 20^th century, the agricultural labor force was also becoming largely foreign-born, as native-born agricultural laborers moved to towns and cities for more and better job options.

At least as early as the 1880s, seasonal farm jobs were losing their appeal for Americans. When the native-born drew away from agriculture, immigrants filled the gap. On the West Coast, they came from Asia.

Late 19^th-century agricultural labor in the West was dominated by the Chinese. After losing their jobs constructing the transcontinental railroad after it was completed in 1869, the Chinese were shut out of jobs in the cities. They eventually found work in California’s agricultural industry; by the 1880s, up to 80 percent of all California farmworkers were Chinese. After Chinese immigration was banned in 1882, other Asian immigrant groups worked on West Coast farms to fulfill the growing national demand for fruit—Japanese, Filipino, Indians, and Pakistanis being among the most common.

After the Civil War, African-American sharecroppers and poor whites along the East Coast were joined by influxes of European immigrants contracted by employment agencies to meet growing farm labor demand. By the early 20^th century, African-Americans were the majority of migrant farmworkers along the East Coast. But the two World Wars would accelerate America’s reliance on immigrant Mexican farmworkers throughout the country.

While Mexicans were involved in agriculture in the West since at least the late 19^th century, World War I increased the country’s food demand and prompted a shortage of agricultural laborers. Now largely lost to history, Mexicans were recruited by the United States to work in agriculture—first during World War I and on a larger scale during World War II through the Bracero Program.

As whites and African-Americans gradually moved out of agricultural work after World War II, native-born Hispanics and Mexican immigrants—both authorized and unauthorized—became the labor force for rural America on both coasts and in the Midwest.

Today, Spanish is the de facto language of the agricultural labor force, with 84 percent of farmworkers claiming this as their native tongue. In 2010, experts estimated that 75 percent of workers on crop farms were immigrants—mostly from Mexico and Central America—and two-thirds were unauthorized. This estimate may be low. Many growers state that up to 90 percent of their workforce is unauthorized.

Agricultural labor in America is now largely in the hands of Latin Americans and Caribbean islanders, both legal residents and—more commonly—unauthorized immigrants. If your food wasn’t harvested by a machine, it was probably produced by immigrants—most of them living in the country without authorization and in poverty.

According to a 2008 U.S. Department of Agriculture report, farmworkers, “while critical to many agricultural sectors … remain among the most economically disadvantaged working groups in the United States.” The same study found that weekly median earnings of crop farmworkers were lower than maids, construction workers, security guards, and janitors. Only dishwashers were found to have lower weekly earnings.

The nation’s primary food producers are also among the most food insecure. One study in North Carolina found that food insecurity among Latino farmworkers was four times higher than the general U.S. population. Specifically, 47 percent of Latino farmworker households in the study were classified as food insecure and 5 percent were found to be suffering from severe hunger.

While Jefferson envisioned an almost sacred role for farmers, today the workforce that harvests the food we eat is under increasing economic and immigration enforcement pressure from a country that does not want immigrants working the fields, but which long ago lost interest in agrarian life.