Searle Hopeful Lame Duck Will Address Labor

Only a few weeks remain for the 117th Congress, and the farming community is hopeful the lame duck session will address a few ag needs during that time.  One of the top issues across commodities in ag labor.  Bryan Searle, President of the Idaho Farm Bureau Federation said it’s still very hard to find workers.

“Nobody really wants to do anything that's hard or difficult or longer hours.  So, it's been a challenge all year long.  People have actually workers have left one farm and gone to another because somebody's willing to offer more money and people will follow the money, and what they have to do.”

Searle noted he’s hopeful the U.S. Senate will work on addressing the farm worker shortage head on.

“The House passed the Farm Workforce Modernization Act, and we're having conversations particularly our senator [Mike] Crapo and senator [Michael] Bennett out of Colorado they've been working on hopefully you know something here on our labor and in the lame duck session we can get something done.  Something that's lingered forever on a guest worker program and providing the you know an adequate force, our dairies left out of that program and it just has a lot of flaws in that program.  So, we need a fix and that would help the labor situation tremendously.”

The final day of the current Congress is technically January 3rd, but many lawmakers will head home for the holidays during the week of December 12th.

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