Cut to Federal H-2A minimum wage could have serious impacts on local agriculture

The Betsie Current has a timely & engaging story from Claire Keenan-Kurgan on a dramatic cut to the minimum wage for workers on H-2A visas & fears it could upend local farms & farmers:

Every year for the past decade, Jose Abel (29) has traveled more than 2,000 miles from the region of Durango in Mexico to tend to the grapes of Northern Michigan’s famed vineyards.

The money he earns during the nine months that he spends in Michigan allows him—and thousands of other Mexican workers in our state—to have dreams back home. “Building a house in Mexico, buying something to live over there, so you don’t have to keep coming here… starting a business, or having a farm,” he explains.

Bel Lago Winery vineyard manager Tomas Moreno

Now, however, the U.S. federal government has lowered the minimum wage—by as much as $4.50 an hour, or 25 percent, in Michigan—for the exploding number of workers who are here on H-2A visas, like Abel.

The decision comes after a couple of years of outcry from some farmers that the cost of labor, transportation, and housing for H-2A workers had become untenable, and that, without locals willing to do the job, small farms would not be able to afford the cost of the harvest season.

“This move is a key step towards modernizing the H-2A program,” Michigan Farm Bureau president Ben LaCross said in an online press release back in October 2025. “More work needs to be done, but this is a great start.”

Others, however, wonder if the new wages will still be able to attract enough farmhands to do the work that locals do not seem to want.

“We get the same guys coming back every year, and it’s a pretty severe decrease,” says Brandon Evans, a farm manager at the Evans Brothers Fruit Co. in Benzie County. “They’re used to the wages they’ve been getting paid.”

They post job opportunities locally as the harvest comes around, but “we just never hear anything,” Evans says. “We post the job online for the same rate as the H-2A guys, and nobody shows up.” Of 415,000 total advertised U.S. farming positions during 2025, only 182 received a domestic applicant, according to The New York Times.

…Without domestic help, “the H-2A program has pretty much taken over,” says Tomas Moreno, the vineyard manager at Bel Lago Winery in Cedar, overlooking Lake Leelanau. He also manages a team of H-2A workers who rotate through various vineyards all across the county.

Moreno says he brought 24 workers to Michigan last year and plans to bring 30 this year. He says that vineyard owners from all over Northern Michigan have been calling him, ready to pay premiums for him to set up contracts with migrant workers through the H-2A visa process.

We encourage you to head over to the Betsie Current to dig into what will be a very serious issue for Leelanau farms & farmers!