OPINION: Farmers and policymakers must invest in innovative farming technologies

The Southwest agriculture sector is bowed by the weight of monumental challenges. Labor shortages, border chaos and unproductive national gamesmanship with immigration reform, as well as the challenge of climate change, have made farming more exigent than ever.

Might this be the time for farmers to scan the horizon for nonpolitical solutions? Can policymakers direct funding to areas they can realistically make a difference in?

For over a decade, Vanea Moreno and her family have been hiring workers in Juárez and crossing with them daily to work farms in Texas and New Mexico. As a labor contractor in the U.S.-Mexico border region, she has seen the manifestations of a broken immigration system: fewer people willing to cross the border for farm work and the growing mistreatment of foreign farm workers who do make the journey.

This all came to a peak during the global COVID-19 pandemic, and in early 2023, when borders were often completely shut down. With few to no border crossings, Moreno says, “our farmers couldn’t harvest anything and had to watch their crops, the result of a year’s hard work, wither away right in front of their eyes.”

According to U.S. Department of Agriculture, the revenue from chile pepper production, New Mexico’s signature crop, has shrunk more than 50% over the past decade, but Americans’ love of chiles has not. The U.S. is currently the largest importer of peppers in the world. Labor shortages, high inflation, and increased production costs are the main contributors to this decline.

Most of the chile peppers we eat come from China, India and Mexico, notes Vince Hernandez, crop consultant and coordinator for Biad Chili Company. Plentiful, lower-cost labor in these countries makes it hard for U.S. growers to compete, as does our country’s historically poor investments in infrastructure.

Americans have developed an aversion to doing the hard, manual labor of farming. Mexicans are following the same trend. The USDA Farm Labor Survey indicates that there has been a 74% reduction in the number of American farmworkers since 1950. The number of hired farmworkers, most of whom are Mexican, has reduced by more than 51%. This represents a potential long-term threat to the viability of many U.S. farming operations that depend on seasonal workers.

In the short- to mid-term, however, there is another primary factor hurting our agricultural competitiveness, which is the U.S. Department of Labor’s H-2A Temporary Agricultural Workers Program. First authorized under the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, this regulation “allows agricultural employers who anticipate a shortage of domestic workers to bring nonimmigrant foreign workers to the U.S. to perform agricultural labor or services of a temporary or seasonal nature.”

“Sounds good, but the problem with this program”, says Benjamin Etcheverry, president of the New Mexico Chile Association, “is its extreme inefficiency and cost for employers.”

Hiring through H-2A entails “dealing with a lot of regulations, red tape, and paperwork, and paying for numerous things such as immigration attorneys, housing, and insurance for laborers, and many other hidden costs.”

Since the dysfunctional H-2A program is the only legal route to hire seasonal workers, many agricultural employers may choose to risk penalties and even tax or criminal liability to hire undocumented workers.

While inaction on U.S. immigration policy has been slowly damaging the agriculture industry, the political theater of the current migrant border crisis has had the effect of shifting attention away from other priorities that need to be addressed when it comes to the farming community.

The 2018 Farm Bill, also known as the Agriculture Improvement Act of 2018, tops this list. This bill has massive impact on crucial farming concerns, such as farmer livelihoods, food production, crop insurance, and low-income support programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, affecting millions of children and families. Instead of renewing and modernizing the program last year, Congress only extended it, thereby postponing its improvement until after the November elections.

People who work in agriculture must always brace for the unpredictable, whether it’s the weather or debilitating federal policies. The agricultural community must adapt to labor shortages by focusing on and investing more in precision agriculture, biotechnology, artificial intelligence, and other technological developments. The policymakers who represent them must also support them in this endeavor, and direct resources to these fields more vigorously.

Newer innovations, like AI-guided laser weeders and fully automated irrigation systems, are already showing great results in solving some of these issues. Researchers at New Mexico State University, and its Chile Pepper Institute, have also been working on chile mechanical harvesters and robotic chile pickers and witnessing the great potential these technologies hold.

It is a moral and economic obligation, therefore, for farmers and policymakers to invest in innovative farming technologies. It is our only chance to prevent our crops from rotting in fields and workers from suffering abuse at the border, just to harvest them.

Shahab Nourbakhsh is a senior research specialist in the chile pepper breeding program of the Chile Pepper Institute at New Mexico State University.