Differentiation in Farm Labor Complement Profiles of Organic and Conventional Farms in the Southeast: Coping with a Changing Farm Labor Market

The farm labor market is expected to experience supply deficiencies as a result of the displacement of foreign unskilled workers due to the impending implementation of stricter immigration policies in the United States. This study scrutinizes the farm labor hiring predicament of farm operators using data from the household survey we administered on organic and conventional farms in the Southeast U.S. Specifically, we used the Seemingly Unrelated Regression (SUR) approach to model and examine the level of difficulty experienced by farmers in hiring non-family farm workers and its influence on farm labor management decisions. We also explore the probable motivation of the extent of family members’ involvement in farm work and analyze the influence of the more labor intensive organic component of farm activities on farm labor management decisions. Our results suggest that family member’s involvement in farm work is likely greater when the farm is mostly organic, engaged in grains and hay operations, relatively smaller, and when farm operation requires high harvesting hours relative to total farm labor hours. Our study has produced evidence on organic farms’ relatively higher demand for labor, regardless of source, and, in absolute terms, greater reliance on seasonal non-farm workers. Our findings also suggest that when non-farm workers are difficult to find, farm businesses tend to optimize family members’ involvement in the farm business and/or maintain relatively higher proportions of full-time employees. Moreover, our results contend that higher wages could not possibly effectively attract non-family workers to seek seasonal farm employment.