PRIORITIES • Lower Cost of Living • Policy to

Get Our Growers the Workforce They Need

Why I believe this — and how I’ll fight for it.

There’s a question I get at every farm meeting in this district, and nobody in Washington wants to answer it honestly: who is going to pick the crop?

Not in theory. This August. The peaches don’t wait, the almonds don’t wait, and a crop you can’t harvest is a crop you didn’t grow. Every grower here has had the year where the fruit was good and the crew was short and they watched part of it go to the ground.

Meanwhile Washington has spent 30 years using farm labor as a debate topic. Both parties would rather have the argument than fix the problem, because the argument is worth more to them than the answer. And the people paying for that are the family operations here, who need a legal, reliable, predictable workforce and cannot get one.

The people who do this work are doing some of the hardest labor in America, in the heat, on their feet, at speed. They deserve to be treated like it. And our growers deserve a system that doesn’t make hiring them a legal gamble. Those two things are not in conflict. Washington has just found it convenient to pretend they are.

Here’s the honest state of play. The guest worker program — H-2A — is the legal path, and using it means housing, transportation, a federally set wage, and a paperwork process that runs months. In 2026 the federal wage rule changed and the California rate moved sharply — and it can move back just as fast with the next administration. A number that swings with an election is not something anyone can plan around, and a grower planting a tree that produces for 25 years is budgeting against a coin flip. The workers can’t plan around it either.

Here’s what I’ll do — and why

Make the guest worker program work like a program instead of an obstacle course. One filing portal, a hard deadline for the government to answer, and penalties on the agency’s performance rather than only on the employer’s paperwork. A grower should be able to know in weeks — not months — whether the crew is coming. If the federal government takes 90 days to answer, that’s the government’s failure, not the farmer’s.

Give growers wage certainty they can actually plan against. Set the guest worker wage on a published, predictable formula with advance notice before it moves, so a family operation can build it into a budget the same way it budgets water and fuel. Wild swings between administrations serve nobody.

Extend it to the work that doesn’t stop in October. The program was built for seasonal harvest, but dairies, packing houses, and nurseries need people year-round and are largely locked out. A cow needs milking in February. I’d open a year-round track so the operations that run all twelve months aren’t forced into a system designed for twelve weeks.

Protect the people doing the work — heat, wages, housing. Enforceable heat standards, wages paid in full and on time, and housing fit to live in. The overwhelming majority of growers here already meet or beat that standard, and they’re undercut by the few who don’t. Enforcement protects the growers already doing it right.

Invest in harvest technology and the training that has to come with it. Mechanization is coming to specialty crops, unevenly and slower than the headlines suggest. I’d back federal research and cost-share for harvest technology that fits fruit and nut operations — and I’d pair every dollar of it with training money, because a region that automates without retraining just moves the problem down the road.

Stop pretending enforcement alone is a workforce policy. You cannot enforce your way to a harvested crop. Any serious plan has to include a workable legal channel for the people already doing this work, and a status for the experienced hands who have been here for years, raising families and paying taxes. I’d rather have that fight than keep handing our growers a shrug.

What this means for Our District

From the orchards of Sutter and Yuba to the vineyards of Napa and Sonoma to the row crops of Colusa and Yolo, this district runs on people willing to do work most Americans won’t. Our growers are asking for one thing: a phone number that works and a rule that doesn’t change every four years.

For nearly 30 years our representative has been in the room while this stayed broken. I don’t take money from agribusiness or from anyone else with a stake in keeping the argument alive, so I can say the parts both parties avoid: our growers need workers, those workers deserve dignity, and anyone telling you those are opposites is selling you an election.

The bottom line

A crop that rots in the field is a family’s whole year. Fix the legal channel, make the rules predictable, protect the people doing the work, and invest in what’s coming. Most of this costs nothing — it’s a government that answers the phone and a rule that holds still. Let’s give the people who feed this country a system that works.

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