Harvesters struggle to recruit crews during pandemic

BELLE PLAINE, Kan. — Kansas harvester Mike Keimig is growing increasingly anxious about whether the foreign seasonal workers he needs to run his nine combines and drive his grain trucks will arrive in time for the start of the winter wheat harvest, which is just weeks away.

His regular crew mostly comprises farm kids from South Africa who return to work for him every year, but they are stuck overseas. The paperwork for about half of the 20 agricultural worker visas he has applied for remains in limbo at the shuttered U.S. Consulate in Johannesburg.

The closure of embassies and consulates due to the coronavirus pandemic is not the only obstacle to bringing in seasonal workers. Governments have closed their borders. Overseas workers who have visas cannot get on a flight. And once they arrive, they would face weeks of quarantine before they could work.

“It will definitely have a big impact on our finances … if we can’t get help to run our equipment,” Keimig said.

“It would even have an effect on the farmers. Well, maybe they can find somebody besides us to do it, I don’t know?” he said. “But I think it would be a little tough because there are a lot of us in the same situation.”

Harvester crews typically traverse the nation with their combines and grain trucks taking on work where the crops are ripening. They usually work the same farms every season, saving the farmers the cost of investing in harvester equipment.

About 30% of U.S. harvest operations use foreign workers on crews, according to Mandi Sieren, operations manager for the industry trade group U.S. Custom Harvesters Inc.

Temporary agricultural worker H-2A visas have been largely spared from immigration rollbacks because agriculture is an essential industry, but the workers can’t travel to the U.S. right now because of the coronavirus, Sieren said.

As for hiring locally, harvesters “would absolutely love to hire Americans, but there are not very many Americans who would leave home for six to nine months at a time,” she said.

As many as half of the workers who harvest U.S. wheat and other grain crops are seasonal foreign workers, said Ryan Haffner, a Kansas harvester and board member for U.S. Custom Harvesters.