December and Christmas may be months away but Christmas tree farmers are already hard at work preparing for the season.
It's been just over a month since about two dozen workers, most from Mexico, arrived to work at Michigan’s Dutchman Tree Farms, the largest Christmas tree grower in the state.
Thousands of seasonal workers from abroad arrive in the state each year through a federal visa program called H-2A to help harvest everything from Christmas trees to cherries and cucumbers.
So far this year the workers at the farm have already planted almost 3 million seeds in the greenhouse.
“About 1 out of every 26 homes in the United States with a real Christmas tree got it from our farm,” said Scott Powell, nursery manager at Dutchman Tree Farms.
These days local workers for agricultural jobs are scarce, so Powell has to rely on the federal H-2A visa program to bring in temporary foreign labor.
“Growing up 30 years ago, every single high school kid trimmed Christmas trees, and it's short term, it's seasonal, and it worked really good for a lot of farmers, but we're not seeing that today,” Powell added.
It’s not for lack of trying, he explained — every season Powell posts job openings, but few, if any, people ever respond.
“In 2011, I hired 110 local workers for a six-week program, traditional harvest, and I finished with 11,” Powell said. “Ninety percent of the workers did not complete the season.”
For years, the H-2A visa program has helped address local labor shortages in agriculture, but now some growers like Powell say higher wage requirements are putting added pressure on them and raising questions about how long some can remain in business.
Powell said he spends about $700 per worker to bring them into the United States in addition to housing and hourly wage increases.
In Michigan, the wage rate for H-2A visa workers is $18.15 an hour — up nearly $3 since 2022. Although the rate decreased by 35 cents from 2024 to 2025, farmers like Powell say it remains too high. Nationwide, the average wage for H-2A visa holders is around $20 an hour.
“The government sets minimum wages by which you have to pay these H-2A workers in order to bring them into your region,” said Chuck Conner, president of the National Council of Farmer Cooperatives. “ And those minimum wages are dramatically higher than what regular wages for other workers would be here in the U.S.”
For example, Michigan’s minimum wage is about $12.50, and Conner said that's one reason why so many farmers hire immigrants who don’t have legal status.
“The estimates for the number of people who don’t have proper documentation to be in this country is that they account for somewhere around half of our total workforce in agriculture,” said Conner.
Because of federal regulations governing the H-2A visa program, workers can only be hired for seasonal jobs — not for year-round positions like those typically found on dairy farms.
“The H-2A program in its current form is too complex for a lot of smaller producers to navigate all the rules and regulations and even if they successfully navigate through them, they end up just having to pay exorbitant labor rates for these workers,” Conner added.
Since 2020, a larger share of the total supply of fresh fruits and vegetables in the U.S. was imported than grown domestically. Conner said the H-2A program is partially to blame.
“Agriculture is a commodity, business margins are thin, and so when you have these inflationary wage rates it becomes detrimental to U.S. food production,” Conner said. “Its a key reason why we continue to import more and more of our fresh fruits and vegetables in this country because the farmers here can’t afford the those H-2A labor rates.”
Over the past several years, lawmakers have floated proposals aimed at reducing or freezing wages for H-2A agricultural workers — efforts that, until recently, have struggled to gain momentum. But that may be changing.
In February, U.S. Representative John Moolenaar (R-MI 2) introduced bipartisan legislation to temporarily freeze H-2A wage rates through the end of next year.
“This legislation would allow farmers to have a reliable and legal workforce, which is a win-win for those who grow our food and for those of us who want to keep the cost of groceries down,” Moolenaar said.
While Moolenaar's bill would offer a temporary fix, other lawmakers are focused on more permanent solutions. This month, a bipartisan group reintroduced the Farmworker Modernization Act of 2025, which aims to freeze wages for one year and cap wage increases at 3.25% for most of the country over the next nine years.
In the midst of these legislative debates, the realities on the ground are felt by workers like Jesus Estrada at Dutchman Tree Farms. It’s his fifth year returning to Michigan on an H-2A visa, where he’s already busy preparing the fields for the upcoming season.
“This job back home — working with Christmas trees — doesn’t exist,” Estrada told Michigan Public in Spanish. “In the fields, the average wage is about 400 Mexican pesos a day, which is around 20 U.S. dollars.”
While he doesn’t want to see wages go down, he said he'd be willing to return even at a minimum of $15 per hour.
For Estrada, coming to the U.S. under a temporary work visa is, as he puts it, a no-brainer.
