California agricultural employers are continuing to adapt to the increasing minimum wage and the rollout of new overtime pay requirements, sometimes by moving away from manual labor to mechanized solutions. The rest of the country is watching closely to see whether these farm labor trends expand.

A federal judge orders USDA to continue collecting farmworker wage data, agreeing with farm labor groups that challenged the suspension of the survey that is used to set minimum wage requirements for H-2A workers.

Specialty crop farms spent more than three times more money on labor costs than other types of operations, according to data from USDA’s 2018 Agricultural Resources Management Survey.

USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service 2020 California Almond Subjective Forecast estimates California almond orchards will produce 3.0 billion pounds of nuts this year, up 17.6% from last year’s 2.55 billion-pound crop.

Ag Secretary Sonny Perdue is defending the work of USDA statisticians in their work to estimate the size of 2019 crops.

U.S. farmers are getting older, continuing a long-term trend, and the total number of farms is declining, according to the 2017 Census of Agriculture released today by USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service.

The National Agricultural Statistics Service has delayed release of the 2017 Census of Agriculture, originally scheduled for Feb. 21, until the spring.

U.S. farmers are planting fewer acres with corn and soybeans this year, while sowing more wheat, cotton and sorghum, USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service said in an annual report.