The mounting regulatory burdens on the shoulders of New York farmers took center stage at an Orange County Chamber of Commerce membership meeting on Nov. 9.
Paul Ruszkiewicz, a fourth-generation farmer in Warwick, has significantly downsized his onion business in the past few years because of increasing labor and food safety costs.
He said the steadily increased minimum wage and new overtime requirements had driven up the farm labor costs, and more stringent food safety regulations called for a major upgrade to his facilities.
“I was looking at having to make a major investment to go up to the next level or having a major downsize to sell directly to the farmer markets,” he said. “I chose the latter.”
His family used to grow 270 acres of onions when he joined the farm business about 30 years ago, but last year, they grew only 70 acres, all the while expanding into less labor-intensive crops such as soybeans and corn, which are attended to by family members with no hired help.
Joel Crist, a fifth-generation apple grower at Crist Bros Orchards Inc., said his business was able to absorb the growing cost of state regulations so far but may stumble should the trend continue.
With more than 600 acres in Montgomery, his family business is one of the few remaining wholesale apple farms in Hudson Valley and competes in the premium apple market on a national scale.
“We have to compete with the Washington state, we have to compete with the Southern Hemisphere in the summer months, and we have to compete with other counties shipping in,” Mr. Crist said, noting that labor accounted for almost half of the business’s operating costs and that any changes to it would directly affect the bottom line.
“What I am most concerned about is what the legislators are going to do ... locally, statewide, and federally. Most new legislation that has come out in recent history—though a lot were pushed through for important reasons—has not been good for us.”
A prime example is the 2019 Farm Laborers Fair Labor Practices Act, he said, which established a 60-hour-a-week overtime threshold and permitted farm workers to unionize on terms seen as unfair to farmers.
Lately, the overtime threshold has been set to gradually drop to 40 hours per week over a 10-year period.
New York state Republican Assemblyman Brian Maher told The Epoch Times at the event that many such farm regulation laws hinged on partisan issues and that the Democratic lawmakers, given their supermajorities in both chambers, almost always got their way, even in the face of Republican resistance.
“We have been trying to advocate along the farms, like the Crist Bros Orchards,” he said. “We are also hoping to show my Democratic colleagues that the law actually hurts farm workers that they are trying to protect because they may be given fewer work hours because of the lowered overtime threshold.”
Matthew Garzia from Marijuana Farms New York, a state-certified cannabis cultivator, processor, and distributor, shared about the unique regulations of his industry, which are ignored by illicit operators that take advantage of the market.
“You can go to almost any gas station and find [marijuana], but it is not tested, it is not run by me, and it is brought from out of the state,” he said. “My product is inherently more expensive, and so it makes it a really challenging experience doing things the right way.”
The discussion was moderated by Orange County Cornell Cooperative Extension agriculture program leader Maire Ullrich.
Orange County Chamber of Commerce President Heather Bell-Meyer told The Epoch Times that her team decided on the farm regulation topic because a similar discussion last year was well received.
“The business community realized that our farmers manage not only their farming and land but also, most importantly, the import and export logistics, legislation, and human resources,” she said. “We constantly advocate for our members, including farmers.”
“Farming is a major industry in Orange County,” County Executive Steve Neuhaus, who stopped by the event in Montogomery, told The Epoch Times. “But unfortunately, the state governments are having these non-farmers and non-growers making policies and not professionals.”
