Photos by Trevor Peterson Brock Georgeson of Maddock, N.D., played with toy trucks as a boy. Now he works with huge, modern-day farm equipment.
BIG CHALLENGE Finding help on the farm
By Jonathan Knutson | Forum News Service
B
rock Georgeson likes his job. Oh, some days are better than others and some parts of the work are more satisfying than others, but he enjoys what’s he doing and plans to stick with it. “This job isn’t for everybody. But it’s worked out for me,” said Georgeson, who, since 2004, has been a selfdescribed jack-of-all trades for a farm and seed company in Maddock. People like Georgeson are in short supply across the Upper Midwest. Farmers and ranchers struggle to find employees to help operate their farms, with demand exceeding supply for both seasonal help and full-time, year-round employees. Producers try to find ways to limit the problem — switching from three combines to two larger ones to require one less operator, for example — but the need for workers persists. It’s not just the Upper Midwest. Zippy Duvall, a Georgia farmer and president of the National Farm Bureau Federation, said last year that “farmers and ranchers in every state tell me that the shortage of labor is the Page 22 – November 2020 – West Central Tribune
Bryan Kenner
Brock Georgeson
greatest limiting factor on their farm.” The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbates the problem, though it’s impossible to say how much, in part because farm workers are designated as “essential,” according to a U.S. Department of Agriculture report. In any case, the difficult questions of how to find employees, how much to pay them and how best to retain them have no easy answers, according to three Upper Midwest farming operations that responded to Agweek’s request for input on farm labor challenges. One is located in Maddock in north-central North Dakota, and the others in west-central Minnesota and south-central Montana.
What’s responsible?
National statistics can be misleading, since they’re the averages of what can be major variations in different parts of the country. What’s true in, say, the California vegetable industry might not be true, at least not to the same extent, in, say, a rural Montana ranching community.
