Fresh fruit is one of the most constant features of an American grocery store.
Apples, pears, and cherries may remain on shelves long after harvest season ends, but the workforce behind them often follows a far less stable calendar.
Agriculture depends heavily on workers hired to pick, pack, and move crops.
But they are released once that work is done.
For consumers, the product can feel permanent, but for the farmworkers, the job often is not.
That tension is playing out again in Washington, one of the country’s most important fruit-growing regions.
Borton & Sons, a Washington fruit grower and packer, plans to lay off 928 farmworkers in November as this year’s harvest winds down, according to a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) reviewed by TheStreet.
The affected employees are general farm laborers working under the federal H-2A program.
The program allows agricultural businesses to hire foreign workers for temporary or seasonal jobs when there are not enough U.S. workers available.
Borton said the layoffs will begin on Nov. 8 and continue through Nov. 15 across operations in Yakima, Zillah, Pasco, Burbank, Prescott, Soap Lake, Othello, and Mesa.
Seasonal layoffs after harvest are common in agriculture, and Borton acknowledged as much in its filing.
What makes this notice more notable is how the company characterized the departures. Borton said all 928 layoffs are considered permanent because it has not identified specific recall dates or staffing needs for 2027.
The company also said it is not yet clear whether additional domestic workers could be affected, citing uncertainties such as weather, crop conditions, and employee attrition over the remaining weeks of harvest.
The company did not respond to TheStreet’s request for more information about its 2027 staffing plans.
Thousands of farm jobs disappear with harvest
Borton’s layoffs are large, but they are far from an isolated event.
From November 2024 through November 2025, Washington employers reported 20 agriculture-related layoffs affecting 14,831 mostly seasonal workers, according to the state’s Employment Security Department.
The filings involved agricultural businesses as well as agencies specializing in services to agricultural employers.
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Several individual filings involved more than 1,000 workers.
Stemilt Ag Services, a Washington fruit company, laid off 1,561 seasonal H-2A field workers in November 2025 as their contracts ended with the harvest season. The company said warehouse and shipping employees were not affected.
AgriMACS, an agricultural employer in Chelan, separately disclosed layoffs affecting 1,368 workers in November 2025.
Other large Washington agriculture filings that year included Gebbers Farms, with 3,465 workers affected, and FirstFruits, with 1,200.
The scale of those notices helps explain why Borton’s 928-worker filing, while substantial, is not unusual for a seasonal agricultural workforce. The figures also provide a clearer picture of a segment of the labor market that historically was much less visible in WARN data.
Washington officials said agriculture-related businesses traditionally did not file WARN notices for seasonal workforce reductions because federal rules did not require them to report seasonal layoffs.
Changes in state reporting requirements brought more of those seasonal employment swings into the public record.
But large numbers in agricultural WARN filings do not necessarily signal that a farm is failing or shutting down.
In seasonal agriculture, such swings in employment can be built into the business. For workers, however, the financial consequences of that cycle can be much harder to absorb.
Farmworkers face financial hardship
Recent federal research highlights the financial vulnerability of agricultural work.
A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study published in 2025 found that workers in farming, fishing, and forestry experienced some of the highest levels of economic hardship among the occupational groups examined.
About 18.5% reported experiencing at least four measures of economic hardship, compared with 6.9% of workers overall.
- Roughly 32% reported food insecurity.
- Nearly 25% reported housing insecurity.
- About 29% lacked health insurance.
- Nearly one-third experienced lost or reduced working hours.
The group’s median annual wage was $35,520, compared with $48,060 for workers overall.
The instability does not fall only on workers. It can also hit growers when weather, crop losses, or delays in seasonal labor collide with a narrow harvest window.
Reuters reported that growers in Michigan’s cherry-growing region faced severe crop losses and delays in bringing in H-2A workers for the 2025 harvest.
One grower told Reuters that labor shortages can leave fruit unpicked when workers do not arrive in time.
It illustrates how closely seasonal workers’ livelihoods and growers’ businesses depend on the same narrow harvest window.
The pressures can run in both directions. Farms need enough workers at precisely the right time, while workers depend on jobs that may last only as long as the crop does.
H-2A wages are also being rewritten
The wages supporting that seasonal workforce are also changing.
In 2025, the U.S. Department of Labor overhauled the way minimum pay rates are calculated for many H-2A jobs.
Instead of using one broad state or regional agricultural wage rate for most field and livestock workers, the department shifted to Bureau of Labor Statistics wage data and divided jobs into entry-level and experienced categories.
The rule also allows a downward adjustment to the wages of H-2A workers who receive employer-provided housing.
Employers are still required to provide qualifying H-2A workers housing at no cost.
But under the new methodology, the estimated value of that housing can be counted toward compensation, reducing the cash wage an employer would otherwise have to pay.
That distinction can matter considerably in seasonal agriculture, where workers’ U.S. earning opportunities may be concentrated into a limited part of the year.
The Labor Department said the new system better reflects differences in skills and compensation while accounting for housing provided to H-2A workers.
The changes have also become the subject of legal and political challenges over how much seasonal farmworkers should be paid.
Washington heavily reliant on H-2A labor
The scale of that temporary workforce remains significant.
Through the first three quarters of fiscal 2025, Washington accounted for about 9% of all H-2A positions certified nationally, according to U.S. Department of Labor data.
Farmworkers and laborers represented 82% of certified H-2A positions nationwide during the same period.
These workers support one of the country’s largest fruit-producing markets. Washington produced about 7.16 billion pounds of apples for use in 2025, according to USDA data, with a farm-level value of approximately $1.89 billion.
About 5.66 billion pounds went to the fresh market, worth roughly $1.75 billion.
The state harvested about 171,000 acres of apples in 2025 and produced roughly 7.54 billion pounds overall.
For consumers, that scale shows up as an uninterrupted supply of fruit in grocery stores. But for workers, the employment calendar looks different. Agricultural businesses may need large numbers of workers during a relatively short harvest window and considerably fewer once that work ends.
In the H-2A system, that temporary nature is built into the job itself.
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