On Saturday, thousands of people descended on a vast field in Nyssa, Oregon, knives in hand. They had been summoned by a viral video on TikTok.
“If you want to know what 350,000 pounds of wasted food looks like, let me show you,” Shay Myers told his followers in the video, which by then had been viewed 2.7 million times.
Myers, CEO of Owyhee Produce, a family farm with fields on both sides of the Snake River in Idaho and Oregon, stood amid what he said was 35 acres of asparagus that wouldn’t be harvested because the visas he had requested for migrant farmworkers had been delayed and he couldn’t find enough local workers, despite paying $16 an hour.
This problem is widespread across the nation and threatens our nation's food supply. Without the help of guest workers, the U.S. will be forced to rely more and more on importing our food from other countries - that should scare you.
We support farmers like Shay in calling for changes to our guest worker program with common-sense legislation that will help the agriculture industry and our economy.
To learn more about this issue and the solution we are calling our legislators to push forward to fix it, please visit our website.