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By Johanna Bejarano, El Sol de Yakima and Yakima Herald-Republic

For more than 15 years, Rocío has worked as a farmworker in Central Washington. She has pruned apple and cherry trees, picked fruit, and harvested and packed asparagus. But now, she says, finding farm work is becoming increasingly difficult for local women.

Rocío asked to use a pseudonym. With jobs already hard to find, she fears speaking publicly about the challenges she and other women in the region face in getting hired could make things worse.

“Women used to get more opportunities to do things like pruning, which takes place in the winter or early in the year. Now, those opportunities are almost nonexistent,” she said.

Rocío said she has experienced unequal treatment when looking for work.

“I had a bad experience at one orchard. A group of us arrived, and I was the only woman. The foreman told us, ‘Take these rows.’ We grabbed our ladders and picking bags and started picking,” Rocío said.

“Our bags weren’t even half full when the supervisor showed up. There were H-2A workers picking there, too, all men. He looked at me and said to the foreman, ‘What are they doing here if they’re local workers?’ Then he added, ‘And a woman, too?’”

Rocío planned to return to work the next day after a medical appointment, but her husband, who was also on the crew, told her not to come back.

“My husband called and said, ‘You know what? Don’t come to work anymore. They were saying they don’t want women here,’” she said.

To pick fruit, workers climb ladders more than 10 feet tall while carrying bags that can hold up to 50 pounds of fruit, Rocío said. It is hard work, she said, but women farmworkers are fully capable of doing it.

“We can do all the work on a farm, and sometimes we even do it better because we pay more attention to detail,” she said.

Rocío sees the growing presence of temporary H-2A workers as one reason her job opportunities are shrinking.

Impact of the H-2A program

A recent University of California, Santa Cruz study on farmworker displacement in Washington state found that the expansion of the H-2A visa program is affecting the local workforce.

“What I’m hearing is that when workers go to farms that already have their H-2A workers lined up, whose applications have been approved and whose workers are on their way, they’re told, ‘We’re fully staffed for now,’ or the farms only hire about 10 or 15 local workers,” said Rosa Navarro, a sociology doctoral candidate at UC Santa Cruz who conducted the study.

Navarro said women are more affected and face several barriers, including assumptions about their abilities compared with men and being passed over because of their responsibilities at home.

“They’re seen as not picking as much as men. They’re pushed to work faster and don’t get help. Several women told me their child got sick and they had to take them to an appointment, or they had to miss work to stay home with the child. Then they would get attendance warnings that could lead to their dismissal,” she said.

The study also found that women spend longer looking for work.

“In general, women spend weeks or even months looking for work. For men, it might be several days to a week at most,” Navarro said.

That could be linked to hiring practices that require more rigid schedules, which conflict with family caregiving responsibilities borne primarily by women, Navarro said. Those responsibilities could keep them from competing on equal terms with workers hired through the H-2A program.

A 2024 U.S. Government Accountability Office report on the H-2A visa program found that the number of H-2A jobs and visas increased by more than 50% between fiscal years 2018 and 2023. Men accounted for 97% of visa recipients.

In an earlier interview, Enrique Gastelum, the CEO of the Worker and Farmer Labor Association, took issue with some of the findings in Navarro's study, and pointed out the sample size of workers surveyed was small and not randomized. The association works with growers across the Northwest to secure H-2A labor.

Growers who use the H-2A program must demonstrate that there is a shortage of domestic workers before they can recruit foreign workers. They are required to hire all “able, willing and qualified” domestic workers and post jobs on both state and federal job listing websites.

More than 34,000 H-2A jobs were certified in Washington state in 2025, according to the U.S. Department of Labor.

Washington state has seen lawsuits and settlements involving employment discrimination and the displacement of women farmworkers, including cases against Cornerstone Ranches and Shinn & Son that resulted in settlements of $1 million and $300,000, respectively.

An attorney for Cornerstone said there was no evidence of intentional discrimination and complicated market factors affected the company’s workforce as it reduced hop acreage. Shinn & Son disputed that it engaged in any of the alleged conduct. 

State efforts

Bertha Clayton, director of the state’s Agricultural and Seasonal Workforce Services office, or ASWS, said in an email that the agency does not collect demographic data showing how many men and women make up the state’s agricultural workforce.

ASWS is part of the Employment Security Department, or ESD, and works to ensure adequate protections for H-2A and domestic workers.

Its advisory committee, which includes representatives of agricultural employers and farmworkers, issues reports and holds regular meetings. It has noted that some local workers feel displaced by the H-2A program, as well as employers’ views that the program addresses a declining local labor supply.

ESD data presented at the committee’s Aug. 13 meeting showed that the Yakima office handling H-2A applications received 44 applications for 5,926 workers between Oct. 1, 2025, and July 31, 2026.

The meeting also addressed the aging workforce as a possible factor in the decline of the state’s agricultural labor force.

“Anecdotally, farmworkers of all ages are facing challenges and pressures stemming from the H-2A program, which does not necessarily suggest that workers aging out of the workforce are the main driver of recruitment,” one advisory committee member said.

Gender-related factors have not been specifically addressed in recent meetings or reports.

In its 2024 report to the Legislature, ASWS said "increased outreach to farmworkers across the state has resulted in more farmworkers learning about these job opportunities.”

The office also said it has stepped up outreach to H-2A employers to inform them of their responsibilities when hiring domestic workers.