Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
children and the elderly, many of whom would classify themselves as retired but
work actively on the farm during planting and harvesting. Many children and older
adults do not receive money and do not appear on farm records.
Confounding the difficulty is that the AFF labor force is known to be much
larger than the corresponding level of employment; that is, at various times of the
year, a great many in the AFF hired and contract labor force are unemployed and
unable to find work. Finally, a large proportion of AFF workers are foreign-born,
and a sizable “reserve labor pool” is in the countries of origin, including workers
who may have temporarily returned to their homes.
For those reasons, it is useful to distinguish measures of “population” from
determinations of “employment”.
Population
refers to the number of people;
em-
ployment
refers to their working status. Employment is often measured in terms
of full-time equivalent (FTE) workers on the basis of temporal averages, usually
derived from 12 monthly reports. Thus, two people who find half-time jobs in the
AFF sector for a full year will be counted as a single FTE worker in measures of
employment.
Even for self-employed workers, the distinction is important. To illustrate, the
Census of Agriculture asks farm operators to report the number of days on which
they were employed off-farm. In the 2002 Census of Agriculture, more farm opera-
tors reported having worked at least some days off-farm than reported no off-farm
work. The majority of those who said that they worked off-farm at all said that
they did so for 200 or more days per year;
2
these farm operators might be counted
twice in measures of employment, as would be the case for workers in any industry
who “moonlight”, holding two jobs at the same time.
HARNESSING THE QUARTERLY AGRICULTURAL
LABOR SURVEY FOR AFF SURVEILLANCE
The Quarterly Agricultural Labor Survey (QALS) is the only national survey
of the agriculture workforce, conducted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture
(USDA) and reported in the periodical
Farm Labor
. The QALS has recently been
called the Farm Labor Survey (FLS). The survey is limited to farm employment.
Initiated in 1910 and conducted with only a few interruptions nearly every year
since then, the FLS is an employer survey that obtains reports of employment
and other characteristics, such as wage rates paid and hours worked. A nationally
representative sample of farm operators and agricultural service firms (mainly
farm labor contractors) is contacted to determine the number of their hired farm
2
United States Department of Agriculture. National Agricultural Statistics Service,
00 Census of
Agriculture. Summary and State Data
, Volume 1, Geographic Area Series, Part 51, June 2004. Table
55. Summary by Size of Farm: 2002, p. 69.
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