In the heart of Huron County, about two miles south of Willard, Ohio, lies Celeryville — an unincorporated community with some of the richest farmland in the nation. Known for its black, nutrient-packed “muck” soil, Celeryville is part of what makes Huron County the number one vegetable-producing county in Ohio.
This muck soil, rich in nutrients and organic material, is both a blessing and, occasionally, a hazard.
“It’s so high in organic material, it’ll actually burn,” Loren Buurma, a fourth-generation farmer at Buurma Farms, said. “As a kid, one of our jobs was to go around and find muck fires and put them out before they did too much damage to the farm.”
Before it was farmland, Celeryville was an uninhabitable cranberry bog. Despite its reputation, in 1896, local landowner Henry Johnson recruited a group of Dutch immigrants from Kalamazoo, Michigan, to transform the land. They drained the swamp and divided the land among their families, each receiving several acres to farm — much of which grew celery. Their work laid the foundation for the thriving agricultural community.
Yet today, Celeryville grows nearly everything but celery.
Buurma recounts that after an aggressive fungal disease — fusarium yellows — devastated celery yields in the 1980s, farmers never fully returned to the crop, agreeing that the risk was simply too high.
And celery never made a comeback. With tight margins and labor-intensive harvesting, growing the crop became infeasible — especially as farm labor itself grew harder to secure. As local labor became more and more scarce post World War II, many growers turned to the federal H-2A visa program.
The H-2A is a temporary visa program that allows people who are not U.S. citizens or residents to provide agricultural labor to farms that are unable to find domestic workers. Originally created as a supplemental resource to meet the seasonal demands, today, a considerable portion of states are dependent on migrant workers.
And in Ohio, Huron County, home to Celeryville, has the second highest number of H-2A workers, with 662 workers in 2022 — a 1251% increase since 2017.
Farmers in Celeryville say that the community has embraced the migrant workers, with business owners seeing a boost in sales. Profits rise during the farming season, as there are 700 more people in the community that need to buy necessities, food and services, heritage farmer Kirk Holthouse said. Holthouse’s family settled in the area after following the original Dutch group to Celeryville several years after its founding.
Yet the future of migrant labor has become more unstable as farmers face financial pressure to optimize their production while keeping produce affordable. Part of this struggle is due to the increase in the adverse effect wage rate mandated by the Department of Labor. The AEWR is the minimum wage that farmers are required to pay migrant laborers from the H-2A visa program.
Although different states pay different rates, the trend “pretty much universally across the board is for it to have gone up. … [In] Ohio, it’s near $19 an hour right now. That’s … five to six dollars more per hour than the typical agricultural wage rate for a non-H-2A worker,” Margaret Jodlowski, an agricultural economist specializing in labor, said.
AEWRs are set significantly higher than the expected minimum wage to prevent domestic wage depression, which also makes the H-2A program attractive to migrant workers.
“It makes a huge difference in their ability to provide for their family … I’ve met workers who’ve told me that they put their kids through school, paid for … them to go to private school, and for university … to build a house … buy a car. So the monies that they are earning here in the United States are making an impact back home,” Wendy Aviña, the outreach coordinator from Advocates for Basic Legal Equity, based in Ohio, said.
However, the program has its disadvantages. Workers are completely reliant on their employer for their housing and paycheck, especially when isolated far from home, Anna Hill Galendez, a managing attorney for the Michigan Immigrant Rights Center, said. Migrant workers are usually hesitant to speak out against abuse and wage theft out of fear of retaliation and being blacklisted. Additionally, migrant workers often tolerate injuries and unsafe working conditions, especially since they have very limited financial options, Galendez said.
The dependency of migrant workers on their employer extends beyond work hours. Workers must rely on farmers to arrange transportation to everywhere from the grocery store to the Social Security Administration office to banks to the hospital, Aviña said.
“If their rights are being respected, and they’re getting paid on time, for many workers, it can be a good job, but unfortunately, these abuses are very common, and so the reality of that pay rate does not materialize for many workers,” Galendez said.
The program also has its disadvantages for farmers, even more so for small farms.
“Every minute of every hour counts, and when you get … people making anywhere from $15 to $20 an hour in the farming landscape … it takes away the … ability to sell product[s] cheap and still make a profit,” Holthouse said.
The concerns Holthouse expresses about the cost of labor are not unique to their family farm, nor are they the only issue with the program.
Jodlowski said that the H-2A requires a considerable amount of administrative burden. Large farms are able to best absorb these costs, often through dedicated departments to navigate the red tape bureaucracy of annual wage rate increases and paperwork. Smaller farms, farms producing very niche crops and urban farms simply don’t have the necessary resources to best take advantage of this program.
As small farms struggle to find the necessary labor, farm consolidation is increasingly common — and reflects broader structural changes in the agricultural sector. Rising upfront costs — including land and equipment — have made it increasingly difficult for new or smaller-scale farmers to enter or remain in the industry. Jodlowski says that fewer and fewer farms are financially viable each year.
In Celeryville, where there were once more than 30 farms, today, only five major farms continue to operate.
“As consolidation is really ramping up … people who get squeezed out, … are people who have been farming for generations, or who have … strong ties to the land, and they’re just no longer able to afford to [farm] … certainly over the long run, we are seeing the rise of larger and larger agricultural production entities,” Jodlowski said.
