Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr has written a letter to Congressional leaders calling for the immediate passage of H.R. 1624, the “Supporting Farm Operations Act of 2025,” which he says would put a stop to the continuously rising Adverse Effect Wage Rate (AEWR) for H-2A guest farm workers. Carr says the effort will help lower costs for Georgia farmers who, under the Biden administration, were mandated to pay significant and arbitrary wage increases for H-2A labor.
“We won’t let D.C. dictate how we farm here in Georgia – and that includes any attempts to impose ridiculous wage increases on our agricultural employers,” said Carr. “Farmers drive our state’s No. 1 industry and ensuring they’re able to operate efficiently and effectively will always be my top priority. I’m proud to stand with our farm families, and I’ll keep fighting until this problem is fixed, no matter how long it takes.”
According to Carr, under the current AEWR, Georgia farmers will pay an estimated 9.5 percent increase in wages to use H-2A labor in 2025. This is on top of the 14 percent and 7 percent increases handed down by the Biden administration in 2023 and 2024. The “Supporting Farm Operations Act of 2025” would return rates back to those of 2023 and freeze the rates from further increase through at least Dec. 31, 2026, he said.
“These increases are crushing Georgia farmers,” said State Rep. Robert Dickey, R-Musella, who chairs the House Agriculture and Consumer Affairs Committee. “Agriculture producers have a hard enough time as it is, but when a prior administration increases foreign labor wage rates over 20 percent in the past 3 years, it is devastating.”
Carr says he has taken several actions to protect Georgia farmers from rising costs and federal overreach.
Last year, Carr filed suit that blocked a Biden administration rule that would have forced agricultural employers to allow temporary H-2A farm workers to form a union. And in 2024, Carr pushed back against a proposal from the Biden administration’s Environmental Protection Agency that would have imposed unprecedented pollution limits and pretreatment standards on an additional 3,000 meat and poultry processors.
Also in 2024, Carr wrote a letter to the U.S. Secretaries of Labor and Agriculture regarding the continuously rising AEWR for H-2A guest farm workers as part of his commitment to working with the Trump administration to grow Georgia’s No. 1 industry.
