(Radio Iowa) – An Ankeny woman who is president of the National Pork Producers Council is urging members of the U.S. Senate to reform the visa system so immigrants working as farm hands or in meat packing plants can stay permanently.  “Our foreign born workforce is an essential part of our supply chain and we need visa reform to reflect our year-round needs.”  Jen Sorenson is also the communications for Iowa Select Farms, the largest pork producer in Iowa and the 8th largest in the United States. “Unfortunately the U.S. is suffering from a serious labor shortage negatively impacting our farms and our processing plants,” Sorenson says. “As any pork producer will tell you, there is no pork season. It requires a full time, hard working and dedicated workforce on our farms and in our processing plants.”

The current H-two-A (H-2A) visa program allows agribusinesses to fill temporary positions with foreign-born workers. Sorenson says that’s designed for seasonal agriculture, like vegetable and fruit farms, not for livestock operations which need a workforce all year long. “If the labor shortage is not addressed, it could lead to farms and packing plants shutting down,” Sorenson says. “As a result, pork production would be constrained, leading to higher food prices for consumers and the United States becoming an unreliable trading partner for the many countries around the world that rely on our pork.”

In March, the U.S. House passed a bill to make changes in the visa program for temporary farm workers. Sorenson says the bill is an excellent solution — if the bill’s cap on the number of visas in the bill is eliminated, so an unlimited number of visas for farm workers is available. “We would not want to find ourselves in situation where we are competing against our fellow livestock farmers for a specific number of workers,” Sorenson says, “and that is why we ask for an uncapped H-2A program and also a year-round H-2A program.” Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley invited Sorenson to testify before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee this week. Grassley also invited Leon Sequeira, an assistant U.S. Labor Secretary in President Bush’s Administration and the former legal counsel to the Senate’s Republican leader.

“The worker shortage on our farms continues to get worse with each passing year and it is threatening the future viability of labor-intensive agriculture in America,” he said. “Farm work is honest, honorable and necessary work, but there are simply not enough U.S. workers willing to do it.” The National Pork Producers Council president told senators the labor shortage in the pork industry is exacerbates by continued population decline in rural areas of the country, where most pork production and processing is located.

(Radio Iowa) -What the locals call “Old Highway 20” across northern Iowa, is now a designated route through Delaware County as part of an effort to revive the roadway nationwide, and to help small towns and small businesses in the process. Brian Farr, with the Historic Route 20 Association, explains the goals. “This isn’t the four-lane Highway 20, this is the old highway that ran through the downtown areas,” Farr says. “Some of that has been removed for 30, 40 years. Our mission was to bring 20 back as a historic highway into the towns.”

There are now more than 180 road signs across the state guiding people along the original Highway 20 – including in Manchester, Earlville and Dyersville. “We want to draw people back into the small towns,” Farr says. “I really feel that when you’re traveling the four-lane, it’s there for a reason, to get from A to B in a hurry, but there’s not a lot to see. We want people to support your small businesses, your mom-and-pop shops, or to just see something unique and historical.”

via historicus20.com

Farr says he’s learned about Old 20 in Iowa and it’s a rich history. “This was an Iowa project but we formed the organization to be a nationwide project,” he says. “We want people to travel from Massachusetts, where Highway 20 begins, all the way to Oregon, but to take the original alignments because you definitely see a lot more.” Farr lives on Highway 20, too – in Massachusetts – and he says even though it’s a thousand miles away, when he’s in Iowa, he knows Old 20 will get him home.