A plain account of how this page has changed and why, newest first. The farm is invented; the law on it is not, and a page that tells a worker what they are owed should be willing to show its working. Each entry says what changed and what it was for.
This is a sample, and says so across the masthead. Cottonwood Draw Farms does not exist. It was built to show a real Washakie County farm what a page of its own could look like for the people who work on it.
The law on it is real, and every statement of it is sourced. That mattered more here than on any other page in this family. A page that tells a farmworker what they are owed, and gets it wrong, is worse than no page.
It is the first page in the family with a full peer in another language. Not a summary and not a courtesy link in the footer: the same fifteen answers, the same twenty-two sources, the same column C, linked above the threshold in both directions.
Walter remembered something that changed how this page should be reached. Three men came to where he lives looking for a room while they worked a season. None spoke English, so one of them typed into his telephone and handed over the translation.
Two things follow. The telephone is already the interface and already trusted, which the page can rely on. But men finding their own room are not in employer-provided housing, which means almost certainly not H‑2A — so they are the other crew, the one with the thinner protections in this state. The “two crews, two statutes” answer is about them, and it stopped being an abstraction.
What it exposed is that the page assumed somebody arrives at a web address. Those men arrived in a driveway. So there is now a sheet for a corkboard: Spanish first and English second, which is the reverse of everything else in this family, with the toll-free number set larger than anything but the headline because it is the one thing that works for a man whose telephone will not scan or has no data. Tear-off tabs along the bottom, the idiom of the room-for-rent notice — the board those men were already reading.
Two faults in the first artwork, both caught by rendering it and looking. Three inches of dead white space, because the type was sized for a page rather than for a board read at four feet. And the tabs carried a truncated address that would have landed the reader on the family index instead of the Spanish page — worse than carrying no address at all, so they now carry the code and the telephone number and nothing misleading. Both codes are verified by decoding them back out of a 600 dpi pure black-and-white raster at the exact size they print.
An invented farm hiring a harvest crew, with the answers written for the crew rather than for a customer. Fifteen answers above, twenty-two previewed sources in the middle, and a column C that explains which law reaches which worker and why.
The organizing fact, which surprised me and is said outright on the page: two crews in the same field answer to two different statutes. Guest workers on an H‑2A visa are covered by one body of regulation; migrant and seasonal workers who are not on that visa are covered by a different Act which expressly excludes the first group from its definitions. So the first question in any dispute is not what happened but how the worker was hired. That is the kind of thing a plain-language page exists to say.
Two features of Wyoming law shaped the page more than anything federal. The state minimum wage statute excludes agricultural work outright, by definition rather than by a lower rate. And workers’ compensation is elective for farm and ranch work — the only agricultural entry on the state’s mandatory list is logging. The interaction is the striking part: because the state exempts agriculture, federal law requires an H‑2A employer to provide equivalent cover anyway. On a farm that has not elected cover, the visa holder is insured and the neighbor hired locally is not. That is now the most important answer on the page.
Three things had moved in the five weeks before this page was written, and none of them could be guessed at from general knowledge.
A layer of worker protections added in 2024 is printed in the current regulations but is not being enforced: the enforcing agency instructed its own investigators to suspend them after courts in several states blocked parts of the rule, and a proposal to remove them is pending and not final. Meanwhile a court in North Carolina upheld the same rule. So the courts genuinely disagree, and a reader can open the regulation, find a protection printed in it, and be unable to get it enforced.
That forced an editorial decision rather than a research one. The page states the older protections as live, because they are, and leaves the 2024 additions out of column A rather than describing an entitlement a worker cannot act on — with the whole situation explained in column C and the guidance cited. Telling a worker they have something they cannot enforce is a particular kind of harm, and it is one a careful page can avoid.
Separately, the regulation that described how the enforcing agencies coordinate on farmworker matters was removed and reserved on 30 September, two days before this page was written. So the page names the agencies and their telephone numbers directly rather than pointing at a coordination rule a reader would now find empty.
The first draft of the pay answer carried a dollar figure. It was removed, and the answer is better for it: the page now explains what the floor is, sends the reader to the place the current figure actually lives, and says to keep the pay stubs. A static page should not freeze a number that is revised on somebody else’s schedule.
The second was a near miss of a different kind. A farmworker services office in Worland was going to be listed with its address and telephone number. The listing turned out to rest on a page carrying a 2022 copyright and a federal funding table from 2019. Publishing an unverified telephone number for a worker in trouble is the worst failure this page could have, so the office is not listed until somebody has called it.