Cottonwood Draw Farms · Seasonal Harvest Work

Beet and barley harvest, and the hay that comes before it. Late September into November, weather deciding the exact days.

• Sugar beets — running with the harvester and the trucks, piling, and cleaning up the headlands.
• Malt barley — grain cart, truck driving, and the elevator run.
• Hay — stacking and hauling, earlier in the season.

Sugar beets and barley are two of the three largest crops in this county by acreage21. The season is short and the days are long while it lasts.

This page does not print a wage figure, on purpose. Not because we are hiding it — the rate is in the job order you are given, and we will tell you on the telephone. Because the legal floor under that rate changes, and a number typed into a web page goes stale and then misleads the person who most needs it to be right.

What the law actually requires is that you be offered and paid the highest of several figures: the adverse effect wage rate, an approved prevailing wage, any collective bargaining rate, the federal minimum wage, the state minimum wage, or whatever higher rate the employer intends to pay2.

For a job filled through the H‑2A program, the one that usually governs is the adverse effect wage rate, or AEWR. The current rates are published by the Department of Labor, by occupation code and by state, in one place3. That is where to look on the day you need it.

One protection does not move: if a new rate published during your contract is lower than the rate you were guaranteed, the employer must still pay the rate you were guaranteed2. Your pay cannot be cut in the middle of the season because a formula in Washington changed.

No. Wyoming’s minimum wage law defines who counts as an employee, and the definition says it “shall not include … any individual employed in agriculture”5. Farm work is excluded outright.

So the state figure is not your floor, and anyone who quotes it to you — in either direction — is quoting the wrong law. Your floor is the federal minimum wage where federal wage law reaches the farm, or the AEWR and prevailing wage rules above if the job came through H‑2A.

If you are here on an H‑2A visa, or doing the same work alongside that crew, yes. The employer has to offer you work for at least three‑fourths of the workdays in your contract period. If less work is offered than that, the employer owes you what you would have earned had you worked the guaranteed days1.

The regulation does the arithmetic itself: a ten‑week contract at six days a week and eight hours a day is 480 hours, so the guarantee is 360 hours1. Your own Sabbath and the federal holidays do not count against it.

This is why your pay stub has to show guaranteed hours separately from hours above the guarantee — so you can check it yourself1.

At no cost to H‑2A workers, and to anyone doing the same work who cannot reasonably get home at the end of the day1. Not deducted, not a deposit, not rent.

It also has to meet federal housing standards — a real list, covering water, toilets, cooking, beds, heating, screens and so on. Which list applies turns on an odd detail: housing built from 3 April 1980 onward must meet the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s standards, while older housing may meet either those or an earlier set13.

You are also owed either three meals a day or free and convenient cooking facilities to make your own. If meals are provided and charged for, the charge has a legal maximum and must be stated in the job offer1.

1. Getting here. Once you complete half of the contract period, the employer must pay your reasonable travel and daily subsistence cost from where you came from — in this country or abroad — if it was not advanced to you already1.
2. To the field. Transportation between employer housing and the worksite is at no cost to you1.
3. Going home. At the end of the contract, or if you are let go without cause and have no other H‑2A job to go to, the employer provides or pays for the trip back1.

The vehicle matters too. A crew vehicle must carry insurance of not less than $100,000 for each seat12, and must meet safety standards on lights, brakes, tires, steering and loading, with a seat for every person riding12.

No. The rule is flat: the employer and its agents must not have “sought or received payment of any kind” from a worker for anything connected to getting the job certified7.

It reaches the recruiter as well. The employer must put it in writing in its contract with any foreign labor contractor or recruiter that they may not seek or take money from workers either7.

If you paid someone to get this job, that is worth a telephone call to the number at the bottom of this column. Keep whatever receipt, message or note you have.

Yes, and in a language you understand1. The timing is set:

• An H‑2A worker gets the work contract no later than when applying for the visa.
• A worker doing the same work who is already here gets it no later than the first day of work.

If no separate contract is handed to you, then the job order is your contract, together with whatever the law requires on top of it1. So keep the job order. It is the document.

Where eleven or more people are doing hand labor in the field on a given day, the employer must provide drinking water, a toilet and handwashing facilities8. The water has to be drinkable, “suitably cool,” in enough quantity for the heat and the work, and placed where everyone can actually reach it8.

This is the most important answer on the page, because Wyoming is unusual and the answer depends on how you were hired.

Wyoming requires workers’ compensation coverage only for employments it lists as extra‑hazardous. In the agriculture sector, the only listed entry is logging. Crop production and animal production are not on the list at all, which means coverage for ordinary farm and ranch work is optional — something an employer may elect to carry, not something the state requires6.

But if you are here through H‑2A, you must be covered anyway. Federal law anticipates exactly this situation: where a state exempts agricultural work from its compensation system, the H‑2A employer has to provide insurance giving benefits at least equal to what the state’s compensation law would give for comparable work, at no cost to you — and must file proof of it with the government before being certified to hire at all1.

On or before each payday, in writing1:

• Total earnings for the pay period, and the hourly or piece rate.
• Hours offered, shown separately as three‑fourths‑guarantee hours and hours above the guarantee.
• Hours actually worked.
• Every deduction, itemized.
• Units produced each day, if you are paid by the piece.
• The pay period dates, and the employer’s name, address and federal identification number.

Pay comes at least twice a month, or more often if that is the local practice1. A deduction is not lawful if it carries a profit to the employer, or is mainly for the employer’s own benefit or convenience1.

If you are not on an H‑2A visa, a parallel set of rules reaches the same place: itemized written statement each pay period, and payroll records kept for three years11.

No, and this surprises people. Two crews can work the same field under two different statutes.

• Workers here on an H‑2A visa are covered by the H‑2A rules — the job-offer requirements this column keeps citing1.
• Migrant and seasonal workers who are not on that visa are covered by a different law, the Migrant and Seasonal Agricultural Worker Protection Act, which requires written disclosure of the terms when you are recruited, wage statements, vehicle safety and insurance, and housing standards11.

The second law expressly excludes H‑2A workers from its definitions10. They are not left unprotected — they are protected by the other set. But it does mean the answer to “what am I owed” starts with how you were hired.

That law also gives you two things you control yourself: a retaliation complaint to the Secretary of Labor within 180 days, and the right to sue in federal court without going through any agency first14.

Wage and Hour Division, U.S. Department of Labor — 1‑866‑487‑9243 (1‑866‑4‑US‑WAGE), 8am to 5pm in your own time zone. This is the right number for wages, the hour guarantee, housing, transportation, recruitment fees, and — in Wyoming — field sanitation18.

Wyoming has no Wage and Hour office of its own; the district office covering this state is in Salt Lake City20.

What the Department says about calling:

• Your name, the nature of the complaint, and whether a complaint exists at all may not be disclosed15.
• It “does not ask about the immigration status of employees,” except as needed to enforce the temporary labor certification programs themselves, and does not share information that could identify you to another agency15.
• Retaliating against you for complaining or cooperating is itself unlawful15.

A second door, much less known. You can walk into a Wyoming workforce center and file a complaint there about a violation of employment law. The state has to take it and refer it on, and because you are a farmworker the clock runs faster than it does for other complaints17. The state’s farmworker program office is in Riverton19.

For safety matters other than field sanitation: Wyoming OSHA, (307) 777‑77869.

An honest answer: most of it, but not all, and we would rather tell you which.

A set of newer H‑2A protections added in 2024 is still printed in the regulations but is not currently being enforced. The Department of Labor instructed its own investigators to suspend enforcement of everything the 2024 rule added, after courts in several states blocked parts of it, and a proposal to remove those provisions is pending and not final16.

Everything this column tells you — the hour guarantee, no-cost housing to federal standards, meals or a kitchen, the three transportation duties, no recruitment fees, the written contract, workers’ compensation, the pay stub, the limits on deductions — comes from the older rules and is not affected by that suspension16.

What is affected is a thinner layer on top: seat belt requirements in crew vehicles, progressive discipline before a for-cause termination, and some disclosure items. Those may or may not survive. We have left them out of this column rather than tell you that you have something you may not be able to enforce.

We put up flyers too. This page is the one that is always here, always the same, and always in both languages: nothing to log into, nothing to scroll past, the work and the law in one place.

And it is honest about its own limits. Where the law is unsettled, it says so. Where a number would go stale, it sends you to the place the number actually lives. Column C has the detail, and the middle column shows you every source before you decide whether to go look at it yourself.