E-Malt.com News article: USA, WA: Yakima Valley hop farmers, brewers contend with trade war, extra visa scrutiny

Late August marked the start of the Yakima Valley’s six-week blitz to harvest fields of hop plants bound for breweries, The Seattle Times reported on September 8.

With the citric scent of Centennial hops hanging in the air, Jessica Riel, a fourth-generation farmer at Double ‘R’ Hop Ranches, looked on as her employees unloaded long bines — stems similar to vines — from the backs of white trucks. Their gloved hands guided the plants onto the picking machine for processing.

With a dearth of local workers, Riel has turned to seasonal foreign labor to fill the gaps and complete the yearly harvest. Out of her current workforce of about 100 employees, 42 arrived from Mexico last month.

“The goal is always to recruit local employees, and, over the years, we’ve seen the number of available local workers decline,” Riel said.

Bringing in labor from other countries isn’t easy either, and it’s not the only issue this year. With President Donald Trump back in office for a second term, the beer industry is facing new and preexisting hurdles tied to immigration and trade. The farmers, brewers, manufacturers and distributors that work to deliver bottles of ale to consumers in Washington and beyond are watching repercussions from foreign policy fights trickle down to their businesses.

The Trump administration is cracking down on illegal immigration — and purportedly causing visa delays for some seasonal workers coming to the U.S. through the H-2A program, a legal process that temporarily permits foreigners into the country to work for American employers in the agriculture industry. That’s on top of longstanding headaches related to the program that employers would like to see resolved.

Fluctuating U.S. trade deals and tariffs are also complicating brewers’ approaches to exports and imports.

“The reality of the situation in Washington (D.C.) right now is that this administration is trying to reset global trade,” including relationships with neighbors Mexico and Canada, said Brian Crawford, president and CEO of the Beer Institute, the beer industry’s trade association. “We’re all just collateral damage.”

The beer industry is a global affair. The U.S. produced the largest share of the world’s hops in 2023, followed by Germany, the Czech Republic and China, the trade association Hop Growers of America found in its 2024 report.

Countries that received the most exports of U.S. hops in 2023 included Belgium-Luxembourg, Germany, Canada and Brazil. Meanwhile, that year, the U.S. mainly imported hops from Germany, New Zealand, Australia and the U.K.

The Pacific Northwest produces the majority of U.S. hops, according to Hop Growers of America, with Washington state making up 74% of the region’s production in 2023.

The state’s beer industry is responsible for more than 57,000 jobs, including over 1,400 agriculture jobs, and a total economic output of $12.4 billion, according to the Beer Institute. Nationwide, those numbers jump to 2.4 million jobs — almost 43,000 agriculture jobs among them — and an economic output of $471 billion.

At the Beer Institute, “what our members are saying is, we just need certainty,” Crawford said. “These guys are making humongous investments, and they don’t know exactly what the rules of the road are.”

For now, despite the lingering questions, business owners are pushing forward.

“We have to be adaptable,” Riel said. “Every day, there’s something new coming at us, whether it’s weather-related or labor-related, regulation-related.”

Riel’s farm has relied on the H-2A program since 2015. That year, Riel left her software industry job in the Seattle area to return to Double ‘R’ Hop Ranches — a family business started by her great-grandfather, Willie Riel, in 1945. The younger Riel was born and raised in Yakima.

As the farm’s co-owner, she helped implement the program for temporary agricultural workers.

“We have quite a few of those men that have been coming on the H-2A program every year since 2015,” she said in late August at the farm in Harrah, which is located about 20 miles south of Yakima.

Washington is considered one of the top five states dependent on H-2A workers, with close to 36,000 seasonal positions in the state’s agriculture industry allocated to those laborers in fiscal 2023, according to the Migration Dialogue project by the University of California, Davis.

Before the COVID pandemic hit, the seasonal employees at Double ‘R’ Hop Ranches worked from April through mid-October. The viral outbreak caused a downturn in the hops industry, Riel said, so the foreign laborers now adhere to a varied schedule.

They first come to Harrah, Yakima County, in the spring then return to their home countries for a summer break. They migrate back in August for the hops harvest.

Riel expected that, in the near future, her business will need its employees for the full six-month period again.

“We are seeing great improvement in the hop industry,” she said. “I expect, next year, we’ll be moving back to that method of more of like a 50/50: half the time here in Yakima with us, half the time back home.”

This year, most of her seasonal laborers began their harvest jobs Aug. 11. However, four couldn’t start work until the last weekend of the month due to increased administrative processing, Riel said.

“What we’ve seen so far this year with the new administration is there have been some additional admin holds on visas when they’re being issued,” she said. “But nothing that has been a detriment to our business. We’ve still been able to get everybody here.”

The U.S. State Department is the federal agency that issues visas to approved H-2A workers.


08 September, 2025