Commentary: America has a farm labor shortage. We need a better guest worker program

Americans expect a lot from farmers and ranchers: fresh, unblemished fruits and vegetables, locally grown and responsibly harvested.

In California, farmers and ranchers produce more than 400 commodities. That's more than a third of the country's vegetables and two-thirds of the country's fruits and nuts. California farm receipts exceeded $50 billion in 2017.

This prodigious output isn't automatic and doesn't happen by chance. American agriculture relies on hundreds of thousands of skilled workers to plant the fields, tend the crops, harvest the produce