Fritz Roka, Ph.D.

North Carolina State University

Ph.D.

Economics

1993

University of Maryland

M.S.

Agricultural Economics

1988

University of Maryland

B.S.

Agricultural Economics

1977

Economic Impact of Agriculture in Southwest Florida

Leadership Collier Class  Feb 2019

Speaker in the Business Section

Southeast Regional Fruit & Vegetable Conference  Savannah, GA, Jan 2019

Farm Labor Management in Southwest Florida – Challenges and Opportunities

21 st Congress of the International Farm Management Association  Edinburgh, UK, July 2017

Farm Labor Contractor Training Program

USDA State Block Grant program (2 separate grants)

2010 - 2013
Project director with 3 co-PIs.

Citrus Mechanical Harvesting – Economic Feasibility and Extension

Florida Dept of Citrus and State Citrus Initiative

1999 - 2014
Program director.

Effect of Cattle Grazing on Water Quality, Buck Island Project

USDA/NRI

2001 - 2003
Project director with 6 co-PIs.

Farm labor management trends in Florida, USA – challenges and opportunities

Roka, FM and Zhengfei Guan

2018

Reliance on foreign guest workers, rising minimum wages, and corporate social responsibility are three trends emerging within the Florida agricultural economy, particularly among labor-intensive specialty crop farms. These trends are creating higher costs and pushing employers into new management relationships with their farmworkers. On one hand, higher costs compromise the competitive position of agricultural operations. On the other hand, new management strategies could increase overall worker productivity, offset some administrative costs associated with labor management, and create new avenues of market access for their products. The success to which agricultural employers adjust to these trends with cost effective management strategies likely will determine their long-term economic success.

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Pre-employment costs associated with H-2A agricultural workers and the effects of the ‘60-minute rule’

Roka, FM, S Simnitt, and D Farnsworth

2017

Agricultural employers increasingly are turning to the foreign guest worker program, known as H-2A, as a means to secure a legal workforce. This paper outlines the procedural aspects and costs of recruiting and hiring H-2A workers. Cost data is from a 2014 survey of citrus harvesters and defines pre-employment costs as filing fees, advertising, surety bonds, travel, and housing. The pre-employment costs associated with guest workers are estimated to be nearly $ 2,000 per worker. The survey was motivated by the ‘60-minute rule’ imposed by the U.S. Department of Labor prior to the 2012-13 citrus harvesting season. Cost data were collected across two crop season, 2012-13 and 2013-14, to analyze the cost implications of the rule. We found that the 60-minute rule significantly increased filing fees. These fees, however, represent a very small share of total costs and overall pre-employment costs associated with the H-2A program did not significantly change.

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Lessons Learned Developing an Extension-Based Training Program for Farm Labor Supervisors

Roka, Fritz, Carlene Thissen, Paul Monaghan, Maria Morera, Sebastian Galindo- Gonzalez, and Jose Tovar-Aguilar

2017

This article outlines a four-step model for developing a training program for farm labor supervisors. The model draws on key lessons learned during the development of the University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences Farm Labor Supervisor Training program. The program is designed to educate farm supervisors on farm labor laws and to support compliance with workplace regulations critical for the safety of farmworkers and the economic sustainability of agricultural industries. Attentive to building partnerships, assessing needs, tailoring the curriculum, and conducting evaluations, the model can be applied elsewhere to address the farm labor issues confronted by specialty crop growers in other states.

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