"I don't hope this will happen," said Utah Rep. Chris Cannon at a town meeting of farmers Wednesday. "I expect it."

The American Farm Bureau, the nation's largest general farming organization, released a report last year that said as much as $9 billion in agriculture production would be lost without a guest-worker program allowing for temporary jobs.

"We need a program," said George Holms, of Heber Valley's Cedar View farm. "What we have right now is not working."

Holms said under the current H-2A guest worker program, four laborers who were supposed to show up in the spring did not arrive at Holms' dairy until Nov. 1, and then they were required to return to Mexico on Dec. 20.

"The government is too slow," said Holms. "There's too many layers of bureaucracy that I have to deal with."

Curtis Rowley, with Santaquin's Cherry Hill Farms, said the H-2A program has problems, but he's fearful that phasing it out will complicate an already difficult problem. "H-2A gets me workers," he said. "Now I'm trying to get them here on time."

Cannon pledged that a transition from H-2A to legislation contained in the AgJOBS bill championed by Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, would be "seamless." Craig failed to get it passed in 2005, but the AgJOBS legislation was included last year in the Senate-passed immigration reform bill. This year, it will be key to a compromise between the House and Senate versions, said Cannon.

The legislation would restructure the H-2A program by revamping the burdensome labor certification process. The bill also would allow farm workers in the U.S. illegally to apply for legal status by continuing to hold agricultural jobs for 350 days over the next three years or 500 days over five years and a $500 fine.

It's estimated that 500,000 farm workers would be eligible to apply, said Cannon staffers. Their spouses and minor children would be given limited rights to stay in the United States, protected from deportation.

Scott Patton, manager of Delta Egg Farm, which produces 28 million dozen eggs each year, said workers are so hard to find that his business is buying expensive equipment to replace them. When the plant lacked a worker to "candle" eggs to ensure there was no blood or meat inside each egg a $50,000 piece of equipment was purchased to do the job.

"We absorbed the cost initially," Patton told Cannon. "But eventually it will be passed along to the consumer."

dawn@sltrib.com