Given the choice between requiring agricultural employers to start paying overtime at 40 hours or 60 hours a week, a Colorado Senate committee opted for the latter on Thursday, setting parameters for a debate that both farmers and farmworkers say is badly needed.
Thanks to a 2021 state law that ended a nearly-century-old federal exemption for agricultural workers from overtime-pay requirements, farm and ranch operators now must pay employees time-and-a-half after they have worked 48 hours in a week. Highly seasonal workers — those laboring at agricultural operations that double their workforce during a peak period of 22 weeks per year — don’t collect overtime wages during that peak period until they reach 56 hours in a week.
But Colorado farmers, already struggling with rising costs of inputs and financial hits from tariffs, say that the overtime rules, which have been in effect since late 2022, have exacerbated their plight and led to a quickening exodus from the sector. Working state farmland has decreased by 1.6 million acres over the past five years — the biggest hit percentagewise of any state, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture — and farm bankruptcies in the state rose by 50% from 2024 to 2025.
What’s more, both farm operators and some workers say, laborers face shrinking paychecks because employers who can’t afford to pay time-and-a-half send them home when they hit 48 or 56 hours. Decreases in income have led some workers to have to get second jobs and have pushed others to move to Wyoming or Utah, said Senate Majority Leader Robert Rodriguez, the Denver Democrat sponsoring Senate Bill 121 with Minority Leader Cleave Simpson, R-Alamosa.
Senate Majority Leader Robert Rodriguez speaks to the Colorado Chamber Board of Directors in December.
Two different approaches in farm bills
SB 121 would reset the threshold for overtime pay for all agricultural workers at 60 hours, a benchmark that industry leaders said would allow them to get what is needed done without having to choose between paying significantly more or sending workers home early. It is backed by a coalition of agricultural groups, farm operators including former Democratic Congressman John Salazar, business interests like the Grand Junction Area Chamber of Commerce and some workers.
However, it runs in stark opposition to SB 81, sponsored by Democratic Sen. Jessie Danielson of Wheat Ridge, which sought to move the overtime threshold for agricultural workers down to 40 hours — the same threshold for most other workers in Colorado. Its backers included Latino advocates like former Democratic state Sen. Polly Baca, unions like the Colorado AFL-CIO, antipoverty organizations and some workers as well.
In an unusual hearing before the Senate Business, Labor & Technology Committee on Thursday, both sides presented their bills simultaneously and witnesses came up, typically stating that they were for one piece of legislation and against the other. Committee members then debated the proposals as a comparison between each other and, by 3-2 margins, advanced SB 121 and killed SB 81.
“Not fair”
Colorado state Sen. Nick Hinrichsen speaks in the Senate in 2024.
The swing vote was Sen. Nick Hinrichsen, a Pueblo Democrat who lamented first that he has seen a 54% reduction of farms in his county during his lifetime and then lamented that the federal government has failed to protect farmworkers. But, with Colorado not having the financial ability to offer tax credits to farm operators to help them offset overtime payments as states like California and New York have done, he said the state needs to do what it can to help small farms, which make up 95% of agricultural operations.
“It’s not fair. It’s not fair for our workers. And (the current law combined with Colorado’s fiscal constraints) leaves our producers at a competitive disadvantage,” Hinrichsen said. “My concern is that five years from now, some of the staples of Pueblo County will not be there anymore if we don’t make the adjustments we see here.”
Farmers and their workers spoke of the financial setbacks they have encountered since enactment of the overtime standard.
Brett Rutledge, who operates a cattle and crop farm outside of Yuma, said he can’t afford with all the other financial pressures he faces to boost pay from $20 an hour to $30 an hour when workers reach their time limits. So, he has come up with new schedules and even scaled back production to comply, and his workers are taking home less pay as they are working fewer hours. Resetting the overtime threshold to 60 hours would allow him to pay workers an average of $12,000 more annually as they can work longer and handle more duties on an expanded farm, he said.
Some farm workers now seek second jobs
Bruce Talbott, orchard and vineyard manager for Talbott Farms in Palisade, noted that workers brought in from other countries as part of the H2A visa program, are not allowed to have a second job. The current overtime restrictions have cost his H2A workers about $3,000 to $4,000 a year — a total that would rise to $7,000 to $10,000 if the overtime threshold was reset to 40 hours, he said.
A server pours a glass of wine whose ingredients were harvested from a Colorado vineyard..
Farm worker Galen Wallace testified that he wants to work more hours at regular wage and make more money in the high season because he struggles to find work in the winter. Mike Dreith, who works at a small farm in Bennett, testified that he’s had to take a second job to make up for his lost income now that his hours are capped at the overtime threshold.
“The bill that was meant to help me has actually created more financial strain and less time at home,” Dreith said.
However, Jennifer Rodriguez, an attorney with Colorado Legal Services who specializes in migrant farm worker rights, told a different story. Many of her clients are grateful to be home more with their families and working less hours, she said, especially because many of them were expected to work significant hours before or face the possibility of losing their jobs.
Baca and others argued that the purposeful omission of farm workers from the federal Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 was an act of racism that Colorado didn’t begin to help rectify until it passed the Farmworkers’ Bill of Rights in 2021. And that bill permitting the state to determine the threshold for overtime hours already was a compromise from its sponsors’ original vision, she and other supporters said.
Part of bigger debate about agricultural regulations
Colorado state Sen. Jessie Danielson speaks in the Senate in 2025.
Danielson, who sponsored the 2021 law as well, argued that if the industry is facing problems, the way to solve that is not by reducing potential hourly wages for the workers that literally make the sector thrive.
“It seems like the industry is always racing to balance the burdens of the industry on the back of workers,” said Danielson, whose family formerly owned a farm in Weld County. “I believe we should not be in the business of rolling back protections for these vulnerable workers. We should be in the business of increasing them.”
But Republican committee members voted with Hinrichsen to send SB 121 to the House floor and to send SB 81 into indefinite postponement. The decision, Rodriguez and Simpson said, will be a boon to farm owners operating on “razor-thin” margins if it can lead to Polis signing the bill into law.
Agricultural-sector leaders say the discussion about the overtime thresholds is part of a larger debate in which some Democratic legislators believe the state needs to put more regulations on the industry for environmental and worker-protection reasons. So, far, though, the industry is pushing back fairly successfully, as it led the effort to defeat a bill that would have limited use of a common crop-protecting pesticide and tamped down a bill that proposed to limit the use of common rat poisons.