ALBANY – Just days after family farmers and small business owners joined together to protest the proposed $15 state minimum wage, the New York Farm Bureau is detesting a new proposal that would exempt farms from any possible wage hike.

State legislators recently hinted to a special carve-out for farms on the contested minimum wage proposal. The move would save farmers the cost of paying increased wages that many farmers argue would put them out of business.

But caveats and carve-outs create new challenges, according to the Farm Bureau, and would fail to keep small farms afloat.

“A carve-out would only make an already difficult task of finding farm labor even harder,” explained New York Farm Bureau President Dean Norton.

In a statement released last week, Norton said farms, if granted a carve-out, would be in an impossible position to compete with other employers that are not exempt and are attracting workers with higher pay.

“Prospective employees would naturally gravitate towards higher paying jobs, and our wages would have to be comparable,” Norton said.