Farmworker unions and farmers may not agree on much, but here’s something they appear to agree on: The H-2A guestworker program needs to be fixed.

Why it needs to be fixed is where the disagreements start. The federal government sets H-2A minimum pay for each state. Predictably, unions say it’s too low, and farmers say it’s too high.

But the people most affected, H-2A farmworkers, see the pay rate as a windfall. In Washington and Oregon, it’s $19.25 an hour. In their home countries, such wages for farmworkers are unheard of.

The H-2A farmworker program is centered on the I-129 form, which has 30 pages of instructions.

When it comes to bizarre and intrusive questions, it rivals the Internal Revenue Service.

The form asks farmers — “petitioners” — to answer a barrage of queries that is both laughable and excruciating.

It asks if the farmworker — called the “beneficiary” — is a member of an entertainment group and what the name of the group is.

Appearing soon in an orchard near you: “The Apple Pickers.”

It asks the “job title” of the farmworker. How about “apple picker”?

It asks the gross and net annual incomes of the farmers. How about: None of your business?

It asks whether farmers participate in the E-Verify program, which allows employers to check Social Security numbers.

It asks when the farmworker was in the U.S. during the past three years.

It also states that by submitting the form “the H-2A/H-2B petitioner and each employer consent to allow government access to the site where the labor is being performed for the purpose of determining compliance with H-2A/H-2B requirements.”

There’s more, but you get the idea.

Using the H-2A form is the federal equivalent of a colonoscopy, and about as intrusive.

It takes a straightforward process of hiring fruit pickers and transforms it into a massive paper-shuffling exercise.

Farmers often have to hire someone just to help them maneuver through the bureaucracy.

That and the expense of transporting H-2A workers to and from the farm and providing housing make the program user-unfriendly.

Ask farmers whether they would rather hire domestic farmworkers or foreign guestworkers, and the vast majority would likely prefer domestic farmworkers.

Yet many are forced to hire H-2A workers because domestic workers simply don’t exist in adequate numbers. The Washington Employment Security Department advertised for farmworkers in 2022 and came up with exactly 11.

In the previous year, the number was zero.

Compare that to the 35,680 H-2A guestworkers Washington farmers were forced to hire last year.

The Biden administration recently managed to make the program even more complicated and onerous with even more changes, apparently aimed at gaining favor with the unions.

The H-2A program is a mess, and neither farmers nor farm unions are happy with it. Seems like now would be a good time for members of Congress to roll up their sleeves and pass legislation to simplify it and make it less expensive.

They could start by tossing the I-129 form into the garbage bin.