About 700 cows need to be milked three times a day at Pennwood Farms.
Hundreds of replacement heifers must be cared for, too. There are also the numerous day-to-day tasks that are required to keep the whole operation running smoothly.
And a lot of that work is done by foreign migrant laborers.
Glenn Stoltzfus, who co-owns the business in Berlin with his brothers, said there are usually a half-dozen or so Hispanic laborers employed on the dairy farm. He said they are in the country legally, but that he can “almost guarantee you” that they are not citizens.
“They do a great job,” Stoltzfus said.
“We were struggling to find people because we milk pretty much around the clock. We’re milking 700 cows three times a day, and each shift is anywhere from six to seven hours long, so there’s not a whole lot of down time between milkings.
“It became very difficult to find people who were reliable that would do that work on a consistent basis.”
Stoltzfus said Oscar, the first migrant laborer who started working on the farm about eight years ago, is still there and is respected as a leader among the workers. Others, mostly family members from Mexico, have come and gone over the years. Whenever a replacement is needed, Stoltzfus said Oscar brings somebody new to the farm.
“It sure has taken a load off of us as far as finding new employees, finding people that are willing to do the work,” Stoltzfus said. “We haven’t looked for an employee for a long time.”
Glenn Stoltzfus, Somerset County Farm Bureau dairy farmer representative, speaks during the Somerset County Farm Bureau Legislative Farm Tour at McWilliams Farm in Somerset County on Friday, August 2, 2024.
The current group lives together in a six- bedroom farmhouse.
They generally keep to themselves when not working and a language barrier does exist at times. But, as Stoltzfus explained, “They have become part of the community.”
He described them as “good honest family people like we are.”
‘A lot of Hispanic labor’
Migrant labor is an integral part of the United States’ agriculture industry.
Approximately 68% of the nation’s 2.4 million farmworkers are foreign-born, with the overwhelming majority coming from Mexico, according to the U.S. Department of Labor’s National Agricultural Workers Survey for 2019-20.
The same report found that 44% of those migrant farmworkers were undocumented and lacked work authorization.
Tommy Nagle, right, and Marty Yahner, talk to eighth-grade students from Cambria Heights about harvesting corn that was planted at Yahner Brothers Farm in the spring in September 2023.
Pennsylvania Farm Bureau Vice President Tommy Nagle, a beef cattle farmer from Patton, and Cambria County Farm Bureau President Marty Yahner both pointed to the same reason as to why legal migrant labor is used so prevalently.
“For decades, there has been immigrant Hispanic labor in agriculture in America, all over the nation, because the sad reality is Americans won’t do the hard job that it takes in many cases on farms, whether it’s picking vegetables in the hot summer sun, or pumpkins, or watermelons in California, or working on a dairy farm, or in a mushroom facility,” Yahner said. “So yeah, there’s a lot of Hispanic labor. That’s just a fact. Americans won’t do those jobs in many cases for any price, for any pay. It’s true.”
Nagle described the migrants as “a reliable workforce.”
“The majority of the agriculture community is in favor of labor like that, just because they’re unable to find labor elsewhere,” Nagle said. “I’ve talked to several larger dairy farms in the area that are paying a very competitive wage, but they still cannot find a conventional workforce to come and work for that. It is difficult work, very labor-intensive at times.
“They’re having a tough time. It doesn’t really seem like wages are a motivating factor. It’s more of the work that’s entailed.”
Both Nagle and Yahner said there is not much migrant labor in the region.
‘Law-biding citizens’
There are, of course, differences between legal migrant workers and undocumented people entering the country.
A Pew Research Center report estimated there were 11 million unauthorized immigrants living in the United States in 2022. The number is likely higher now.
President Donald Trump has made issues with undocumented immigration a focal point of his two terms and three campaigns. The number of encounters at the Mexico-United States border has dropped by a large amount since he took office again in January.
Most recently, U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported 7,180 crossings in March, the lowest monthly total on record, compared to a monthly average of 155,000 over the previous four years, according to CBP.
Still questions remain about policies going forward, regarding illegal crossings and migrants entering legally to work in agriculture and other jobs.
Nagle said there needs to be a “realistic” plan to meet agriculture’s needs.
“As soon as we can have a comprehensive immigration reform out there that puts everyone on the same page and there’s a clear vision of what we can do to get workers that would definitely help agriculture,” Nagle said.
Stoltzfus said the migrants who work at Penn- wood have not communicated to him any concerns about their residency status.
“I think the administration has pretty much conveyed to the agriculture industry that they’re not going to be going after migrant workers or people who work on farms that are law-biding,” he said. “They’re going after the criminals.”
Stoltzfus also proposed what he called a “simple solution” to the overarching issue.
“If someone comes to the border, wants to come in, and wants to work, and has work lined up, give them an ID,” Stoltzfus said. “They’re law-biding citizens. Give them an ID, allow them to come in and work.
“Why is that a problem? Why can’t we do that? To me, it seems so simple. But when you get politics involved, whatever, I don’t know.”