The right people

Photos courtesy of Legacy Labor

A third-generation sweet corn grower, Steve Hoekstra says Hoekstra’s Sweet Corn primarily relied on high school labor in years past. Around six years ago, he says that it began to “dry up.”

“The kids weren’t interested in working,” he says. “It was then by chance that we got introduced to H-2A.” Since then, they’ve been using H-2A labor and are now in their fourth season partnering with Legacy Labor. Hoekstra says they bring in a crew in March and they stay through Thanksgiving. Three arrive earlier than the rest to work in the company’s flower greenhouse; eight more come later to bring the total crew size to 11. Legacy also works with Hoekstra’s dad and a neighboring farm to bring labor over.

“It takes that wonder of how the work is going to get done out of the equation for us,” he says. “Before this, it was really hard to get people to show up and do the work. We’d get text messages at 10 p.m. the night before saying they couldn’t come in the next morning and you can only deal with that for so long.”

Steve Hoekstra pictured with his daughter.

Hoekstra says he was recommended Legacy Labor by another H-2A firm and was told that Legacy owner David Judah was a great partner to work with.

“David came over to Wisconsin a week later from Michigan and we met and I could tell that everything was on the up-and-up,” he says. “That’s the biggest thing — the one year, I had another H-2A company and it got really bad really fast. They weren’t doing things legally that I didn’t even know about. With David, everything is done legit. It’s all done right. He thinks through every scenario for us and that takes a lot off of my plate.”

Over the last few years, Hoekstra says working with Legacy has taken his stress level from “being unreal” to more manageable.

“We wanted to take on more business and we didn’t know how we could even do it,” he says. “How were we going to get it done? Every time we’d get offered a contract or place a bid, we didn’t know how we’d be able to get it done. It’s taken my business from worrying about the labor end of it to knowing that the labor is figured out to being able to think about how to grow my business.”