The right team

In the spring of 2021, Hoffman Nursery explored hiring an H-2A firm to help them hire much needed workers. According to COO and company vice president David Hoffman, the grower had been dealing with a “labor lull.” Hoffman says the lull was due in part to the labor market being down for people interested in the “intensive, tedious, very focused” work done at Hoffman with ornamental grasses. They couldn’t find the people they needed. Or, if they did hire someone, they didn’t stick around, he says.

“You have to have an eye for what you’re doing and want to do it for eight hours a day,” he adds.

They began, he says, looking at different ways to solve that problem, including working with H-2A firms such as Legacy Labor, Inc. Before beginning to work with Legacy, the company was considering automation to replace the workers it needed or downsizing to reduce its production and the number of workers needed.

“We weren’t able to keep up with what we needed to do,” Hoffman says. “The plants weren’t up to the quality that we expect of ourselves. If we were going to stay on this path, we needed to go into H-2A, whether that was us doing it or someone else. It’s been better for us to bring in someone else.”

“At Cultivate that year, maybe 30 minutes into the show, I talked to [CEO/co-owner] David Judah and we hit it off and figured out that this would be a good fit,” Hoffman says. “After I had that conversation with David, I went back to my team and told them that Legacy had their ducks in a row that it would be worth continuing the conversation.”

By the fall of 2021, they began working with Legacy to get everything set up for workers and bring H-2A workers to their base in Rougemont, North Carolina, for the 2022 Season.

Going the H-2A route, Hoffman says, has taken that worry off of their plate. In the first year, they brought in 16 workers in 2022 and signed up for 25% more in the following year for the 2023 season.

“In the beginning, with the paperwork and just figuring out how many people we actually need, they were a huge help,” Hoffman continues. “With the paperwork and handling various logistics and knowing how to handle every little detail that comes with H-2A, that’s where we decided that it’s worth it for them to come in and handle it for us. It was, honestly, an easy decision looking back at it and knowing how this has helped us.”