The New York Farm Bureau is backing Gov. Kathy Hochul’s push to expedite work visas for migrants coming to the state as farmers face a labor shortage.

In a Tuesday interview on Spectrum News, Hochul said there are 5,000 jobs on farms in the state that could, at least in part, be filled by migrants, a point she initially raised in May.  

There is currently a federally mandated 180-day waiting period for migrants who have obtained asylum seeker status to get a job.

“If these individuals could work – my God, I can't tell you how many people have said to me, ‘I need them in my North Country, Lake Placid Hotel, a restaurant over in Syracuse, a nursing home on Long Island,’” Hochul said in the interview. “There are so many jobs that they could have been absorbed into our economy so easily. 5,000 farm jobs open today.”

Farmers in New York have struggled with labor shortages since the COVID-19 pandemic, and the New York Farm Bureau representatives say they support this push from the governor.

“There’s a need for farm workers in this state. We fully support her efforts to expedite visas for many of the asylum seekers, because there are opportunities for them to work on farms as long as they are properly processed,” Steve Ammerman, director of communications for the New York Farm Bureau, said in an interview Wednesday but he said training is needed to work on farms.  

“It’s not like you can just walk onto a farm one day and know how to care for a cow or the proper way to harvest an apple, but if by some chance they already have some of those skill sets, maybe they came from or worked in a rural area -- that can be advantageous,” he said.  

Overall, this would be beneficial to New York farmers, Ammerman said.  

“People who are interested in farm work, those are the people we want to hire and get them into that pipeline, that would be good news for our farms who are trying to fill those positions,” he said.