Article doesn't mention the pay once. No matter what you think about this issue, this is total trash journalism by the reporter Samuel Benson and Politico. No wonder people don't trust news sources.
the issue is pay, but it is hard to evaluate pay on a dairy, as the work occurs 365 days a year, with a few intense periods when haying and or planting and harvesting corn,calving, and then mostly 3~4 hrs a day, one very early in the morning, so there are only odd situations that make it worth while to anybody, and as pointed out, loosing labour can instantly change all of someones plans.
I read the article diferently as my grand parents and uncles farmed in Penn state, one of them as a dairy farmer and those experiences with them fills in the blanks.
It takes a lot of creativity and decisivness to survive in dairy and family farming, margins are small but often the equity is high, so the temptation to sell out to big business is always there.
I assume GP's point is that the farms rely on being able to pay below minimum wage (IIRC at least some places have carveouts in minimum wage laws for farm labor, not just tipped workers), and that's part of why it's so difficult to find replacement workers.
The lack of mentioning that in a story about the economic impacts of this seems like a deliberate choice to garner more sympathy than "I want to pay people $2 an hour to work" might otherwise. (That is a made up number, I did not go dig up the relevant PA pay rates.)
> “The whole thing is screwed up,” said John Painter, a three-time Trump voter who runs an organic dairy farm in Westfield. “We need people to do the jobs Americans are too spoiled to do.”
That seems to cover it in the words of one of the farmers. I personally wouldn't consider the article too sympathetic to them.