Trump Deportations Have Dairy Farmers on Edge

By Andrew Sharp and Barn Raiser

Visit a dairy farm anywhere in the country and odds are decent you’ll overhear conversations in Spanish.

Like other farmers in the United States, dairy farmers rely on immigrant laborers from Mexico or Central America, many of them without authorization to work here. Immigrant labor is vital in getting milk to market, whether it’s moving cows through milking machines, taking care of chores that milking robots still can’t do or trucking milk across the country.

“It’s a grueling, grueling lifestyle,” says Wisconsin dairy farmer Tina Hinchley of her occupation. The Trump administration’s aggressive stance on immigration has rattled many in an industry reliant on immigrant labor. (Guillermo Spelucin Runciman)

That’s especially the case on larger dairies with hundreds or thousands of cows. According to Farm Action, only 2.5% of dairies (comprising a few hundred dairies with more than 2,500 cows) produce nearly 45% of American raw milk.

“We’re at a point today where, if you go on large dairy farms—and when I say large, I mean anything that’s, let’s say 500 cows and higher—[there’s a] very strong likelihood that most of the milkers are Hispanic, and probably some of the shop or outside crew,” says Richard Stup, director of agricultural workforce development at Cornell University. In the Northeast and Midwest, he estimates immigrants make up about 50-60% of dairy workers, while in the Southwest and West it is close to 80%.

Rick Naerebout, CEO of the Idaho Dairymen’s Association, estimates that about 90% of workers on Idaho dairy farms come from other countries.

That has left many farmers deeply uneasy at the aggressive stance on immigration taken by the Trump administration, which has made immigration enforcement central to its message and policy.

There are signs Trump may be ramping up raids on dairy workers. In late March, ICE reportedly picked up four adults and three children at a dairy farm in Sackets Harbor, New York. The agency said at the time that it had also begun conducting “enhanced targeted operations in parts of New York,” picking up any unauthorized workers they find along the way. On April 21, ICE conducted what Migrant Justice, a Vermont-based advocacy group, called the largest single immigration enforcement action against farmworkers in Vermont in recent history when it detained eight workers at a dairy farm in Berkshire.

Why the issue is so acute for dairies

Nationally, estimates vary on how many workers on dairy farms lack authorization to work in the country—although they likely have papers, genuine or not, to present to their employers—but there’s broad agreement that it’s a significant amount.

“That number is all over the place, and no one really knows,” says Stup, adding that it also varies quite a bit from farm to farm. Some farmers are very assertive about making sure authorization paperwork is genuine, while others don’t look too closely. A decade-old study from Texas A&M, still cited by some industry groups, found that immigrants make up 51% of all dairy workers, while dairies that employ immigrant labor produce 79% of the U.S. milk supply.

Why not hire locals to work on dairy farms? Farmers would love to, but as in other industries, they say the labor pool simply isn’t there.

That’s not because of low wages, says Jaime Castaneda, executive vice president of policy development and strategy for the National Milk Producers Federation. In fact, dairy is very competitive with other agricultural sectors and may even offer benefits, he says. But the work, while rewarding, is demanding and often starts in the wee hours of the morning, and locals who do sign up for it don’t last.

“We’re very lucky to have these foreign workers that, actually, not only they are willing to work with animals, but they are very good at it,” he says.

Numbers back up Castaneda’s assertions. A 2013 study done by the Partnership for a New American Economy and the Center for Global Development, a bipartisan coalition supporting immigration reform, analyzed data from The North Carolina Growers Association. The association pools resources to bring in labor via the H-2A visa system, which allows migrants to come in temporarily for seasonal work. To be part of the H-2A system requires that employers demonstrate an effort to recruit domestic workers first, so the study analyzed how successful the growers association had been at recruiting a domestic workforce.

It went very poorly.