‘We’ll have to go vegan’: Dairy farmers rattled about finding workers amid Trump immigrant sweeps

Dairy farmers are warning that Americans will drastically have to change their diets amid the Trump administration’s aggressive sweep of undocumented migrants who provide a significant portion of agricultural labor.

If all undocumented dairy farm migrant workers were deported tomorrow, the industry “would die a horrible death,” one farmer told the Financial Times in an interview published Wednesday.

The industry heavily relies on migrant workers, and some 40 percent of the workforce in the U.S. are not authorized to work, according to Daniel Ortega, a food economist at Michigan State University.

“If there’s no immigrant labor, there’s no milk, no cheese, no butter, no ice cream,” Wisconsin dairy farmer John Rosenow told the outlet. “We’ll all have to go vegan.”

In Wisconsin, workers from Mexico and other Latin American countries make up an estimated 70 percent of the labor force, according to an op-ed in the Wisconsin Examiner.

That statistic has farmers fearing the worst as Trump’s administration clamps down on immigrants.

“Am I worried that some or all of my workforce could be swept up? Yeah, for sure,” Hans Breitenmoser of Lincoln County told the Financial Times. “I’m more worried now than ever before.”

Breitenmoser told the publication he employs 11 Mexican workers, and believes that the Trump administration has not considered the impact its tough immigration policies could have on Wisconsin. It’s difficult to find Americans willing to do the hard physical labor involved.

“Let’s say the people in Washington could wave a magic wand and make all these people disappear,” he said, referring to migrant workers. “You’d have dead cows piling up outside the dairy farms. The industry would die a horrible death within 48 hours – because no one would be there to slaughter the cows, let alone milk them.”

There is concern that American workers will not pick up the slack if undocumented migrants on the farms are deported. The National Milk Producers Federation (NMPF) warned that dairy farms “will not be able to survive, let alone thrive, without a steady, reliable workforce.”

Migrant workers play a “critical role that many U.S.-born workers are either unable or unwilling to perform,” Ortega told the newspaper.

The figures speak for themselves. Out of 97,691 seasonal agricultural jobs advertised between March and May 2020, a mere 337 American-born workers applied, according to the National Council of Agricultural Employers.

The move to deport undocumented migrants will also likely increase the cost of producing food for farmers who would have to pay more for American labor, and hit consumers. “Instead of bringing prices down, these policies will drive them up,” Ortega added.

The farmers told the Financial Times that they were preparing their staff for the moment when ICE officials knock on the door.

One Mexican-born laborer who has worked on Rosenow’s farm for 10 years told the newspaper that the business owners would suffer more than he would. His son, who works with him, added: “We should all just say, fine, and leave this country, and they’ll see what happens.”

If the U.S. dairy industry loses its foreign-born workforce, it would nearly double retail milk prices and cost the U.S. economy more than $32 billion, the NMPF warned.