Dairy farming in Vermont is undeniably a difficult proposition. Volatile milk prices, high costs, a shortage of labor, a dearth of large-animal veterinarians and climate change in the form of flooding are just some of the challenges. So it is astonishing to learn that some farmers in the state welcomed policies that threaten to compound their existing problems.
Witness Dustin Machia, a fifth-generation dairy farmer whose operation in Sheldon, Vt., near the Canadian border, is one of 35 in the state that milks at least 700 cows. Machia, 37, supported President Trump last fall in part because he promised to crack down on illegal immigration — “bad people,” as he puts it.
But following widely publicized arrests and deportations of migrant farmworkers in northern Vermont, Machia seems puzzled. “All the dairy farmers who voted for Trump were under the impression they weren’t going to come on farms and take our guys,” he told The Boston Globe recently. “It’s happening more than we’d like. It’s scaring the farming community, and we’re like, ‘This wasn’t supposed to be.’ ”
Vermont’s dairy farmers have every reason to be scared, although no reason to be surprised. The University of Vermont says that 94% of dairies in the state that hire outside workers use migrant labor — a workforce estimated, the Globe reports, to number 750 to 850 mostly Mexican workers, plus 150 partners and children.
“Migrant workers are essential to the dairy industry in Vermont, New England and the nation,” observes Anson Tebbetts, Vermont’s secretary of agriculture. And although smaller farms have given way to much larger operations in recent years, dairy farming remains a $3.6 billion industry in Vermont, a pillar of the economy that also bolsters other sectors such as tourism.
The larger farms that have resulted from consolidation — the number of cows has remained the same even as about half of the state’s dairy farms have gone out of business in the past decade — has only intensified the demand for labor that farm advocates say local people can’t be hired to do.
Thus the alarm when the U.S. Border Patrol detained eight Mexican men in April at Pleasant Valley Farms, Vermont’s largest dairy farm. Four of them have already been deported without a chance to challenge their detention, according to the advocacy group Migrant Justice, while one has been released from custody, as has been another man who was arrested earlier. Federal officials claim that dairy farms are not being targeted in the search for undocumented workers, but as always, actions speak louder than words.
While sympathetic to dairy farmers in general, we do have to wonder what led those who voted for Trump to believe that their migrant workers would be exempt from the administration’s all-out assault on undocumented — and sometimes documented — immigrants. The intention was plainly stated, and farmers are of necessity practical-minded folks normally careful to weigh the consequences of their actions.
So, what were they thinking? In Machia’s case, according to the Globe, he still feels Trump is “more for the rural people like us, the middle-class type person.” So far, Trump has repaid the faith of those rural people by such actions as ordering staff firings and funding cuts that imperil forecasting by the National Weather Service, even as the ferocity of hurricanes, tornadoes and flooding is spiking; abolishing incentives for schools to buy food from local farms; gutting environmental research; and ending a contract to produce a bird-flu vaccine.
One could only wish that these farmers’ interactions with the migrants who work for them shaped their position on immigration, rather than relying on “news” or views that originate a couple of thousand miles to the south. That way, they might make a useful contribution to a real solution, which is immigration reform that prevents the entry of “bad people” into the country but also provides a path to citizenship for hard-working, law-abiding, tax-paying people who only want to better their circumstances while doing essential work in a signature Vermont industry.