FEAR ON THE FARM

BIG AGRICULTURE WRESTLES WITH THE WHITE HOUSE IMMIGRATION CRACKDOWN.

- By Emma Hinchliffe

DAIRY DEFENDER Land O'Lakes CEO Beth Ford is advocating for solutions to several crises facing farmers.

AT A LARGE DAIRY FARM, an immigration crisis takes just eight hours to happen, says Beth Ford, CEO of dairy business Land O'Lakes.

That's how much time passes before thousands of cows would need to be milked if a farm is raided by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers and its workers are taken into custody. “If there’s nobody there, the cow starts to leak milk,” Ford says. “After 24 hours, you really get into crisis with the animal— they could have an infection.” It can quickly get to the point where a farmer might be forced to cull the herd, sending the cows to a meat processing plant—which, these days, might also be short of workers.

It’s a bleak picture, Ford acknowledges, but it’s no exaggeration of the predicament that the more than 1,200 dairy farmers she represents worry about as they watch deportation sweeps happen across the country. “I want to make sure everyone's paying attention,” Ford says. Especially those leading the federal government’s immigration crackdown, to whom she wants to say: “Listen, do you realize the risk there is with this right now?”

Ford is diving into a subject few of her CEO peers want to discuss in public: President Donald Trump’s immigration enforcement drive and its effects on American business. For her, it’s just one piece of the puzzle, a problem that deepens the overlapping crises already facing America’s farmers: drops in sales and profitability and a farm bankruptcy rate that's double what it was a year ago; a global trade war threatening exports; the rise of Brazil as a fierce competitor; and in the rural communities where farmers live, closures of nursing homes and obstetrics wards.