Invisible Hands

“The trend towards Hispanic dairy workers was started in New York in the late 1990s,” said Thomas Maloney, farm management extension specialist in the Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management at Cornell University. He explained that dairy farms began to grow, but there wasn’t much of a workforce who was willing to do the work.  “[American workers] were not that interested and they didn’t stay very long and the workers who were good seemed to be few and far in between, and if you lost one it was hard to get another one,” Maloney said. At this point, most produce farms, as well as vineyards in the area, were employing Hispanic workers, mostly of Mexican descent. Dairy farmers needed a more stable workforce, one that wouldn’t get tired after a few months and that could stand the 24/7 model of a dairy farm, and immigrant workers wanted a non-seasonal, year-round job.  Seeing that half of all dairy workers in the U.S. are immigrants, it is safe to say that there are many people in the area who find themselves in a constant fear of deportation and who are both geographically and systematically isolated from the outside world. According to a study done in 2016 by Maloney along with the College of Agriculture and Life science at Cornell, about 70 percent of the farms surveyed in upstate New York  had Latino immigrants make up 50 to 100 percent of their workforce. Latinos occupy the grunt work; milking cow and moving rocks to cover the fields, protecting the cows’ food supply. Most Americans on the farms are mechanics, provide veterinary services or are the diary owners themselves. Juan said that he had never  seen an American worker endure the harsh hours and conditions of milking cows for more than a month and that there is an apparent divide between the Americans and the Mexicans on the farm. It’s not a trend unique to New York: Nationwide, the U.S. dairy industry has a has a deep dependency on immigrant labor, enough so that 79 percent of the nation’s milk supply is immigrant-produced,according to a study done by the Center for North American Studies at Texas A&M University. As much as we depend on immigrant labor, we also find it indispensable: The same study highlighted that eliminating immigrant labor would reduce the U.S. dairy herd by 2.1 million cows and retail milk prices would increase by an estimated 90.4 percent, reducing US economic output by $32.1 billion and reduce employment by 208,208 jobs.