New York Dairy Farms Prepare for Increased Immigration Enforcement

Feb 11, 2025

By Rebecca Redelmeier

New York dairy farms are preparing for the potential of increased immigration enforcement on farms, where foreign-born workers play a key role.

“If you lose your workforce, what do you do?” said Richard Stup, director of the Agricultural Workforce Development program at Cornell University. “If you're a parent and you get detained, what do you do? Who's got your contact information?”

Stup has been helping farm owners and workers navigate these questions amid a federal crackdown on unauthorized immigration. Since President Donald Trump’s inauguration, immigration authorities have scaled up the number of unauthorized migrants they detain, arresting more than 1,000 people in a single day. Scores of those recently arrested have no criminal background, according to reporting from NPR.

Around 50% of dairy workers nationwide are born outside of the United States, according to a 2014 survey. Many are authorized to work in the U.S., but not all.

In New York, many farms have long standing connections with villages in Guatemala and southern Mexico, and rely on workers who have been going back and forth for decades, Stup said. Now, some of those workers may face arrests and deportation.

In recent weeks, Stup said he has only heard of immigration officials approaching farms in New York looking for individuals with criminal records. But if officials begin to raid farms to arrest any unauthorized workers, he worries dairy farms will struggle.

Some farm owners echo those concerns.

“There is a lot of nervousness,” said one New York farm owner. WSKG agreed to withhold his name because he is concerned speaking out could make his farm a target of immigration authorities.

The owner said his farm has around 5,000 cows and 35 full-time employees, about 20 of whom are foreign born, mostly from Mexico. Many have authorization to work in the U.S., he said, but it can be difficult to tell if all their papers are legitimate.

The farm owner said it has been challenging to find Americans willing to work on his farm, where hours can be long and the jobs can be physically demanding. That’s why he said the farm relies on long-standing relationships with workers from Mexico.

“They run equipment and feed cows, spread manure, kind of anything and everything,” he said. “It takes training, and over time, they learn a lot more skills and become quite valuable.”

Some experts, including Stup, say one solution could be expanding the H-2A visa program, which allows employers to hire foreign workers for temporary agricultural jobs. Currently, jobs are only eligible if they last for 10 months or less, which is useful for seasonal work on fruit and vegetable farms, but less helpful for dairy farms that need year-round workers.

Project 2025, which was written by some of Trump’s allies, includes the recommendation to “phase down” the H-2A program. But so far, Trump has not indicated that he plans to change the program.

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Video: The 15-Year Bet Behind Every New Variety!

Canada is trying to decide how much agricultural research capacity it can afford to lose. Brian Rossnagel believes the better question is whether the country can afford to rebuild it.

The longtime barley and oat breeder makes the case with a simple fact about his profession: the consequences of today’s decisions may not become visible for 10 or 15 years.

“Pick the right parents. That’s the biggest thing,” Rossnagel says. “If you pick the wrong parents, you’re not going to get anywhere—and you don’t know that until 10 years, 15 years later.”

That warning carries particular weight as Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada moves to reduce spending and streamline parts of its science operations. The department’s 2026–27 plan anticipates the loss of approximately 665 positions by 2028–29 and says some research will be reduced where capacity exists in academia or industry. AAFC says the changes will make its science operations more cost-effective over the long term.

For Canada’s seed industry, Rossnagel’s career illustrates what is at stake.

This fall, the retired University of Saskatchewan breeder will be inducted into the Canadian Agricultural Hall of Fame. During his 35-year career at the Crop Development Centre, he helped develop more than 100 barley and oat varieties, including CDC Austenson—one of Western Canada’s most widely grown feed barleys. His induction recognizes not only those varieties, but the collaboration and research system that made them possible.

Rossnagel is quick to emphasize that none of it was the work of one person.

“The first thing I thought about was all the other people who contributed to whatever success I and my program had over the years,” he says. “We know that it’s not an individual who does this. It’s a group—a team.”

That team extends well beyond the breeder whose name appears beside a variety. It includes technicians, pathologists, quality specialists, statisticians, regional testing sites, seed growers and industry partners. It also includes the breeders who came before and those who will carry the germplasm forward.

CDC Fraser barley, for example, moved through three breeding careers. Its parents came from Brian Harvey’s program. Rossnagel advanced the material after Harvey retired, and Aaron Beattie later guided it through registration and release.

That kind of handoff is normal in plant breeding. The person who makes the original cross may never see the resulting variety reach farmers.

It also explains why lost research capacity cannot simply be switched back on when budgets improve.

“If you shut it off, it’s very, very difficult—and particularly costly—to start it up again,” Rossnagel says. “If you have to start from scratch, it’s going to be at least 10 years before anybody notices whether you’re getting anything done or not.”

The concern is not simply how many experimental lines Canada can process. Modern equipment, statistical tools and genetic technologies allow today’s breeding programs to evaluate tens of thousands of lines—far more than Rossnagel could handle when he entered the field in the early 1970s.

But efficiency and automation do not generate every idea.

“If you pare back down, and instead of having six or seven individual scientists concentrating on wheat breeding, you go down and say three people could handle all this, well, that’s half the ideas gone,” he says. “Particularly if you happen to lose the three people who had the really neat and innovative ideas, boy, that’s a problem.”

It is a timely distinction for Canadian agriculture. Consolidating programs may preserve the volume of material moving through a system, at least initially. It may not preserve the diversity of thinking, regional knowledge or willingness to pursue unconventional crosses.

That regional knowledge matters because Canadian agriculture is not one uniform production environment. A variety suited to southern Alberta may face different disease, moisture and maturity pressures than one grown in Manitoba, Ontario or Atlantic Canada.

“Agriculture is applied biology,” Rossnagel says. “Biology, all around the Earth, moves from the poles to the equator. It does not move from Newfoundland to B.C. like politics do.”