A “black swan event” could be on the horizon without more legal immigrants to satisfy a labor shortage, according to the CEO of an American agricultural cooperative.
Land O’Lakes CEO Beth Ford sounded the alarm at the Fortune Most Powerful Women (MPW) Summit on Tuesday. Ford noted the precarious position faced by American farmers, including a labor shortage due to the Trump administration’s harsh immigration measures.
“These are folks who oftentimes try to get American labor [but] are struggling to do so,” Ford said. “They absolutely need labor, and if they don’t have it, that’s yet another element—and it could be a black swan event for a farmer if they don’t have somebody who can help and be on [the] farm.”
A “black swan event” is an unpredictable and extreme occurrence that has severe consequences, according to Investopedia. These include natural disasters, disease outbreaks, or labor shortages in the agricultural industry, reports Fortune.
Ford, who’s helmed the dairy firm since 2018, added that farmers, “who try to get American labor, are struggling to do so.” President Donald Trump’s Labor Department claimed in an Oct. 2 filing that Americans are unwilling to fill the gap left by these job losses. It wrote that the lack of undocumented workers “results in significant disruptions to production costs and threatening the stability of domestic food production and prices for U.S consumers.”
As of 2022, roughly 42 percent of all farmworkers were born outside the U.S. and lack official work authorization, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
A staggering 51 percent of all dairy laborers in the U.S. are immigrants, according to the National Milk Producers Federation.
A food crisis could take just eight hours to transpire if Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids a farm, said Ford in an Oct. 3 interview with Fortune.
“If there’s nobody there, the cow starts to leak milk,” said Ford. “After 24 hours, you really get into crisis with the animal—they could have an infection."
In that event, a farmer might need to send the herd to a meatpacking plant, which could also be facing labor shortages.
So far, dairy workers in upstate New York, Vermont, and Ventura County, California, are among those who have been detained in ICE raids.
Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers has cautioned that further detainments could have serious consequences.
“If suddenly those people disappear, I don’t know who the hell is going to milk the cows,” he told Wisconsin news outlet WLUK.
Ford said at the summit that immigrants are essential to the U.S. economy.
“While there might be some discussion on undocumented, et cetera, this is critical for the health of the economy,” she said.
