American farmers were already facing multiple crises. Then came Trump’s immigration crackdown

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.

Saying what must be said on behalf of American business—to an easily riled up and often vengeful administration—is quite literally Ford’s job right now. At the beginning of 2025, just as Donald Trump returned to the White House, Ford accepted the role of chair of the immigration committee for the Business Roundtable, the influential group made up of the CEOs of the country’s largest companies. Immigration chair has always been a prominent role; her predecessor was Apple chief Tim Cook. But what was once a mostly ceremonial position has become a political minefield at the center of one of the current administration’s most controversial policy priorities: carrying out the “largest mass deportation operation in history” and bringing American workers back to factory floors and fields.

So why do it? Why wade into such a contentious national battle? Ford was the Business Roundtable’s first choice for the job. The organization’s CEO, Joshua Bolten, sees her as bringing a “vital perspective from America’s agricultural heartland.” For Ford, it was an immediate yes. For the farmers she represents, the issue of immigration enforcement is indivisible from their need for labor—which is the main issue. Without workers to get all those cows milked, fed, and cleaned up after, their farms simply could not function.

And doing hard things seems to be in her nature. Ford, 61, grew up in Iowa, in a working-class family as one of eight siblings. Now, she and her wife are raising their three kids together in Minnesota. When she was named CEO in 2018, she became the first openly gay woman to lead a Fortune 500 company. Last year she was named one of Time’s 100 most influential people; this year, she was No. 12 on Fortune’s Most Powerful Women list.

Ford does not answer to a traditional board representing shareholders. Land O’Lakes is a 104-year-old member-owned cooperative whose board of directors includes the dairy farmers whose milk and butter Land O’Lakes is responsible for getting on grocery store shelves. It also does significant business in animal feed and agricultural technology. Land O’Lakes’ fate is directly entwined with the future of the American food system—and its challenges. As well as labor shortages, the co-op’s members are struggling with rising costs, supply-chain disruptions, and unstable prices. The company’s own financial results mirror those of American farmers overall, with sales down 15% from a high of $19.2 billion in 2022.

While Ford’s Midwestern modesty prevents her from painting herself as a savior, it’s clear she believes she can help solve some of these thorny problems. Besides, if not her, then who?

Ford’s forthright manner is apparent as she strides into a meeting a few minutes early, firm handshake at the ready, at Land O’Lakes’ headquarters, set back behind rolling green fields in peak Minnesota summer. She doesn’t use emotional language when discussing the immigration conundrum, instead speaking pragmatically: “The debate is, do we have enough of a workforce that will elevate and grow the economy over time?” she says.

FREDERIC J. BROWN—AFP/Getty Images

Ford hasn’t yet been on the phone with Trump about this; while Trump has hosted tech CEOs for splashy AI dinners, he hasn’t brought together agriculture industry leaders recently. But if and when Ford does have her chance to talk directly with the president, she says she won’t forget that the farmers she represents, for the most part, actually like Trump.

“I’m not out here saying, ‘You big, bad administration, you are bad people,’” Ford says. “Let’s be adults here. What I’m trying to say is, ‘You should want me to tell you what I’m seeing and hearing from farmers.’ I believe the president genuinely loves the farmer. And guess what? The farmer respects the president … I do think it’s important to be straightforward and honest.”

White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson called Trump a “tireless advocate” for farm owners. “He trusts farmers and is committed to ensuring they have the workforce needed to remain successful,” she told Fortune. But she reaffirmed the administration’s commitment to enforcement, saying, “there will be no safe harbor for the countless, unvetted, criminal illegal aliens.”

For Trump, being tough on immigration is an easy political win with the GOP base. But deporting immigrant workers leaves huge labor gaps to fill—and getting to the stated goal of 100% participation in the workforce for American workers is easier said than done. Undocumented workers make up a quarter of the construction workforce, according to the American Immigration Council. A 2022 estimate by the Center for Migration Studies found that 45% of farmworkers—283,000—were undocumented.

Meanwhile, American-born workers are unlikely to return to this kind of manual labor en masse. Population decline, an aging U.S. citizenry, and falling labor force participation will contribute to slow workforce growth, the Bureau of Labor Statistics projected last year.

‘The largest mass deportation operation in history’ 

During his 2024 campaign, Trump pledged the largest mass deportation operation in history—aiming to deport 1 million immigrants a year with at least 1,500 ICE arrests per day. In Trump’s first seven months, the administration has deported 324,000 people, the Department of Homeland Security has claimed. The number of agricultural workers among that number was not released.

The nation’s approximately 24,000 dairy farms weren’t the primary target of ICE raids, but they haven’t escaped unscathed: Eight workers on a Vermont dairy farm were arrested, for example. Eleven more were arrested during one widely reported raid on a dairy in New Mexico. Many such incidents go unreported by the media.

In September, the Supreme Court made it easier for these kinds of raids to continue, allowing officials to detain a person based on factors including their race, whether they are speaking Spanish, or their employment at a low-wage job while litigation over the practice works its way through the courts. Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill, signed into law in July, tripled ICE’s funding for the 2025 fiscal year to $28.7 billion—mostly going toward increased detention of suspected migrants.

In mid-June, Trump seemed to briefly reconsider his strategy, apparently convinced by arguments that the detentions were hurting American agriculture and the food system. “We must protect our farmers, but get criminals out of the USA,” he wrote on Truth Social. He told ICE to pause raids on farms, hotels, and restaurants. Just a few days later, that guidance was walked back, as Homeland Security told ICE to resume enforcement.

The back and forth has continued: In August, Trump hinted at allowing workers in the U.S. illegally to leave and reenter with new documentation—but nothing has been put to paper yet. An ICE raid on a Hyundai plant in September ensnared hundreds of South Korean nationals—imperiling exactly the kind of foreign investment in manufacturing that Trump is trying to encourage, and putting the administration in damage-control mode. Trump wrote on Truth Social that he doesn’t want to “frighten off or disincentivize investment.” 

Why all the mixed signals? Bob Worsley has a theory. The former GOP state senator from Arizona and the founder of SkyMall chairs the American Business Immigration Coalition, and has been lobbying on this issue for years. He has noticed that Trump tends to soften his stance on immigration enforcement when he considers its effect on industries where he has direct business interests or experience: hotels, construction, food service. “They need workers at Mar a Lago and the golf courses,” Worsley says. “They have construction projects and understand this will not work long term without that labor force.”

But at the White House, immigration hardliners like deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller often steer him back toward tough enforcement—and raise concerns that any industry concessions on immigration could be viewed as a broken promise by Trump’s voters.

Living in fear

If farm owners’ anxiety is rising amid all this confusion and combative rhetoric, it’s of course even more nerve-racking for the workers themselves. José, a 57-year-old dairy worker on the Oregon-Idaho border, tells Fortune that the dozen or so workers on his farm are split between asylum seekers from Peru and workers who, like José, are from Mexico. (José is a pseudonym to protect his identity.)

José first crossed the southern border into the U.S. in 1991, before returning to bring back his wife and young son. They carried a gallon of water, a blanket, and a backpack “full of dreams,” he recalls, speaking in Spanish via a translator. He worked in irrigation before switching to dairy 25 years ago, and he has worked at his current farm for 12 years.

It’s brutally hard work. José starts his days at 6 a.m., checking on calves born overnight, and spends the next 12 hours vacuuming up cow excrement and caring for animals sick with conditions like milk fever. It also can be dangerous: animals sometimes kick, and a cow weighs more than 1,000 pounds. But the work has sustained José and his family over the years for a reason that sets dairy apart from much of agriculture: cows need to be milked in every season, which means year-round work. José earns about $49,000 a year.

Since Trump came back into office, “it’s been total stress,” José says. Deportations happened during the Biden and Obama years, too, but there’s a new fear during Trump 2.0: marching onto fields without a court order, or breaking car windows—those are new tactics, says Teresa Romero, president of the union United Farm Workers (UFW), which has recorded such incidents on farms in California.

Who feeds us?

Some 86% of U.S. farmworkers are foreign-born, and almost half are undocumented.

“From the moment you wake up, you’re kind of looking both ways,” says José. “You’re always nervous and thinking in the back of your head, ‘Don’t get me, don’t get me.’”

José and his wife, who works on a nearby farm that grows corn and onions, had three of their four children in the U.S. Their youngest is 15, and the older three all graduated college, with one pursuing a master’s degree. They have three grandchildren born in the U.S., too. That made it all worth it to José.

“I know I did something wrong,” he says of entering the U.S. illegally. But he explains: “We came so that our children would be important people, big people.” With their education, he points out, they are contributing to this country.

Over the years, José considered trying to obtain legal status. But lawyers told him and his wife it was “risky” and they were better off waiting for a president who would offer some kind of amnesty to farmworkers, as President Ronald Reagan did in the 1980s. Instead, there’s a president who campaigned on the promise to deport people who arrived in the U.S. without documentation—and has even floated revoking the birthright citizenship that allowed three of José’s children to be American citizens. (His eldest, who arrived as a baby, obtained legal status through marriage.)

Life on the farm 

For some farm owners, the prospect of having longtime workers—colleagues and often friends—arrested and deported is not only an economic risk and a logistical problem to solve, but also an emotional and moral issue. A co-owner of a farm in New England, Victoria (a pseudonym), described an atmosphere of fear and vigilance as she considers the risks that many of her 48 workers are facing.

While everyone she has hired presented her with some form of documentation, she says, it’s impossible to always know if those papers are accurate. Whether or not they have legal status, some Spanish-speaking workers are now scared to venture outside their homes more than necessary, which makes it difficult for them to meet their daily needs. For them, farmers in Victoria’s community shop for groceries and deposit checks at the bank. Victoria has even been granted power of attorney for seven children, in case they are separated from their parents. “It’s almost like being in a constant grief-stricken state,” she says of the toll the uncertainty takes. “And this is on top of everything else we do.”

Indeed, running the farm is an unrelenting daily grind. A typical day starts at 1:30 a.m. when the first shift of workers shows up to get the day’s feed ready before the morning milking starts around 4 a.m. With 5,000 cows, the process takes about four hours—and it repeats two more times before the day is out, producing 20,000 gallons of milk a day. That brings in more than $10 million in revenue per year. But it requires a huge amount of labor—ideally, from workers to whom the animals respond well. “Cows prefer consistency and comfort above all else,” she says. And even with all that work, “profitability is elusive.”

Victoria and her co-owners are two years into their tenure as stewards of the farm, after their parents and in-laws agreed to sell in their seventies. Their situation, and the uncertainty about whether future generations of farming families will want to continue this arduous work, reflect broader issues that Ford worries about—the aging of farm owners and industry consolidation. Between 2017 and 2022, the U.S. lost 142,000 farms, while average farm size increased 5%.

Making agricultural work appealing—sustainable and profitable—is the key to solving these problems, Ford argues. For the security of America’s food system, farmers must be able to thrive. For farmers to thrive, their communities need to thrive. That’s why Ford has advocated for broadband access in rural America: so farmers’ kids can attend virtual classes and do homework. She also has prioritized medical facilities in rural communities. And her willingness to take on one of the most difficult political issues in America, immigration, also stems from this core belief.

“It’s very complex,” Ford admits. “It’s emotional, it’s fraught.”

A path forward 

So what comes next? Immigration enforcement has been the focus of so much attention during the second Trump administration that not much has been done on immigration policy. The need for work-visa reforms doesn’t usually grab the same headlines. (One exception was when Trump proposed a $100,000 fee on H-1B visas, the program known for bringing skilled tech talent into the U.S.) But the policy work is what Ford is most eager to do, she says. She just needs things to calm down first.

The Business Roundtable supports measures to allow in an increased number of skilled immigrants; a bipartisan solution for Dreamers; and more temporary work visas. That last priority is most relevant to agriculture: The H-2A program allows farmers to employ workers for seasonal work. The dairy industry would like a similar program for year-round work.

Ford bristles when asked if it’s difficult to negotiate with an administration that has been hostile to LGBTQ issues. She has a go-to line about working with people who have different beliefs: “I don’t even agree with some of the things that are said around my own dinner table.”

There is certainly some agreement to build upon, too. The uncomfortable triangle of business, lawmakers, and labor has unexpected corners of alignment: Labor and lawmakers both want agriculture to offer “good” jobs—whether for foreign-born workers or Americans. Business wants a strong economy, as does Trump. Ford is committed to forging a practical path forward, even if it’s a messy one.

“Hope is not a strategy,” she says. “That’s not what we’re doing here.”

This article appears in the October/November 2025 issue of Fortune with the headline “Fear on the farm.”