A consistent message from farm groups nationwide is that labor is a No. 1 issue in the agricultural economy. Jeremy Foltz is a professor of agricultural and applied economics at UW-Madison. Through the UW Dairy Innovation Hub, Foltz’s team has been surveying farms across the state to understand where workers are coming from and why farms struggle with hiring.
“A lot of farm businesses have trouble sourcing labor,” Foltz says. “This is true throughout the economy right now. But I think it’s a particularly acute problem in the dairy farm world, and that’s both dairy farms and the input suppliers and the processors.”
Foltz says the tight labor market is partially due to overall high employment in the U.S., which pushes wages up. While that’s good for workers, it makes it harder for farms to compete for employees, especially due to the physical demands of farm labor.
“Every farmer knows this, and everybody who’s ever worked on a farm knows this,” he says. “If there are jobs in the area that are not as hard, but pay more, it gets hard to source that labor.”
Immigration trends are also a factor. He explains that historically, dairy labor has relied on immigrants. In the past, it was Irish and German families. Recently, it’s been workers from Mexico and Central America. Foltz notes that political and logistical challenges have slowed that pipeline.
Foltz and his team found that foreign-born labor accounts for about 50 to 60 percent of the workforce on Wisconsin dairy farms. That’s a more grounded estimate than the often-cited claim that 90 percent of dairy labor is foreign-born.
With data in hand, the next step is analysis. Early results suggest that mid-sized farms — those milking between 150 and 300 cows — are facing the greatest challenges. Foltz says larger farms seem to have figured out labor sourcing. He says it’s a tougher hill to climb for mid-sized farms that can’t get by with just family members.
Survey responses will help shape a deeper understanding of labor dynamics in the industry. The research aims to identify the specific needs of different types of farms to guide policy or business decisions.
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