How milk is getting caught in the middle of Trump's policy agenda

In Maine, Watson said she is worried about the cost of her feed increasing if Trump goesthrough with a threat to put a 25% tariff on all Canadian imports. Being relatively close to the Canadian border, most of her feed comes from Canada, and she said the tariffs could add $1,200 a month to her grain bill.

“It would be easier to bear if we were not in a situation where many of our organic dairy farmers have been financially underwater for many years due to market factors,” said Watson, who is also president of the Maine Dairy Association. “Many farmers, I think, will just try to put their heads down and bear it without accruing too much more debt, but so many of us are behind on our bills already.”

Higher costs are also a concern for Wormuth. He said he started a barn renovation sooner than planned after he was told the price for the new metal stalls would be going up, from $85,000 to $106,000, once Trump’s 25% tariff on steel and aluminum went into effect earlier this month.

“We can’t just go to the market and raise our prices because all of our costs are higher, so we are kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place,” he said.

At the same time, dairy farmers have been impacted by cuts and funding freezes at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The agency cut funding for a program that helps schools and food banks buy products from local farmers, like lunch milk from nearby dairy farms. Other farmers have been left waiting to get reimbursed for millions of dollars in grant funding previously awarded to them for conservation projects on their farms, like installing solar panels on barn rooftops.

Immigration fears

Dairy farms are heavily reliant on labor from immigrants, who work at dairies that produce 79% of America’s milk, according to the National Milk Producers Federation. Work on dairy farms can involve early hours, long days and weekend shifts year-round in harsh weather.

“It is very labor-intensive, hands-on work. It’s not glamorous. It’s hard work, it’s valuable work, but it is absolutely something that we as a society have moved away from valuing,” said Watson. “So we rely on immigrant labor. They come ready to work and they do tremendous work on our farms. The idea of losing that workforce, it could be devastating for the dairy industry.”

For dairy workers who aren’t born in the U.S., it can be difficult to get the proper work authorization because there isn’t a specific visa available for dairy workers, unlike other agricultural industries in which employers can bring workers to the U.S. on temporary visas during the harvest season.

Dairy workers don’t qualify for those temporary agriculture worker visas because they work year-round. Members of Congress and the dairy industry have tried and failed multiple times over the past two decades to create a visa program for dairy workers.

That’s left dairy farmers worried their workers could get swept up in the Trump administration’s stepped-up deportation efforts. The National Milk Producers Federation estimates that if the U.S. dairy industry lost its foreign-born workforce, it would nearly double retail milk prices and cost the total U.S. economy more than $32 billion.

One dairy farmer, who didn’t want to publicly share his name for fear of retaliation against his workforce, said they are hearing a lot of fear among their workers, who are trying to avoid going out into public and preparing their families for the possibility that they get deported.

“They see the ads on TV saying if you’re not here legally, you should leave, and those types of things just creates a lot of fear and anxiety,” the farmer said. “Our guys are like family. They’ve been here with us a long time, they’re important to us, but you can tell that they’re scared and just unsure what’s going to happen.”

Bird flu spread

The uncertainty around tariffs and immigration comes as the industry is also closely watching the spread of avian flu in dairy cattle over the past year.

So far, the fatality rate of infected cows has been low and most are able to recover in a few weeks. But the infections do lead to a temporary decrease in milk production that can reduce farmers’ income.

“The last thing we need right now, on top of all the volatility from the tariffs and the immigration threat and those things, would be to lose a drop in production for bird flu,” said Wormuth, who worries that bird flu could start to spread among New York dairy cattle when birds start migrating back north in the spring.

The Trump administration has yet to make any significant changes to the federal response to avian flu in dairy cattle. Under the Biden administration, the USDA provided funding to dairy farms to help reduce the spread of the virus, cover veterinary costs and compensate farmers who lost milk because of sick cows.

The USDA started a voluntary milk-testing program in December, during the final days of the Biden administration, but some states have been slow to put the system in place. Public and animal health experts have said widespread testing is critical to containing virus cases that might otherwise go undetected, giving the variants more opportunities to spread to animals and humans.

The dairy industry is encouraging the Trump administration to continue the development of a vaccine against avian flu for dairy cattle, said Castaneda. But he is concerned some countries may not accept milk from vaccinated cows, even though pasteurization has been shown to kill the virus — creating one more element of uncertainty about what’s ahead for dairy farmers.

“I don’t think that a vaccine should be mandatory, but having a vaccine available, that’s something that we are certainly looking to have as another tool to deal with this issue,” said Castaneda. “This is our first time we have encountered this. We don’t know if it’s going to be a recurring issue or a one-time thing.”