In late July, I took a trip to Minneapolis. I was there to visit the headquarters of Land O’Lakes, the Fortune 500 company best known for its butter.
It’s remarkable that CEO Beth Ford was willing to host me at her HQ, given what I wanted to discuss. We were there to dive into the impact of President Donald Trump’s immigration enforcement drive on American business, and especially American agriculture. As CEO of Land O’Lakes, Ford is one of the country’s foremost advocates for American farmers. In January, she became chair of the Business Roundtable’s immigration committee—making her responsible for representing not just her own industry, but every industry, on this issue.
Ford is willing to go where other CEOs won’t. That’s for a few reasons. In agriculture, labor is absolutely critical. In dairy, it’s even more so—if a dairy farm is raided by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), as some have been, it can turn into a crisis within eight hours. That’s when cows need to be milked next; if no one’s there, a cow could start to leak milk, to develop an infection. That could even lead a farmer to decide to cull the herd, and send cows to a meat processing plant—which also might be short of workers these days.
Crucially, Ford views immigration as one piece of the puzzle within an overlapping set of crises facing American farmers today: 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.
She’s willing to use the interest in immigration to draw attention to all the problems facing farmers right now. ICE’s raids of farmworkers, 86% of whom are foreign-born and half of whom are undocumented, threaten to make those crises even worse.
“I want to make sure everyone’s paying attention,” she told me.
This story also features the perspective of a New England dairy farmer with 48 employees, who has been given power of attorney for seven children on her farm whose parents fear for what would happen if they were separated. It features the perspective of an undocumented dairy worker on the Oregon-Idaho border who has been working in the industry for 25 years. “From the moment you wake up, you’re kind of looking both ways,” he told me. “You’re always nervous and thinking in the back of your head, ‘Don’t get me, don’t get me.'”
Those are the people Ford is trying to find a solution for—as she walks a tightrope in Washington.
“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.”
I hope you’ll read the full story here.
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
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