I appreciate the excellent Searchlight article by Makenzie Huber in the Oct. 14 Brookings Register (Noem’s neighbors hit with an immigration audit that decimates their workforce). The not-so-hidden secrets about the 21st century agricultural work force in South Dakota are laid bare in this piece of reporting.
I grew up on a small Moody County farm in the 1940s and 1950s, where we had chickens, hogs, sometimes sheep, and 10-12 dairy cows at any given time. When I started milking at 6 or 7 years of age, it was by hand. By the time I was 10 or 12, we had milking machines. That was a big improvement, but frankly, I do not have especially fond memories of that struggling, diversified farm.
Livestock farming gradually became more specialized in eastern South Dakota in the 1970s and 1980s.. That resulted in fewer and bigger dairy farms, often in the range of 50-200 head, but still largely operated by extended families. The 1990s and early-2000s have seen the conversion to “California-style” agriculture in hogs, dairy, and egg production. By that I mean an agricultural economic model based on “cheap labor” often brought in from elsewhere. Also, animal health and environmental quality have become more challenging in this kind of agriculture.
The Searchlight article describes then-Gov. Mike Rounds’s push in the early 2000s to grow the South Dakota dairy industry by recruiting dairy farm operators from the British Isles and Western Europe, where dairy farms were being constrained by environmental regulations.
I remember attending one of the meetings held in Brookings in the early 2000s to promote this model. I came away from that meeting thinking: "If we need to recruit a new generation of dairy farmers, why are we basing it on a ‘California model’ of industrial size farms in which the owners have a subsidized start-up and are set up to thrive, but the workers consist of cheap labor brought in from outside who will have essentially no bargaining power? Why not, instead, create a new ‘homestead act’, in which we help willing workers from wherever — including, especially, from south of the border — and with paths to citizenship?"
This would be like how my great-grandfather Sweeney (whose own father immigrated from Ireland) benefited from the original Homestead Act to start the farm I later grew up on in Moody County. Under this idea, we could again have many modest-sized dairy farms spread across the eastern South Dakota countryside, rather than extremely large farms (each with thousands of cows) that are more threatening to the environment and dependent on cheap hired labor?
But that is not the path that was followed. So here we are, with an agricultural economic model that depends on extreme inequality and questionable environmental viability.
