Foreign labor

The importance of immigrant labor in the dairy business. I don’t know why one of our listeners got in touch with me regarding the immigration issue, but I got an email telling me that if I wanted to discuss the importance of migrant workers to agriculture that he would hook me up with somebody who had expertise on the subject. I responded that I was interested and I got another email suggesting that I talk to Terry Jones of Emmett who has been in the dairy business most of his life. He’s a pretty bright guy who graduated from Cal Poly Tech and was quite explicit about his feelings. “I think you need to back up and take a look at what we have in the way of opportunities. The skill set that we in agriculture need today, no longer exists in America. When you have the H2A program and illegal immigrants as people call them, they think that they are an unskilled labor force when in reality they are a very highly skilled labor force and what we need. Just to give you an example, my neighbor has about 2000 pairs of beef cows and we were talking one day and I said I am having a terrible time getting people to take care of cattle and my barn. He said Terry if you think that’s rough, try to find somebody that knows how to sit on a horse all day and make that work. So what we need is a skill set that was common in America 50 years ago but is not today. So when you look at these individuals from foreign countries that still have that as their base work ethic, working with their hands, working in an agrarian environment, working with animals, that is the skill set we are looking for.