A medium-sized farm owner is usually excited to look across their acres of land, blooming with greens or grains. Unfortunately, they aren’t seeing their crops. Fields have been increasingly overrun with weeds. They don’t have the workers to maintain or harvest the few crops that have survived and they certainly can’t do it alone. The farm workers who have been working Unites States’ farms for years have either been stopped along the U.S.-Mexico border or detained in ICE raids.

This is the story of many farmers across the country, from New York dairy farmers to California pecans growers. U.S. agriculture depends on immigrant and migrant labor. The nationwide tensions around immigration policy in the U.S are high and it is hitting the agricultural sector hard, along with change and trade wars. Farming contributions to national GDP are at an all time low.

Just how much is the farm labor force changing?

The U.S. Department of Labor published a report in 2018 on The National Agricultural Workers Survey. The data, which is from the 2015-2016 fiscal year, sets the scene for the call for help we’re hearing from farmers.

Approximately 2.4 million laborers are working on U.S. farms and ranches, growing crops and tending animals. 76% of those laborers are immigrants or migrants—most coming from Mexico. Of the total labor force, 29% are U.S. citizens, having either been born in the U.S. or granted citizenship, 21% are lawful permanent residents and 1% have other work authorization.

That leaves 49% of workers—just over 1.1 million people—unauthorized or undocumented. This is likely an underestimate. It doesn’t include those who choose not to answer this question out of discomfort or fear. The nonprofit organization Farmworker Justice estimates that there could be as many as 1.7 million undocumented farmworkers.

From the beginning of his campaign, Trump has made his stance on immigration very clear. In 2019, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested approximately 143,000 undocumented immigrants and removed more than 267,000 –a significant increase in removals from the prior year. Along the U.S.-Mexico border, there were 855,093 apprehensions by Border Patrol in 2019, twice that of 2018.

Supporters of Trump’s policies argue that relying on immigrant labor does long-term harm to U.S. farmers. It makes them depend on an unpredictable and unsustainable labor supply. Strict immigration enforcement would force farmers to consolidate and mechanize, they argue, strengthening farmers’ operations and position the global agricultural market. Executive director for the Center for Immigration Studies, Mark Krikorian, favors immigration restriction. “The more productive policy response would be subsidized loans to invest in machinery for small-scale farmers,” he explains “rather than revising how we import foreign workers and perpetuating the labor-intensive old-fashioned way of doing business.”

While farm owners do have the option to purchase proper working-visas for the labor force, they are expensive and entail much red tape. More often than not, they are not a viable option.

There is some light at this end of this tunnel. The U.S. House passed a bill this past December that would bring farmworkers out of the shadow economy by legalizing approximately 325,000 unauthorized laborers and providing them with a path to a green card or citizenship. Unfortunately, it is unlikely to passed by the majority of Congress or approved by Trump, who has made his stance on foreign-labor perfectly clear.

It is clear that the farming industry is in the midst of a crisis. It is a crisis that affects us all since we all need to eat. If the industry were to lose all of the undocumented workers, agricultural production would fall anywhere from $30 to $60 billion and food prices would rise 5% to 6%.

Food for thought.