The image depicts a Wisconsin dairy farm in the winter, where outdoor work is still required amidst snow, ice, and other cold conditions. Image by Corey Coyle.

“I came to the story of the dairy industry because it’s pretty much in your face here in Wisconsin,” UW-Madison PhD candidate, Dustin Cohan, told me over a Zoom call. 

Dustin Cohan is a fifth-year history PhD candidate at UW-Madison. He completed a master’s project on Chicanx advocacy and fights for liberation in Wisconsin during the 1970s. He is trained in immigration and labor history, an interdisciplinary field of history that studies work and workers as a means of better understanding the past. Immigration and labor history are deeply intertwined because immigrants have and continue to fill many of the most important, unprotected, and underappreciated jobs. Dustin’s work in these fields led him to his current project, studying the interactions between primarily Chicanx workers and, what he describes as, “a strangely complicated industry” — the Wisconsin dairy industry.

Now in his fifth year, Dustin is writing a dissertation centered around oral histories. He conducted interviews with Mexican dairy workers currently working in Wisconsin. Although there has been a sharp uptick in the number of  immigrant workers in Wisconsin, there are few studies of their experiences, from the government or academia. I was able to talk to Dustin about his research uncovering the experiences of undocumented immigrant workers and connecting the rise of immigrant labor to a consolidation of agricultural power in Wisconsin dairy.

Since the mid 1990’s, agricultural power in Wisconsin’s dairy industry has shifted from lots of small farms to fewer and larger industrial farms.With this consolidation, and with it the desire to produce the most for the cheapest, dairy farmers turned to immigrant workers, particularly undocumented workers, in the late 20th century. From the mid 1990’s through the early 2000’s, Dustin estimates that about 95% of immigrant workers in Wisconsin were Mexican. More recently workers have come from central America and northern South America, too. 

Dustin explains that this shift in the labor force happened in many other industries before Wisconsin dairy. “It’s just like any other story of Mexican immigrant workers coming to an industry that needs them, and they will be used as long as they’re needed.” Wisconsin farmers knew that their counterparts in California, as well as paper, factory, and furniture industries in Wisconsin, hired Mexican-American workers. When fewer Wisconsinites were willing to do the jobs dairy farmers offered, those farmers followed the lead of other industries. 

But unlike these other industries, the shift in hiring practices in Wisconsin dairy farming coincided with a change in federal immigration law. The 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act aimed to reserve jobs for citizens or immigrants with legal work visas. It imposed a strict process for immigrants to receive legal permanent status and imposed more regulations on employers to confirm that their workers were legally permitted to be in the country.

Dustin explained that because there were more hoops to jump through to gain legal status, the effect of the law was that more and more people coming to the country were classified as undocumented. This shift in the classifications of immigrants coincided with the rise of industrial agriculture in Wisconsin dairy. As Wisconsin dairy farms grew and industrialized, farmers needed more workers willing to work for less. Therefore, farmers became more likely to hire workers with the fewest legal protections: undocumented workers. 

The Day to Day of an Undocumented Dairy Worker

Workers do all the labor necessary to keep the farm running. Most live and work on or very near the farm. They often work long hours milking and cleaning the cows, maintaining the barns, and preparing and cleaning farm equipment. The work is fast paced, and workers feel pressure to work every day, even though the work is exhausting and dangerous. Dustin notes the irony, “there’s not a lot of documentation (no pun intended) for this thing, and there’s not a government oversight to check into these things.”

Being undocumented means workers have access to fewer legal protections and resources. Farm work is fast paced, so it is easy to get hurt. Wisconsin is a difficult place to work a job that requires year-round outdoor labor. In the freezing winter, workers are prone to air-borne illnesses, and in the humid summer, workers are at risk of heat exhaustion. Even if a farm offers a health plan–which many do not–undocumented workers often fear visiting a doctor, or going out elsewhere in public. 

The life of an undocumented workers is centered around dairy farms. Dustin explains that workers wake up and work for ten to twelve hours on the farm. Then they have to clean themselves and get some rest to wake up and do the same thing the next day. Dustin tells me that a lot of workers save up to buy a car in their first few months of working to be more mobile in such a rural environment, but the nature and timing of their work makes it hard to take advantage of that mobility. 

A Gap in Research

Information on immigrant labor on Wisconsin dairy farms is sparse. Research conducted by sociologists from UW-Madison is the best information for anyone studying immigrant labor in Wisconsin dairy. But, Dustin explains, their interviews included only a few hundred workers of the 25,000 or more migrant workers working in dairy in the state. Dustin knows how hard it is to conduct such interviews. People don’t always want to talk to him, ignoring requests for interviews. When he does visit farms, he sometimes finds people are often not happy to share their stories. This lack of information and research, however, makes his research all the more important. 

Dustin’s work stitches together the history of immigration law, shifts in labor, and economic consolidation in America’s dairyland. “Like a lot of other food industries in this country, it’s all about how cheap the product can be, and how cheap you can get food to American consumers.” His experience as a labor historian enables him to recognize Wisconsin dairy as just one industry in a much broader agricultural and economic system that is exploiting immigrant workers. He says that the desire to do things as cheap as possible “will continue to be the largest force affecting dairy farmers, and the people who take on the brunt of that economic decline are always gonna be the workers.”