Farmers who spoke to CBS News are increasingly fearful of how President Donald Trump's plans for large-scale deportations could affect their livelihoods, correspondent Nancy Chen reported on Monday.
This comes amid other reporting about similar fears from the agricultural industry, which relies extensively on immigrant labor to operate, and has seen the gradual disappearance of family farms in recent decades.
"Talk to any farmer and they will tell you it is difficult work, but it is getting harder and harder to stay in business these days," Chen reported from Chester, New Jersey. "There was a 7 percent drop in the number of American farms from 2017 to 2022, that is 142,000 fewer farms in just five years, according to the USDA."
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Part of the issue squeezing small farms is climate change, increased cost of inputs like fertilizer and feed, as well as the growing bird flu scare that is driving up the price of eggs. But, noted Chen, labor supply is one of the biggest pressures.
"So many farmers we spoke with say that they're watching very closely to how President Trump addresses this, given that he has vowed to launch the biggest deportation effort in American history," said Chen, adding that recent statistics indicate as many as 42 percent of farmworkers may not have authorization to work in the United States. "There is a lot of nervousness among farmworkers right now" — even among those who only hire legal workers, as a shrinking labor pool puts them in tougher competition for the manpower they need.
One farmer Chen spoke to, whose own farm only uses fully vetted and authorized labor, was very clear: "There's no question in the United States we have a shrinking workforce ... anything that happens from a policy standpoint that reduces people in our workforce is going to make it very difficult for industry, certainly for agriculture."
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