Ruth Conniff - Milked: How an American Crisis Brought Together Midwestern Dairy Farmers and Mexican Workers

How an American Crisis Brought Together Midwestern Dairy Farmers and Mexican Workers

RUTH CONNIFF

NEW YORK

LONDON

For Mitch

John Rosenow and Stan Linder, two septuagenarian dairy farmers from Western Wisconsin, are driving along a winding mountain highway in Veracruz. A snow-capped volcano, the Pico de Orizaba, Mexicos highest peak, looms on the horizon as Stans Ford Transit van navigates the narrow road, past lumbering donkeys, wooden shacks with piles of charcoal for sale outside, sheep grazing on the steep hillsides, and a man with a team of oxen plowing a field in the valley below. The two farmers are here to visit the families of their Mexican workers. As Stans van enters the village of Astacinga, John takes out his cell phone and places a FaceTime call to his employee Roberto Tecpile, who is back on the farm in Wisconsin.

John holds the phone up to the windshield and Roberto gives Stan directions to his house, telling him where to turn as he drives through the village, the sunshine bouncing off the brightly colored houses on either side of the road. Then John flips the phone around and Roberto shows the farmers the very different landscape back in Wisconsin, where deep snow has fallen overnight. Temperatures have dropped well below zero, he tells them, panning the black and white scene. Snow is piled high on the roof of the barn.

Just then the van reaches Robertos place in Mexico. Its a ranchstyle house with a bright pink, faux-brick facade surrounded by a manicured lawn that looks like a miniature golf course, with low rock walls and raised beds full of blooming roses. Roberto has been away, working in the United States, for twenty of his forty years. He has returned to Mexico a few times during that period, to get married, start a family, and then go back to the United States to continue earning money to build his house. He wants to Americanize, says John, as he gets out of the van to meet Robertos wife, parents, and three children, Kevin, Aaron, and Megan, whose made-in-the-U.S.A. names were bestowed on them from afar by their father.

Another vehicle pulls up behind the farmersa crew from PBS NewsHour is following them. PBS is filming a documentary about the farmers decades-long relationship with their Mexican workers and their annual trips to Mexico sponsored by a nonprofit group called Puentes/Bridges, which seeks to build understanding between Midwestern dairy farmers and the Mexican workers who do much of the labor on their farms.

Kevin, Robertos teenage son, cannot join the group. He is tending the sheep, his family explains. But everyone else comes out to hug John. He asks Veronica, Robertos wife, through an interpreter, if she has a message for her husband. The kids are doing well in school and behaving themselves, she says.

Everybody really loves Roberto, John tells her, as the PBS cameras roll. Hes kind and smart and hes the one of my employees I like the most.

But the kids really miss him, Veronica says. And Megan wants to meet her dad. Veronica was pregnant with Megan the last time Roberto left home, and he has only seen his five-year-old daughter on FaceTime.

John takes a tour of the house with Robertos father, Gerardo Tecpile, a small man with broken teeth, a plaid shirt, and a shredded baseball cap. Its all concrete, Gerardo says proudly. All the houses in the area used to be made of wood, he adds. Now, little by little, we are making them with laminate and cement. Everything has changed. Gerardo is supervising the construction, buying materials and hiring builders with the money Roberto wires home from the United States.

John asks if most of the concrete houses in the area are being built by people milking cows in the United States and sending back money. Yes, Robertos father says. A lot of young men go up there and save. Kevin might be going next to join his father on Johns farm in Wisconsin in a couple of years, he adds.

Robertos mother chimes in to say that she never wanted her sons to leave. I didnt want them to go, but their uncles took them, she says.

Kevin is eager to follow his dad to the United States, Veronica says, and has dropped out of high school. I scolded him, but he doesnt understand, she says. Im not going to let him go, because the border is really dangerous.

The PBS crew captures the conversation with Robertos wife and mother, who cry as they describe how hard it is to be separated for so many years when the men in the family leave to work in the United States. When the camera shuts off, the PBS reporter gathers the family together and, through his interpreter, encourages the children to stay in school and keep studying. Thats what their father wants, he tells them.

But Kevin, who is not there to hear the reporters advice, already has other plans. In less than two years he will be gone, joining his father to work on Johns farm.

In Wisconsin, where I grew up, dairy farmers have become increasingly dependent on undocumented Mexican labor as low milk prices and massive consolidation have driven a historic farm crisis across the Midwest.

Under pressure to grow their operations in order to compete with the growth of giant farms, family farmers in Wisconsin and Minnesota began hiring Mexican workers about twenty years ago, as they moved from family operations with very few employees to bigger dairies that needed paid labor to handle all the cows. There were not many American workers willing to do the dirty, exhausting jobs on the farm. But Mexican workers in the area were glad to move over from seasonal agricultural jobs to full-time, year-round work on the dairies. They have now become essential. By some estimates they perform about 80 percent of the labor on Wisconsins dairy farms, even though, unlike seasonal agricultural workers, they cannot get a visa because their jobs are year-round. Thus, most of the people producing our nations milk are working illegally.

Images of red barns, green fields, and contented-looking cows jostle for space on cartons of milk, tubs of yogurt, and packages of butter and cheese in the grocery store dairy aisle. Looking at the labels, the average consumer can imagine a farmer leading a cow from the pasture into the barn, then sitting on a three-legged stool and milking her by hand, gently squirting the milk into a pail. But that nostalgic picture has little to do with the reality of modern dairy farming in the United States.

The typical U.S. dairy cow never grazes in a field at all. Instead, she lives in a huge building with a concrete floor, where she munches on a carefully monitored diet of grain and supplements. Modern dairy farms are noisy places with lots of machinery. Dairy farmworkers labor around the clock, pushing groups of cows into the milking parlor in shifts that run continuously from morning to night. The average cow produces about nine gallons of milk per day during three rotations through the milking parlor. After her teats are painted with a disinfectant, she is hooked up to a milking machine that pulls milk out of her udder and sends it flowing through pipes into a refrigerated holding tank where it is cooled. Every day, a refrigerated milk truck arrives to siphon hundreds of gallons of milk from the farms holding tank and carry it to a processing plant, where it is pumped into insulated silos and mixed with milk from other farms to be pasteurized, homogenized, and bottled for sale.