UpFront: Farmers discuss immigration and agriculture

Dairy farmers John Rueinger of Van Dyne and Sarah Lloyd of Wisconsin Dells discussed immigration on this weekend’s edition of “UpFront with Mike Gousha,” produced with help from WisPolitics.com .

According to a 2010 UW Madison study, immigrants make up 60 percent of the workforce on dairy farms with more than 300 cows and 20 percent on smaller farms.

Lloyd said in the past, farms relied on family labor.

“We haven’t been paid good prices for our milk, so we need to expand to economies of scale — which means more hired labor,” she said. “One of the issues is we can’t find us (American) born workers that are consistently coming to do that job.”

Rueinger agreed and said in the changing dairy business climate migrant workers are extremely important to the industry and immigration reform needs to accommodate that.

See more from the show:

http://www.wisn.com/politics/upfront