The Voice of Dairy Farmers in Our Nation's Capital

Tell Congress to Support a Legal, Reliable Workforce for Dairy Farmers

Dairy farming is a seven-day-a-week, 365-days-a-year business. While dairies across the country seek to hire help from their own communities, offering highly competitive wages, dairy farmers consistently are met with a lack of local applicants. That means most of the milk production in the United States out of necessity must rely on foreign-born workers to ensure that herds are cared for and milked. Without these foreign-born workers who provide the skilled labor to adequately tend to the herds, animal well-being would be at risk, and dairy farms would go out of business within days of any workforce disruption.

House Agriculture Committee Chairman GT Thompson has introduced the Securing Agriculture’s Workforce Act (H.R. 9535). Its central change for dairy is straightforward: SAWA would allow H-2A visas for work that is temporary, meaning tied to a job contract of up to 350 days, without also requiring that the underlying work be seasonal. Because dairy has been locked out of H-2A for nearly 40 years, SAWA includes a targeted mechanism to allow the current dairy workforce to transition to H-2A, providing certainty for both dairy farmers and dairy farmworkers.