In late July, I took a trip to Minneapolis. I was there to visit the headquarters of Land O’Lakes, the Fortune 500 company best known for its butter.
It’s remarkable that CEO Beth Ford was willing to host me at her HQ, given what I wanted to discuss. We were there to dive into the impact of President Donald Trump’s immigration enforcement drive on American business, and especially American agriculture. As CEO of Land O’Lakes, Ford is one of the country’s foremost advocates for American farmers. In January, she became chair of the Business Roundtable’s immigration committee—making her responsible for representing not just her own industry, but every industry, on this issue.
Ford is willing to go where other CEOs won’t. That’s for a few reasons. In agriculture, labor is absolutely critical. In dairy, it’s even more so—if a dairy farm is raided by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), as some have been, it can turn into a crisis within eight hours. That’s when cows need to be milked next; if no one’s there, a cow could start to leak milk, to develop an infection. That could even lead a farmer to decide to cull the herd, and send cows to a meat processing plant—which also might be short of workers these days.
