Every year, farmers in California’s Central valley heavily rely on the labor of hundreds of thousands of immigrant agricultural workers to grow and harvest their crops.
But for many in a region that produces one-quarter of the country’s food, president-elect Donald Trump’s promise to deport millions of undocumented migrants – a move that could result in national agricultural output falling by up to $60bn – is not a threat to their livelihoods.
Some just don’t seem to believe him. “I don’t see that there’s going to be a push to go chase anyone who’s willing to work on a farm,” says Tom Barcellos, who milks 1,600 Holstein cows on his farm in Tulare county.
As Trump’s tariffs and deportations threats grow louder, many Americans are at a loss to understand why voters in farming-dependent counties across the US are so loyal to the president-elect, backing him by a margin of three to one in November’s presidential election.
But farmers such as Barcellos say they trust Trump.
During his first White House bid, Trump met Barcellos and other Central valley growers in person to hear out their concerns around water access for their farms. At the time, environmental regulations meant that farmers and growers in the region faced higher restrictions to accessing water in part due to efforts to protect fish and other wildlife.
“He understood our situation with water; he understood what the business climate was in agriculture and that there was so much regulation that was hampering our ability to do anything,” he says.
“He promised to make improvements.”
Three years into his administration, in 2020, Trump did exactly that.
As the Biden era comes to a close, farmers such as Barcellos say they are drowning in expenses and red tape resulting from strict environmental and emissions regulations introduced by Democratic leaders at the federal and state levels, at a time when American agriculture is in free fall.
A drought in the Corn belt, low crop prices, and China moving away from its once-longstanding dependency on US corn and soybeans has many American farmers on their knees. The number of US farms fell by 141,000 between 2017 and 2022, according to US Department of Agriculture census data.
Despite his threats and bluster, farmers see Trump as a bulwark against a progressive environmental movement that, some of them say, has created major problems for agriculture without providing solutions.
“The emissions issue has raised the cost of all of our equipment to ridiculous levels,” says Barcellos, a third-generation farmer.
He says the same model of hauling truck he bought five years ago is $100,000 more expensive to buy today. Some reports suggest that running electric big rigs costs as much as twice that of diesel equivalents. Last year the California Air Resources Board voted to ban sales of new diesel trucks by 2036.
“I can’t afford an electric truck. Period,” says Barcellos.
On the tariffs front, many farmers believe Trump will ultimately have their back. Although his previous tariffs war cost American agriculture around $27bn in 2018 and 2019, Trump then reportedly gave farmers record handouts worth $32bn in direct farming aid to counter the effects. Should Trump reignite his trade war next year, some observers believe similar efforts may again be in the offing.
But others believe that Trump’s anticipated efforts to impose tariffs on foreign goods may not have the same effect as previously.
With China no longer as dependent on US corn and soybeans – America’s top two export commodities – as it was during Trump’s first trade war, industry specialists say China is better prepared and instead worry that a new trade war could hit US farmers over the long term.
“While it’s possible to divert exports to other nations, there is not enough demand from the rest of the world to offset the major loss of soybean exports to China,” an October report by the National Corn Growers Association found.
Others wonder if sending checks to farmers to offset potential income losses is sustainable.
“Tariffs and comprehensive deportations will affect the economy and mean that it’s going to be worse for the grain markets, domestic food production and processing, plus the national debt than what has happened under the Democrats,” says Bill Wiley, a farmer in Shelby county, Ohio, who hires a small number of Nicaraguan workers to harvest gourds and pumpkins at his farm every fall through the H-2A agricultural visa program.
“All of that should be turning off farmers.”
While Harris carried her home state of California handily, in Barcellos’ largely agricultural Tulare county, just 200 miles from Oakland, her hometown, Trump won by more than 20%.
Not all farmers, Wiley included, voted for Trump, and given the president-elect’s apparent threats to agriculture and food production, he’s at a loss to explain why many farmers would.
Either way, what happens once Trump takes office next month is likely to affect millions of people.
“If we assume that half of our agricultural workforce is undocumented, we can safely say that the best-case scenario for mass deportations is that American food production and supply is cut in half,” says James O’Neill of the American Business Immigration Coalition. Around 45%, or 1 million, of US agricultural workers are undocumented.
“We need legislation that legalizes the hardworking farm workers we already rely on – those with no criminal records, who have shown their commitment to the US and to American farmers.”
Barcellos, who also serves as president of the Lower Tule River irrigation district, maintains that a host of Democratic policies and laws are hurting agriculture.
Rather than helping immigrant workers, he believes that California’s $15.50 minimum wage for farmer workers and $19.75 an hour for H-2A workers is instead hastening the industry’s move towards mechanization, “and the workers hate that”.
“California is forcing the hand of mechanization where they are trying to stop equipment from running because of the emissions they produce,” he says.
“We are run by the coastal cities. We don’t have a fighting chance.”
