A Republican Farmer Asks ‘Well, Who’s Going to Milk the Cows?’ When those Immigrants form Trump's Shithole Nations are thrown out.

[Dante]

It's all political. It's divisive and it is meant to be. What is? The Immigration Issue. Many Administrations and Congresses had ample opportunity over the last 50 years to address the issue. When one side seeks "comprehensive" reform of immigration policies, the fights begin. It's as if it's a team sport where nobody wants the other side to win.


[ For two decades, Tim O’Harrow, 79, the family patriarch, has tried to persuade politicians he has voted for and donated to — most of them Republican — that they need to fix the nation’s broken immigration system.

But Washington has failed to make any meaningful changes, and Republican voters continue to be anti-immigration, particularly those in Wisconsin, a swing state where 95 percent of Republicans support mass deportation, according to a recent poll by Marquette University Law School.

That has left the O’Harrows in an uncomfortable place — stuck between what they see as an obvious truth, that immigrants are essential to America’s food supply, and a national political mood hurtling in the other direction.

And now, after generations of feeling at home in the Republican Party, the O’Harrows feel politically homeless.

“I don’t know that I’m a Republican anymore,” Tim said. “I don’t know what we are anymore.” ]

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/27/us/politics/wisconsin-farmer-republicans-immigration-trump.html

So far...

 

[Stryder50]

It was 5 a.m. and five degrees above zero on the O’Harrow dairy farm, and two workers, men from Honduras, moved down rows of outdoor hutches pouring steaming milk into buckets for mooing calves. A third followed in the darkness with a flashlight, looking for babies that did not drink, a sign of illness.

That worker, who came from Mexico as a teenager, knew that a calf that was sick in the morning could be dead by evening. He knew this because he has worked in the dairy industry in Wisconsin for his entire adult life, and on this family farm for about 20 years. Now in his 40s, he has mastered the intricacies of milking, birthing and inseminating, and logging it all onto a computer. This February morning, he was passing down his knowledge to the 19-year-old grandson of the family who employs him.

“We’re a little bit behind today, so you can hear everybody’s kind of angry at us,” said Sullivan O’Harrow, the grandson, who motioned toward the bellowing calves as he walked beside the worker training him.

Immigrant workers are the lifeblood of the O’Harrow farm, a four-generation family enterprise with 1,600 cows in northeastern Wisconsin. But many of them will not travel to Mexico to see dying parents, or drive to nearby towns to visit siblings, or let journalists use their names in newspapers, because they are afraid of being swept up in the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.

...

That they need to hide strikes the O’Harrow family as morally wrong, but also as potentially bad for the country: These workers oversee America’s milk. By one estimate, dairies that employ immigrant workers produce 79 percent of the nation’s milk supply and the price of milk would double without them.
Image

A worker feeding calves before sunrise at the farm.
Video
The O’Harrow farm is a four-generation family enterprise with 1,600 cows in northeastern Wisconsin.CreditCredit...
Image

Sullivan O’Harrow, the 19-year-old grandson of the family patriarch, Tim, in the farm’s office.
For two decades, Tim O’Harrow, 79, the family patriarch, has tried to persuade politicians he has voted for and donated to — most of them Republican — that they need to fix the nation’s broken immigration system.

And fixing it isn't as difficult as many want to make it seem.
At least for any new immigrants the process could be simplified and stream lined.

Those here illegally would be more difficult, but still fixable.
Start with visa/permit for visiting worker status.

My oldest son works in immigration processing applications for citizenship. One challenge for many is that the process takes several years and several thousands of dollar$. Nation should really consider how to find ways to reduce that.

 

[Dante]

‘Well, Who’s Going to Milk the Cows?’​

Tim O’Harrow is first and foremost a dairyman, but for years, he was also a Republican, and for years those identities coexisted peacefully.

He was born in 1946, the year before his parents bought the farm, which is about a 45-minute drive north of Green Bay.

At that time, few, if any, Wisconsin dairy farms employed immigrant workers. Farms were small and families were big. Tim’s parents employed one local man, but he and his eight siblings were mostly the ones who woke up before dawn to clean manure and help feed and milk about 50 cows, before heading off to school.

Tim’s father, Russell, also grew up on a farm, which helped establish the family’s Republican politics. As a young man in the 1930s, Russell watched as farmers, trying to raise the price of milk by withholding supply, dumped one of his family’s milk shipments into a river. Tim said that the experience had stuck with his father, and after Russell graduated from college and bought his own farm, he gravitated to the more institutionalist and conservative American Farm Bureau Federation and the Republican Party.
Image

Immigrant workers are the lifeblood of the O’Harrow farm.
Image

The farm’s workers tend the calves, keep the cows moving through the milking parlors, and feed them in the long barn.
Image

Workers in one of the farm’s milking parlors.
Tim continued that tradition. He was president of his county Farm Bureau branch in the late 1970s and was appointed to President Ronald Reagan’s National Dairy Board in the 1980s. In those years, the Republican Party was open to immigration. Reagan, during the 1980 presidential campaign, dismissed the idea of “putting up a fence” on the border. Later, he extended amnesty to millions of undocumented immigrants from South and Central America.


Meanwhile, family farms in Wisconsin were struggling.

Families had gotten smaller — Tim, one of nine children, had only two of his own — just as farms were under pressure to get bigger. Large-scale farming was underway in California, helped by Mexican labor, and sweeping changes in the industry were resulting in ever thinner margins.
As usual, ignoring facts and what it is you imagine you are responding to.

so what dante wow what a story....most of the modern dairy farms in America have machines that do the milking...

As usual, ignoring facts and what it is you imagine you are responding to.

 

[Harry Dresden]

You too?

You didn't read what you are responding to

Almost 100% of commercial dairy milking is done by machines, a practice standard on most farms since the early 20th century. Machines use vacuum pressure to extract milk in 5-7 minutes, and while human staff typically attach the equipment in parlors, voluntary robotic systems are growing rapidly, taking over the attachment process entirely.

U.S. Dairy +4
Key details regarding modern, machine-based dairy farming include:

• Automation Standard: Mechanical milking is used universally in commercial dairies for sanitation and speed.
• Types of Machines: Farms use either traditional milking parlors (herringbone or rotary) where staff attach machines, or automatic milking systems (AMS/robots) that handle attachment without human intervention.
• Efficiency & Frequency: Cows are usually milked 2–3 times per day, often using automatic cluster removal when the milking is complete.
• Robotic Growth: Robotic milking systems allow cows to be milked voluntarily, which can increase production by 3% to 11%.
  
  
  U.S. Dairy +5

 

[Dante]

And fixing it isn't as difficult as many want to make it seem.

Evidently it is, oh stable genius. Try using some of your bets words here next time

 

[Dante]

Almost 100% of commercial dairy milking is done by machines, a practice standard on most farms since the early 20th century. Machines use vacuum pressure to extract milk in 5-7 minutes, and while human staff typically attach the equipment in parlors, voluntary robotic systems are growing rapidly, taking over the attachment process entirely.
View attachment 1236799U.S. Dairy +4
Key details regarding modern, machine-based dairy farming include:

• Automation Standard: Mechanical milking is used universally in commercial dairies for sanitation and speed.
• Types of Machines: Farms use either traditional milking parlors (herringbone or rotary) where staff attach machines, or automatic milking systems (AMS/robots) that handle attachment without human intervention.
• Efficiency & Frequency: Cows are usually milked 2–3 times per day, often using automatic cluster removal when the milking is complete.
• Robotic Growth: Robotic milking systems allow cows to be milked voluntarily, which can increase production by 3% to 11%.
  View attachment 1236800U.S. Dairy +5

Ignoring facts yet again...

Tim added cows, but soon had difficulty finding enough workers to care for them. It was hard and repetitive work, with long shifts that started before dawn, including on weekends. No one wanted to do it for what he could afford to pay, which at the time was several dollars above minimum wage. He hired students, single men, working mothers, people from a prison probation program.

“They would call five minutes before milking time, and say, ‘I’m not going to make it,’” Tim said. “Well, who’s going to milk the cows? We’re trying to run a business. It just wasn’t working.”

In 1999, the farm’s head herdsman went to a meeting about the labor problem. One dairyman recommended Mexican workers.
I know Harry Dresden is NOT reading what he is responding to

 

[Harry Dresden]

Ignoring facts yet again...

Tim added cows, but soon had difficulty finding enough workers to care for them. It was hard and repetitive work, with long shifts that started before dawn, including on weekends. No one wanted to do it for what he could afford to pay, which at the time was several dollars above minimum wage. He hired students, single men, working mothers, people from a prison probation program.

“They would call five minutes before milking time, and say, ‘I’m not going to make it,’” Tim said. “Well, who’s going to milk the cows? We’re trying to run a business. It just wasn’t working.”

In 1999, the farm’s head herdsman went to a meeting about the labor problem. One dairyman recommended Mexican workers.
I know Harry Dresden is NOT reading what he is responding to

what country is this farm in dante...i dont see it in your presentation...

 

[Stryder50]

Evidently it is, oh stable genius. Try using some of your bets words here next time

The "some" complicating and making solutions tough to impossible are mostly your side of the political isle ~ Democrats, Leftists, Socialists, etc.

 

[Stryder50]

Almost 100% of commercial dairy milking is done by machines, a practice standard on most farms since the early 20th century. Machines use vacuum pressure to extract milk in 5-7 minutes, and while human staff typically attach the equipment in parlors, voluntary robotic systems are growing rapidly, taking over the attachment process entirely.
View attachment 1236799U.S. Dairy +4
Key details regarding modern, machine-based dairy farming include:

• Automation Standard: Mechanical milking is used universally in commercial dairies for sanitation and speed.
• Types of Machines: Farms use either traditional milking parlors (herringbone or rotary) where staff attach machines, or automatic milking systems (AMS/robots) that handle attachment without human intervention.
• Efficiency & Frequency: Cows are usually milked 2–3 times per day, often using automatic cluster removal when the milking is complete.
• Robotic Growth: Robotic milking systems allow cows to be milked voluntarily, which can increase production by 3% to 11%.
  View attachment 1236800U.S. Dairy +5

You may want to consider visiting an actual dairy farm or two to see how this really works.
Highly doubtful that it could ever be 100% machines only.'

Also you may want to spend time near cows. They have personalities and can be cantankerous if irked.

 

[Dante]

what country is this farm in dante...i dont see it in your presentation...

Wisconsin is mentioned a few times.

The "some" complicating and making solutions tough to impossible are mostly your side of the political isle ~ Democrats, Leftists, Socialists, etc.

Why do you even bother? You're just trolling.

 

[Stryder50]

Wisconsin is mentioned a few times.


Why do you even bother? You're just trolling.

No where near as well as your trolling.
I doubt I've ever seen you not trolling here.

 

[Dante]

You may want to consider visiting an actual dairy farm or two to see how this really works.
Highly doubtful that it could ever be 100% machines only.'

Also you may want to spend time near cows. They have personalities and can be cantankerous if irked.

What a blowhard you are...

"the O’Harrow farm, a four-generation family enterprise with 1,600 cows in northeastern Wisconsin"

I can see why Harry Dresden has an affinity for you

 

[Stryder50]

What a blowhard you are...

"the O’Harrow farm, a four-generation family enterprise with 1,600 cows in northeastern Wisconsin"

I can see why Harry Dresden has an affinity for you

I live in the middle of a dairy farm area.
I grew up in a dairy farm area.
I've helped milk cows.
One of my neighbor's a few hoses down the road had one of his cows crawl through the fence to my backyard several weeks ago, helped him get her out and back into his pasture.

You on the other seem too much the townie, likely wouldn't know where to reach if milking a cow.
This is more you;