Donald Trump's mass-deportation plan to hurt farming, says Co-op chief

By Kim Chipman, Joe Mathieu and Tarso Veloso 

President-Elect Donald Trump’s threat of mass deportations risks hurting the domestic agriculture sector already struggling with labor shortages. 

That’s according to Matt Carstens, chief executive officer of Iowa’s biggest farm cooperative, who said Trump’s plan should be approached carefully. Farming would be one of the biggest US sectors hit should the incoming administration move forward with kicking potentially millions of undocumented immigrants out of the country.

 

“We’ve got to make sure there’s a balance there, that agriculture’s voice is heard,” Landus CEO Carstens said during an interview on Bloomberg Television’s ‘Balance of Power.’

 

The impact could be especially acute in areas like California, which abounds in specialty crops like fruits, nuts and vegetables, though the grain and soybean-dominated Midwest also could be at risk. The farm sector remains a human-intensive business, he noted. 

 

“The ag industry does need labor and it’s got to come from all places,” Carstens said in an interview at Bloomberg’s Chicago office on Tuesday. 

 

The US Department of Agriculture has said nearly half of hired crop farmworkers lack legal immigration status. The share of laborers not lawfully authorized to work in the US rose from about 14% in the 1989-91 period to roughly 40 per cent in recent years. Meanwhile, although there’s been a slight decline in the number of people moving out of rural US counties since the onset of the global Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, the prior decade saw an overall loss of population.