A Year on a Dairy Farm

7. Chapter 07 August Haying And The People Who

Marcelino Pérez is twenty-nine years old. His full name, on his Guatemalan birth certificate, is Marcelino Mateo Pérez Hernández. He is, on this Tuesday afternoon in August, in the seat of a 1998 John Deere 6300 tractor in Tom Hartley’s upper field, raking second-cutting hay into windrows under a sky that has not produced any cloud cover all day.

The temperature is ninety-one degrees. The cab on the 6300 has air conditioning that worked until 2017 and has not worked since. The window is open. Marcelino is wearing jeans, a long-sleeved cotton work shirt to keep the sun off his arms, scuffed leather boots, and a baseball cap that says CAYUGA TRACTOR & EQUIPMENT on the front. Sweat is running into the small of his back and being absorbed by his belt. He has been raking hay for three hours, and he will be raking hay for another two, and then he will stop and eat something and then he will go and milk the cows.

The hay was cut yesterday by Tom on the discbine. The discbine is a machine that cuts the standing grass and lays it in long flat bands across the field, where it will dry in the sun for a day or two depending on the heat. Today, in this heat, one is enough. Tomorrow morning Tom will run the baler over the windrows and roll the hay into round bales the size of a small car, weighing about a thousand pounds each, and Marcelino will move them to the barn with the skid steer and stack them into the long row that will, eight months from now, in February, be the food the cows are eating off the bunk.

It is the most directly traceable arc on the farm: this grass becomes that meal becomes the milk that the truck takes to Cortland. The arc from this field to a glass of milk in a child’s hand in the suburbs of Boston runs through, as much as anything else, the seat of this 1998 John Deere with its broken air conditioning, and the man who is in it.

Marcelino grew up in a town in the highlands of Guatemala called San Pedro Necta, in the department of Huehuetenango. The town sits at about five thousand feet and is built on the side of a steep slope above a valley, the kind of slope on which growing anything is hard and on which much is grown anyway: corn, beans, coffee, vegetables for the local market. His first language is Mam, an Indigenous Maya language spoken by about half a million people in the western highlands of Guatemala. He learned Spanish in school. He learned what English he has from work, in five years of conversations in barns.

He left Guatemala in 2020. He was twenty-four. His daughter, Marisol, was two. He paid a coyote four thousand dollars, money he had borrowed from an uncle in Quetzaltenango, and he traveled overland through Mexico in a series of buses and trucks and one period on foot, and he crossed the Rio Grande at night near Roma, Texas, in a group of seven people with a guide. He was in U.S. immigration custody for three days and was released with a court date in Houston, which he did not appear for, because he had a cousin in upstate New York who had a connection on a dairy farm in Wayne County, and that is where he went. He has not been back to Guatemala since.

He has been on Tom’s farm for five years. Before that he was on the farm in Wayne County for two. He has worked on a dairy farm every day of his life in the United States.

His wife, Lucía, lives in the same house Marcelino grew up in, with his mother and with Marisol, who is now seven years old. He sends home, on average, a thousand dollars a month. The money pays for the house, for Marisol’s school, for the medicine when his mother needs it (she has diabetes), and for one ongoing project, which is the slow construction of a second floor on the house — concrete blocks, rebar, a tin roof — that Marcelino believes he will live in when he goes home, sometime in the next two or three years.

He has not held his daughter in five years.

About half of all the labor on American dairy farms is performed by foreign-born workers. The exact figure depends on how you count and what study you read; the most careful estimates put it between forty and fifty-five percent. The vast majority of those workers are from Mexico and Central America. The vast majority are men. A substantial proportion — most studies suggest seventy percent or more — are undocumented.

This is not a marginal feature of the American dairy industry. It is a structural one. If, tomorrow, every undocumented worker on every American dairy farm went home, the industry would not function within a week. Cows would not be milked. Calves would not be fed. Milk would stop arriving in trucks at processing plants, and yogurt cups and cheese sticks and gallon jugs would stop appearing on grocery shelves shortly after that.

Everyone in the dairy industry knows this. The farmers know it. The processors know it. The retailers know it. Congress knows it. The agency that enforces immigration law knows it. There is no version of the American milk supply, in the year 2025, that does not depend on this labor.

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