A Year on a Dairy Farm · August: Haying & the People Who Do It

August: Haying & the People Who Do It, part 2

How did this come to be? Through a series of choices made over the last three decades, almost all of which involved someone deciding not to do something.

The agricultural guest-worker visa in the United States is called the H-2A visa. It allows foreign workers to come legally to the U.S. to perform farm work, with employer sponsorship, for a defined period of time. In 2024, about three hundred and fifty thousand H-2A visas were issued. Workers picked apples in Washington and strawberries in California and tobacco in North Carolina and lettuce in Arizona, all legally, all under the protection of a federal program with rules about housing and wages and transportation.

None of those workers can be on a dairy farm. The H-2A visa is, by law, for seasonal work only. Dairy is not seasonal. Cows are milked every day of the year. A worker on a dairy farm cannot be hired under H-2A, because the work has no off-season, and the law has been written so that it does not apply.

The dairy industry has been lobbying Congress to fix this for thirty years. The fix is not technically difficult — a year-round agricultural visa, with appropriate protections, would solve it. The fix has not happened, because immigration is one of the most politically charged issues in American life, and any bill that addresses any part of it gets pulled into the larger fight, and the fight does not resolve. So the law has stayed roughly the way it was written in 1986. And dairy farms have hired the workers they could find, who are mostly undocumented, who do the work, who keep showing up.

Tom did not write this law. Marcelino did not choose this law. They both work inside it.

At twelve-thirty Marcelino comes back to the trailer for lunch.

The trailer is the same trailer Tom’s father put in for a hired man in 1991 — a single-wide on cinder blocks behind the barn, with a propane tank visible from the kitchen window of the main house and a small wooden porch that Marcelino built himself in his second year. The inside is small but it is his. There is a couch, a television (Univisión, mostly soccer), a kitchen with an electric kettle and a four-burner stove, a bathroom, a bedroom in the back. The walls have a few things on them. A small wooden cross over the bed. A photograph of Marisol at three, in a school uniform, smiling. A printed-out picture of the Guatemalan national soccer team. A calendar from the Spanish-language Mass at Saint Stephen’s in Geneva.

For lunch he heats up beans and rice from the night before in a cast-iron pan, makes two tortillas on the burner, and sits at the small kitchen table to eat. He has done this almost every day of the last five years. He likes it. The food is the food his mother made and his wife makes and that he has made himself for so long that he has stopped thinking about it.

While he is eating, he calls home. The time difference between upstate New York and Guatemala is two hours; in San Pedro Necta it is ten-thirty in the morning, and Lucía is at the market. Marisol is at school. His mother is the one who answers.

Mijo. ¿Cómo estás?

Bien, mamá. Hace calor.

¿Cuánto?

Como noventa.

His mother makes a sound that means hot. They talk for ten minutes about nothing — the weather, the price of corn, the leak in the kitchen ceiling that Marcelino is paying to have fixed for the third year in a row, what his cousin in Quetzaltenango is doing now. He does not ask if she is taking her insulin. She always says yes. He worries about it anyway.

Avísale a Marisol que su papá la quiere.

Le avisaré.

He hangs up. He finishes the rice. He washes the pan. He goes back to the field.

Marcelino is paid sixteen dollars an hour. He works approximately seventy hours a week, sometimes more in haying season, sometimes less in winter. His annual earnings, before any deductions, are about fifty-eight thousand dollars. He is also provided with the trailer, the propane for heating it, water, and electricity, which together represent about another eight thousand dollars in annual value.

Tom pays him as a 1099 contractor, which is legally questionable for someone who is in fact an employee, and which is the way most undocumented dairy workers are paid because it does not require a Social Security number that matches the employer’s records. Marcelino does not file a U.S. tax return. Tom does not withhold taxes. The arrangement is a fiction that both sides understand.

By the standards of American dairy labor, Marcelino is paid well. The median wage for a dairy worker in the United States in 2024 was about fourteen dollars an hour, with no housing. The bottom quartile is below twelve dollars. The hours are generally similar to what Marcelino works, which is to say long. Tom, for what it is worth, is one of the better employers in the region. He pays more than the median, provides housing he keeps in repair, pays Marcelino for the days he is sick, and has, twice in the last five years, offered him an unpaid two-week visit home. Marcelino did not take it either time. He is afraid that if he leaves, he cannot come back.

What does this kind of life cost a person?

The body shows it first. Marcelino’s hands, at twenty-nine, look forty. His lower back hurts most mornings; his knees ache in the cold. He has not been to a dentist in five years. He has not been to a doctor in five years for anything other than a fever in 2022 that Sarah drove him to a clinic in Geneva for and paid for in cash, because Marcelino does not have insurance and could not have used it if he had.

The mind shows it differently. Marcelino is not a sad man. He is a determined one. He came here to do something, and he is doing it. But there are things in him that he carries: the absence of his daughter; the quiet awareness that she is growing up without him in the room; the question of whether the second floor of the house in San Pedro Necta will be ready in two years or three, and whether he will be ready when it is. He goes to Mass when he can. He prays. He sends home what he sends home. He sleeps.

The thing he says about it, when asked, is Es lo que hay. It is what there is.

On Sunday afternoons, Marcelino is mostly off. He milks in the morning, with Tom, the same as every other day. After breakfast, he is free until evening milking. About once a month, on a Sunday, Sarah drives him into Geneva.

The drive is twenty-two minutes. Marcelino sits in the passenger seat. Sarah talks about whatever Sarah is talking about — Anna’s grades at Cornell, the price of beef at Wegmans, what is happening in the news. Marcelino listens. He nods. Occasionally he says something. Once, four years ago, he made a joke in English about Sarah’s driving that made her laugh until she nearly went off the road, which he found to be against the joke’s larger point and which he has never repeated.

At the Western Union counter, in the back of a check-cashing place on Exchange Street, Marcelino sends $400 to Lucía. The fee is $9.99. The money will be available to her in twelve hours, in the equivalent in Guatemalan quetzales. They have done this on the fifteenth of every month for sixty months. Lucía will pick it up at the bank in Huehuetenango on Monday.

Then Sarah drives him to Saint Stephen’s, where the noon Spanish Mass is just letting out, and Marcelino goes in to confess, and Sarah goes around the corner to the Wegmans to do the week’s grocery shopping. She picks him up in an hour. They drive back to the farm. He goes to his trailer. He calls home. Marisol is awake by then. She is seven. She tells him about a friend at school who has a new bicycle. He tells her he loves her. He says it many times in their conversations, because there is a thing in him that does not believe she has heard it enough.

In the evening he milks the cows.

A book about an American dairy farm in 2025 cannot be honest without saying these things. The milk in the carton is what the cow makes. The cow is what the grass and the weather and the genetics make. The work that turns the cow into the carton is, on a great many farms in America and on this farm too, what a man like Marcelino does, in a country that does not see him, for a family that has not seen him in five years, on a tractor whose air conditioning broke in 2017.

The farm Tom runs is a good farm. The wages Tom pays are better than most. The trailer Marcelino lives in is dry and warm and has good light. None of this changes what the system is: a system no one designed to be good. It is a system that grew up in the gap between two sets of laws — one that says we need this labor, one that says this labor cannot legally exist — and it has been allowed to remain in that gap for thirty years.

Marcelino Pérez is twenty-nine years old. His daughter Marisol is seven. The last time he held her, she was two. He sends her four hundred dollars on the fifteenth of every month, and he calls her on a phone he keeps on speaker so she can hear what is happening even when there is nothing to say.

Outside the trailer, where Marcelino is asleep, the August night is loud with crickets. Down the slope, in the main barn, the cows are settled in their stalls. In the upper field, the windrows of hay are drying in the dark. Tomorrow Tom will bale them. Tomorrow at four in the morning, Marcelino will get up and walk to the parlor.

It is the work he came here to do. It is not all of him.

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