South Dakota Searchlight reports that Walt Bones employed illegal migrant labor at his Turner County Dairy while he was South Dakota’s Secretary of Agriculture:
The Department of Homeland Security wanted to do a routine work authorization audit of the Turner County Dairy more than a decade ago.
Walt Bones, who co-owns the dairy and was the state secretary of agriculture at the time, complied with the obligation, sending the official documents employers must have on hand for employees: driver’s licenses, Social Security cards, or migrant-worker visas.
About 10 employees had falsified documents, the audit found, and were working illegally. Some of them had been working for years with Bones, who said he did not know their actual legal status; he’d invested in them and trained them.
He had to let them go [Makenzie Huber, “Lack of Action on Immigration is ‘Holding SD Back’, Dairy Farmers Say,” South Dakota Searchlight, 2023.06.09].
And whose fault is that lawbreaking? The system’s, says Bones!
At the same time, Bones couldn’t find new employees to hire as dairy workers – a near constant problem in the agriculture industry – so he contracted with another firm to temporarily fill in the gaps.
“You’ll never guess who they hired. The same people we just let go,” Bones said. “That is case in point how screwed up our system is” [Huber, 2023.06.09].
The point is not that Eminent Leader in Agriculture, Family, and Community Walt Bones broke the law and blames others—in South Dakota, such Trumpist lawbreakers get state checks and awards. The point is that Bones and the rest of South Dakota’s big dairy operators couldn’t make milk or money without foreign-born workers:
The majority of farmhands in South Dakota’s booming dairy industry are foreign-born. The 24/7 operations are jobs most Americans don’t want – due to the long hours, the rural setting and the pay, Bones said, so immigrants and foreign guest workers meet the need.
About 70% of farmworkers in the United States were born in Mexico or Central America, according to the Department of Labor – though that doesn’t include workers in the livestock industry. An estimated 44% of farmworkers in the U.S. lack legal status, according to the survey of 2,172 crop farmworkers.
The country’s agricultural economy would break without foreign-born people working as farmhands, and the country’s homegrown food supply would disappear, said South Dakota Farm Bureau Federation President Scott VanderWal [Huber, 2023.06.09].
Hmmm… if the Governor can suspend federal safety rules due to a perceived fuel shortage, maybe she could issue an executive order suspending enforcement of immigration rules to address South Dakota’s actual worker shortage. Maybe Bones and the rest of the dairy industry need South Dakota to become a sanctuary state.
Why do the majority of South Dakotans hate people who speak Spanish?
One has to laugh out loud at the rank hypocrisy of the folks in ag and tourism who consistently vote against their interests. They lock-step vote republican and rail against immigration, open borders, and “other people” coming here. Yet, they haven’t a clue or solution to solve the state and national labor shortage, or the 15-20 year worker age hole in the demographic pyramids.
P Aitch – it isn’t people who speak Spanish – it’s people who “look like” they might speak Spanish. I’m sure they’d have no problem with someone like a friend of mine from Nebraska – an immigrant FROM SPAIN who has a thriving irrigation system business and teaches Spanish at his local high school, nor with his blonde haired, blue-eyed SPANISH immigrant wife. It’s the mestizos (descendants of the predominantly Arabic Moorish Conquistadors and the Native population) they have a problem with.
Exactly right, Richard. I think the hate of Central Americans is from underachieving people who chose bar stools instead of night schools who subconsciously NEED to have a class of people “below” themselves in order to bolster their deflated self esteem. #pathetic
I can see it now, while vets check dairy cows for preggers a state official checks all migrant womern workers for preggers, using the same equipment.
Well, Walt Bones Jr. is one of many operators guilty of Immigration violations. About ten years ago, I worked with a church group who were concerned about a family that attended their parish and worked on a farm operated by a landlord who housed them in a shack and mistreated the adults and children. They were concerned that as the family were “illegal” that they would be deported if they took their concerns to law enforcement. I consulted with an immigration specialist who told me deportation was doubtful as the INS held illegal farm workers and restaurant workers at “the bottom of the list” of illegal workers they were concerned about. She said INS generally ignored these groups of workers.
P. Aitch, it also speaks volumes that the “class of people below themselves” is an exploited class populated by those who are willing to do jobs that the “bar stool” crowd refuses to take. Hearing the full story from so many farm employers and their expectations of their workforce becomes insanity that anyone would live up to those expectations. Beyond salary, housing, food, paperwork, and other expenses to create the environment to keep immigrant workers I ask why not invest all that into salary for local workers.
In the meanwhile, “if you build it, they will eat”.
https://www.reuters.com/article/jbs-labmeat-idUSKBN2XS1ON?utm_source=reddit.com
“Brazilian meatpacker JBS said on Tuesday that its subsidiary BioTech Foods started construction in Spain on its first commercial-scale plant to produce lab-grown meat, which is set to be completed by mid-2024.
The factory, which JBS says will be the world’s largest lab-grown meat plant, should produce more than 1,000 metric tons of cultivated beef per year, JBS said. It said it could expand capacity to 4,000 metric tons per year in the medium term.
“The new BioTech plant puts JBS in a unique position to lead the segment and ride this wave of innovation,” said JBS USA’s head of value-added business, Eduardo Noronha.”
““With the challenges imposed on global supply chains, cultivated protein offers the potential to stabilize food security and global protein production,” BioTech Foods co-founder and CEO Iñigo Charola said in a statement.
JBS said BioTech plans to gradually increase its production capacity to meet growing consumer demand, and sees Australia, Brazil, the European Union, Japan, Singapore and the United States as key markets.”
I see dead cows walking, industries collapsing. Change is hard. Ignoring it is harder.
They are coming for the hogs, too. Soon enough one will be able to breathe in northwest Iowa.
In the meantime, go ahead and build that second hog slaughterhouse in Sioux Falls . . . bahhahahaha.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/johncumbers/2023/06/09/the-startup-bringing-home-the-400b-baconminus-the-pig/?sh=1a5b3fd6419c
White folks fear Indians because of their past. While western civilization was dying from self imposed plague, Indians were building empires in America. They were conquered by Spain hence the Spanish language. Spanish is not the native tongue of Indians, but it is what it is. Niether is Catholism, yet both were imposed and both instill fear in the WASP.
“The Maya civilization, known for its advanced mathematical calendars, spanned southeast Mexico and parts of Central America. Widespread political collapse led to its decline centuries before the arrival of Spanish conquistadors, whose military campaigns saw the last stronghold fall in the late 17th century.” https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/ancient-maya-city-discovered-mexican-jungle-2023-06-21/
We could follow the trail of the Mayans very easily in today’s political climate. Look around and you read about ol’ Bonsey here. Dumb as a he wants to be so he can make money off the backs of those who have little or no choice but to do the back breaking work that no white man would take. We allow Bones and his irk to do this because Bones and crew will not support any kind of change in our immigration system. Too easy to exploit others.
And the chickens have come home to roost. Can turkey be far behind?
The death knoll of the US hoofed and feathered meat industry, their CAFOs, feed raisers and suppliers is at hand.
Plant-based meats are gaining acceptance and success. My supermarkets are unable to keep it in stock. Now the US Government approved precision fermentation for chicken.
https://apnews.com/article/cultivated-meat-lab-grown-cell-based-a88ab8e0241712b501aa191cdbf6b39a
“For the first time, U.S. regulators on Wednesday approved the sale of chicken made from animal cells, allowing two California companies to offer “lab-grown” meat to the nation’s restaurant tables and eventually, supermarket shelves.
The Agriculture Department gave the green light to Upside Foods and Good Meat, firms that had been racing to be the first in the U.S. to sell meat that doesn’t come from slaughtered animals — what’s now being referred to as “cell-cultivated” or “cultured” meat as it emerges from the laboratory and arrives on dinner plates.
The move launches a new era of meat production aimed at eliminating harm to animals and drastically reducing the environmental impacts of grazing, growing feed for animals and animal waste.
“Instead of all of that land and all of that water that’s used to feed all of these animals that are slaughtered, we can do it in a different way,” said Josh Tetrick, co-founder and chief executive of Eat Just, which operates Good Meat.”
I’ve been following Upside and Good Meat for a couple years. Great news for American consumers. 🇺🇸
PS – Don’t expect sympathy for SD agriculture. Your Governor and legislators have exuded nothing but disrespect and disconcerting contempt for everyone except themselves for 50 + years.
It’s likely that raising bison is the only future left for ranches over the next decade.
It’s likely that raising food, instead of feed or fuel, is the only future for farms over the next decade.
SD Public Broadcasting picked up the story. https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/06/21/1183484892/no-kill-meat-grown-from-animal-cells-is-now-approved-for-sale-in-the-u-s