Farmers Say Crops Are Rotting In Their Fields After ICE Raids

Donald Trump’s immigration raids are starting to take their toll on farms across the country, with farmers reporting that crops are rotting in the fields because there are no workers left to pick them. This exact same scenario happened years ago in the state of Georgia when they cracked down on migrant workers, and now Trump has brought that same level of failure to a national level. This is going to have a major impact on the food supply chain, as Ring of Fire’s Farron Cousins explains.

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Several times this year, and for many, many, many years here at Ring of Fire, I have told you the story. I believe it took place in either 2012 or 2013 in the state of Georgia. And this was a story actually brought to my attention by attorney Howard Nations. Uh, back when we were hosting, uh, you know, ring of Fire on free speech tv, he would come on every week with us. And here's what happened in the state of Georgia, again, it was either 2012 or 2013, they passed very strict laws reducing the amount of migrant workers they were going to allow in the state and basically cutting the Visa program. And so what happened was that that year when this went into effect in Georgia, the farmers didn't have employees.

Agriculture, community collapsed. Economy of Georgia suffered tremendously in ways that took years and years to finally get back on. And of course, there were shortages of foods all because as the farmers told us, the crops are rotting in the field. I don't have workers, Georgians aren't willing to do these jobs. I've tried and they're not letting me bring in the migrants that I bring in every year. So we got nothing. We lose hundreds of thousands of dollars per farmer, and you lose food and revenue and the workers aren't obviously making money. So Georgia immediately was like, all right, screw this. We messed up. We're going back to the way things were. And again, took years, but they finally got back to where they should be. Well, history does like to repeat itself, doesn't it? Because reports came out this week, media outlets went out and talked to farmers across the country, not just Georgia.

And you know what those farmers told us? My crops are rotting in the fields because I have no one willing to do the work. Willing, of course being the key word. And the reason is simple. These farmers tell us, the farmers who by the way overwhelmingly voted for Donald Trump, so little bit of you voted for this, you idiot. But, and yeah, I'm gonna call them idiots because he said he was gonna do it. He did it. And now you're like, oh, woe is me. I'm getting exactly what he told me I was gonna get. So yeah, either way. Um, I, I have no empathy for these people anymore. I just really don't. I'm sorry. Maybe that makes me a bad person. But getting exactly what you voted for, I don't know, kind of feel like, yeah, you should get that. But anyway, I digress. So the farmers tell us we don't have migrants coming in.

You know, we basically hire the same group of people every single year for the picking season. We know them all by name. We have dealt with them for years and years and years. They come back to our farm every year. They're not here this year they didn't come. And these farmers say only about half of the usual workers who come over did end up coming over, which is still not enough. And they said, we have crops rotting in the fields. The fruit is rotting on the trees. The vegetables are rotting in the soil because there's not enough people to do the work. And they said explicitly, it's because either ice has already deported some of these people when they were working on other farms or two, they don't want to come over here because they know if they do, they could be subjected to an ice raid.