Survey Assessed Impact of Mass-Deportation Policy on California Farms

The California Farmer Immigration Enforcement Survey was conducted in December 2025 and January 2026 by Michigan State University in cooperation with California Farm Bureau. More than 500 farmers representing a broad spectrum of California farm production from 50 of California’s 58 counties responded, answering questions about farmers’ and farm employees’ experiences with immigration enforcement, associated production disruptions, and strategies farmers used to manage these challenges.

Approximately 15% of respondents reported labor losses related to general immigration enforcement activities or worker concerns and anxiety stemming from media or other reports of possible enforcement activity. But fewer than 1% of respondents reported losing workers as a result of direct on-farm enforcement. This suggests that while on-farm immigration was relatively rare in 2025, farm employers experienced transient workforce shortages caused by frequently erroneous social media posts that were sometime echoed by legacy media outlets, which were in turn sometimes echoed by social media, perpetuating a cycle of anxiety that sometimes caused farm employees to be hesitant to go to work, to leave their homes, or send their children to school. Because of the acute short-term labor needs of many specialty crops produced in California, even very brief interruptions in the availability of workers to cultivate and harvest time-sensitive crops led to isolated crop losses. This is borne out by survey findings that 8 percent of respondents reported operational disruptions associated with immigration enforcement.

In response to these conditions, 14% of respondents reported turning to farm labor contractors to fill short-term labor shortages, and same percentage reduced production, while 11% offered enhanced incentives to retain workers and 10% completed the same workload with a reduced workforce. Farmers reporting labor losses were 13% more likely to reduce production than those to did not report workforce losses.

You can read the full Michigan State report here. You can read coverage of the survey in AgAlert, the newspaper of FELS’ parent organization, California Farm Bureau, here.