In recent earnings calls, shareholders of some publicly traded meat companies asked whether the Trump administration’s deportation plans – among other issues – could pose a challenge to their industry. “We’ve been there before. This has had no impact on our business,” said Tim Klein, chief executive of National Beef, owned by Brazilian food company Marfrig, in response to a shareholder question. In response to a similar question on a Tyson Foods earnings call, CEO Donnie King said: “There’s a lot we don’t know at this point, but I’d like to remind you that we’ve been running this business successfully for over 90 years, no matter which party is in control.
It is unclear whether the Trump regime will target meatpacking plants operated by the industry’s largest companies, given the favorable treatment these companies received at times during Trump’s first presidency. During the Covid-19 pandemic, President Trump issued an executive order that allowed plants to continue operating, even as meatpackers were among the hardest hit by infections. The U.S. House Select Committee on the Coronavirus Crisis later found that Tyson’s legal department had drafted text of the proposed ordinance.
“These large meatpacking companies have prevented additional protections from being put in place to protect workers, in part by engaging in a concerted effort with Trump administration political officials to insulate themselves from oversight, to force workers to remain in conditions dangerous and to protect against liability for any resulting worker illness or death,” the committee concluded in its report published in December 2022.
Labor supply is tight in meatpacking plants and in the agriculture industry as a whole, says Cesar Escalante, a professor at the University of Georgia College of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences. The industry needs more workers, says Escalante, who argues that the United States should expand the H-2A seasonal agricultural worker visa program to include more livestock workers. Smaller farms are more likely to be affected by a lack of workers, Escalante says, while larger farms may shift to mechanization.
If meatpacking workers were deported en masse, this could result in higher prices for consumers. A report from Texas A&M Agrilife Research estimates that eliminating immigrant labor on U.S. dairy farms would nearly double retail milk prices. It’s unclear what impact Trump’s deportation plan would have on meat or food prices more generally, because much of the plan remains unknown. “We don’t know yet how the situation will end,” Hubbard says.