The 65-year-old pushed aside a lace curtain that covered his apartment door, dividing his room from the dairy’s sour-smelling milking parlor. In the barn, a horseshoe-shaped milking platform hummed awake. Super-producer black-and-white Holstein cows, twice Hilario’s size, peered out from vinyl curtains.
“They’re smart and curious, and they’re nervous,” Hilario said. “You have to be gentle with them,” he tells The Economic Hardship Reporting Project and The Guardian.
He and his co-worker began a rhythmic routine: They clapped the bumpy rears of the cows, twirled towels and, in one fluid motion, attached the milking machine onto beach ball-sized udders. They finished at about 2.30 a.m., hosing down the parlor before falling asleep next door. Hilario, who asked not to have his full name used due to safety concerns, began his next shift at 6.30 a.m.
Hilario did this work, roughly 60 hours, seven days a week, for $650, he said, well below the state minimum wage. There were no days off, no clock to punch, no clear line between night and morning, no moment when the job truly ended. When a cow was injured or a piece of equipment broke, he worked more, without extra pay.
As Vermont’s $5.4 billion dairy industry has consolidated and farm family labor has disappeared, workers without permanent legal status have become indispensable to the dairy business, which comprises more than half of the state’s agricultural economy. More than 9 in 10 Vermont dairies surveyed in a 2025 state report employed a migrant workforce.
But the state has refused to codify rights for any of the state’s 8,300 farm workers, including roughly 1,000 undocumented workers, according to numbers provided by Migrant Justice, a Vermont-based human rights organization founded and led by farm workers. These workers remain exempt from minimum wage rules, overtime protections and the right to unionize. And increasing immigration enforcement has made them more legally vulnerable and kept them cloistered on farms. Their vulnerability stands in stark contrast to Vermont’s progressive identity and the values espoused by many of its leaders.
Under the second Trump administration, the outlook has darkened for dairy workers with the constant threat of detention and deportation. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement runs surveillance operations in the state and has a growing presence, detaining community members, including three without a warrant, in early March.
“We have workers who are now living arguably even more in the shadows than they have in the past,” said the Democratic state representative David Durfee, chair of the House Committee on Agriculture, Food Resiliency and Forestry.
More than a year ago, Durfee led a task force — the agricultural worker labor and employment laws study committee — that recommended establishing a minimum wage and overtime pay for farm workers, while rejecting calls for collective bargaining and unionization. At least two bills introduced to address the recommendations stalled in 2025, and lawmakers gave little attention to the issue during the 2026 legislative session.
“In Vermont, we want to protect farms more than we care about workers,” said the state representative Kate Logan, a Progressive/Democrat from Burlington who sponsored one such bill last year. “We care more about making sure a farm can be profitable or continue to exist than we care about whether or not the person working at the farm can afford their rent.”
Only 13% of Vermont’s dairy workforce receives minimum wage, according to a 2024 survey of 212 Spanish-speaking dairy workers by Migrant Justice. Hilario’s hourly wage was roughly $11 per hour, more than $3 less than the state minimum wage of $14.42 per hour.
Since the 1930s, the U.S. has barred agricultural workers from basic labor rights such as the minimum wage and overtime pay. Vermont followed suit in the 1960s, reinforcing the federal policy with its own state law. The precedent of exclusion is so entrenched that in 2024, when Vermont expanded unionization rights, farm workers’ protections were stripped at the 11th hour.
Agricultural industries such as Vermont’s no longer rely solely on the work of farm-owning families but depend on hired employees, the majority of whom are immigrants from southern Mexico, Will Lambek, a Migrant Justice staff member, told the agricultural taskforce in October 2024. Nationally, immigrants now make up more than half of dairy laborers, according to estimates from the National Milk Producers Federation.
Vermont’s image as an agrarian utopia dotted by thousands of dairy farms has receded as the industry has consolidated. In the 1940s, there were 11,000 dairies across the state. By 2024, only about 480 remained.
Even as farms have vanished, dairy production has grown. Since 2013, the number of cows per farm has increased by nearly 70%, to an average of about 250, and the state’s income from dairy has doubled over the last decade.
But farmers operate within a pricing system that offers little room to absorb labor costs, limiting their ability to pay more. The industry relies on an 89-year-old federal milk pricing program that fluctuates with global supply and demand and, farmers say, has not kept pace with inflation. Milk’s perishability further limits flexibility, requiring producers to sell at least every other day regardless of price and making dairy especially labor-intensive. Farmers milk at least two, and often three, times a day.
Those constraints have become more acute as milk prices have fallen. On Maple Grove Farm in Derby, Andy Birch milks 50 cows with the help of his wife and a high school student he pays $15 an hour. He lost his other employee, a second high school student, when her family moved out of state in January. He couldn’t afford to replace her. The check he receives every two weeks from his milk buyer declined by about $5,500 between 2024 and 2025.
Many farmers maintain that they compensate their workers fairly and treat them like family. The Vermont Dairy Producers Alliance says a 2024 survey created for the farm labor study committee showed more than two-thirds of its members paid their workers the state minimum wage. Brian Carpenter, a former chair of the association, told the committee that if extraneous costs like heating, housing and transportation were factored in, the wage rose above $23 an hour. The survey did not include data on when, how or how many members were surveyed.
Mary White, president of the Vermont Farm Bureau and owner of Fort Waite Farm, said the quest for increased wages overlaps with a dwindling industry. Where White lives in Corinth in Orange County, there were once 52 dairy farms. Now, White said, her farm is one of only two still shipping milk.
“It’s like that in many, many towns, where there’s only one or two farms left,” White said. “The workforce has in a sense disappeared.”
Hilario spent his youth next to his father in coffee fields in Chiapas, Mexico, before taking a factory job in Mexico City and then coming to the U.S. in 2006. He’s worked in Vermont since 2013, paying to put his four daughters through college. Vermont is now his home. His children are grown, and he doesn’t plan to return to Mexico.
“For most people when they come, they’re coming and they’re staying here for quite a while because we don’t want to be putting our lives at risk coming and going, crossing back and forth between the U.S. and Mexico,” a former dairy worker testified to a Vermont legislative committee in October. “The people I know in the community, they’re staying here for a long time.”
Hilario’s life outside work revolves around his church and volunteering for Migrant Justice, which formed 15 years ago after a 19-year-old farm worker was strangled to death by dairy machinery.
For years, much of his organizing work pushed businesses to join the Milk With Dignity program that creates partnerships between private companies and participating farms to pay a premium on milk in exchange for better working conditions, improved housing and higher wages, along with a protected complaint system for workers. In 2017, Ben & Jerry’s, a subsidiary of Unilever, committed to sourcing milk for its ice cream from Milk With Dignity farms. Today, that accounts for about 54 farms, or only about an eighth of Vermont’s dairies.
Most dairy farms in Vermont remain outside the program. Last November, Hilario joined a group of workers and supporters in front of the Hannaford supermarket in Middlebury and picked up a microphone.
“I’m a dairy worker. I’ve worked on the same farm for five years. I’ve been paid below minimum wage, living in a house that isn’t fit for human habitation,” Hilario said in Spanish through an interpreter. Hannaford representatives accompanied by the sheriff’s department issued a trespass citation to at least one supporter, a former dairy worker.
The protest was part of a years-long campaign to force Hannaford to join Milk With Dignity. The supermarket chain, which is owned by the Dutch company Ahold Delhaize, has resisted the workers’ pleas for years.
In a response to allegations of worker abuse in its supply chain by Migrant Justice, Ahold Delhaize wrote in 2024 that it recognized “migrant workers are vulnerable throughout supply chains worldwide, particularly in agriculture,” and the company took reports of abuse “very seriously.”
“That is why Hannaford has been, and continues to be, engaged in a thorough due diligence review across its dairy supply chain,” the company wrote in response to the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre, a global organization investigating human rights.
Hannaford has said it works with other “industry and supply chain partners” that advance human rights. “The concerns and issues facing agricultural workers are systemic, complex and extend far beyond Hannaford’s supply chain and the state of Vermont,” the company said in a 2023 statement. Hannaford and parent company Ahold Delhaize did not respond to requests for comment.
“If working conditions and pay protections are important to the state, we shouldn’t necessarily be leaving it to private individuals or the market to make that happen,” Durfee, the state representative, said of the program. “It’s passing along the buck to somebody else.”
Last April, Migrant Justice filed an international human rights complaint against Ahold Delhaize, alleging worker abuse in its supply chain. In response, the company launched an investigation into dairy suppliers in the north-eastern U.S., including the farm where Hilario works. In October, Hilario and Nicolas, another dairy worker, laid out their demands on a Zoom call to third-party investigators: their own bedrooms, the state minimum wage and one day off a week.
Migrant Justice launched a new campaign this April in the U.S. and the Netherlands, asking Ahold Delhaize to publish its findings after the company’s 2025 annual report stated the results of its investigation “confirmed the importance of confidentiality and trust in conducting a meaningful dialogue.” Migrant Justice feared this meant the report would be buried.
The workers are still waiting to hear back.
At 65, Hilario could be on the verge of retirement and eligible to receive Social Security benefits from the taxes he pays every year. Instead, for years, his one form of relief came on Sundays, when he paid his co-worker $100, roughly a sixth of his weekly $650 salary, to cover his morning shift so he could leave the farm for church.
Last September, Benjamin, one of two church leaders, greeted Hilario at the door in a shiny pink tux. Benjamin moved to Vermont and grew his 30-member congregation, composed mostly of farm workers, by traveling between dairies with his King James Bible in hand. Today, many of those members are afraid to travel to the church.
Hilario still attends all three services on Sunday, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. That September morning, Benjamin told parishioners about the work of Noah to save the world from the flood. “It’s difficult to serve in something that’s never been seen,” he said.
Hilario’s bosses at his old farm discouraged contact with Migrant Justice, but he continued fighting for the future he hasn’t yet seen.
“Maybe it has to do with racism,” Hilario said. “They want to keep denying us our rights, but at this point they have to listen more.”
Hilario left his old farm in February, after working every day since he arrived five years earlier. Nicolas remains on his farm, where he arrived three years earlier. In December, when he had flu-like symptoms for two weeks, he had to work without sick days. When two co-workers suddenly left the dairy, Nicolas worked three shifts a day for two days before his farm found replacements. One was a friend from his childhood in Puebla. They grew up 20 minutes down the road; they now share a bedroom.
“Nothing’s difficult about the work,” Nicolas said while milking, a wry smile under his thin mustache. “It’s just the same thing every day.”
Through the door of the milk barn, the scene looked pleasant and pastoral: soft lines of fog settling over farm fields, ramshackle barns along winding roads, black-spotted milk cows peering between fence rails, all within the humpback hills that give Vermont its Green Mountain state nickname.
“Those on the outside think everything’s fine,” Nicolas said.
This story was produced by The Economic Hardship Reporting Project and The Guardian, and reviewed and distributed by Stacker.