Most American dairy cows are milked by immigrants. On Dale Hemminger's farm in upstate New York, the cows are milked by robots. When a cow wants to be milked, it walks up to a machine that cleans its udder, attaches cups to its teats, draws the milk and dispenses a treat. In a barn that Hemminger plans to open this year, other robots will roam the floor like little automated pooper scoopers, picking up manure.
The cause isn't an abnormal number of deaths or a plummeting birthrate - though that's slipping too, exacerbating the trend - but instead a collapse in the rate of migration from 2.7 million people in July, 2024 down to just 1.3 million in 2025 as the White House does everything in its power to make the country hostile to immigrants.