At a large dairy farm, an immigration crisis takes just eight hours to happen, says Beth Ford, CEO of dairy business Land O’Lakes. That’s how much time passes before thousands of cows would need to be milked if a farm is raided by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers and its workers are taken into custody.

“If there’s nobody there, the cow starts to leak milk,” Ford says. “After 24 hours, you really get into crisis with the animal—they could have an infection.” It can quickly get to the point where a farmer might be forced to cull the herd, sending the cows to a meat processing plant—which, these days, might also be short of workers.

It’s a bleak picture, Ford acknowledges, but it’s no exaggeration of the predicament that the more than 1,200 dairy farmers she represents worry about as they watch deportation sweeps happen across the country. “I want to make sure everyone’s paying attention,” Ford says. Especially those leading the federal government’s immigration crackdown, to whom she wants to say: “Listen, do you realize the risk there is with this right now?”

Read the full story from the October/November 2025 issue of Fortune.