With an incoming Republican administration and Republican control In the U.S. House and Senate, a lot of dairy farmers will be following any developments on trade and labor.

When it comes to trade, there are a few different threads of discussion going on, said Paul Bleiberg, National Milk Producers Federation’s executive vice president for government relations.

“I think certainly one will be what happens with tariffs … . And there’s been a number of initial statements the president-elect has made, conversations he’s subsequently had with different foreign leaders. We will kind of see how that plays out,” he said during the latest Dairy Defined podcast.

The US-Mexico-Canada Agreement renewal opportunity will come up later in this Congress. That may provide the potential to address a number of issues, including U.S. dairy’s issues with Canada and following the commitments that were made, he said.

New markets

“Then there’s the question of whether the new administration may pursue new agreements, whatever forms those may take, whether it’s sort of individual bilaterals like some of what they did in their first term, the agreements with Japan and China phase one and things like that,” he said.

Another question involves the role of Congress, and that can take a lot of different forms, he said.

“There’s a lot of interest right now in what may come of all of these different threads in the trade space, and I think members of Congress and stakeholders and others are all going to be pretty engaged,” he said.

Shifting to labor, there’s a lot of interest in what’s going to play out in the immigration border/labor space in broad strokes he said.

Food security

“We’re going to be reminding members of Congress and members of the incoming administration of the important work that dairy farm workers do. Not just from a dairy farming operational perspective of helping work on the farm, but from a food security and national security perspective,” he said.

National Milk will be helping make sure farmers can produce milk and dairy products 24/7, 365 days a year, he said.

“As you talk about border security in the new Congress, obviously there’s discussion that Republicans may use the budget reconciliation tool to spend some money on securing the border,” he said.

There’s also likely to be legislative negotiations around agricultural labor.

In the last Congress, House Agriculture Chairman Glen “GT” Chairman Thompson spearheaded the Agricultural Labor Working Group, which was a bipartisan group of Agriculture Committee members that included policy recommendations in their final report that National Milk support, such as opening up the H-2A visa program to dairy, he said.

There’s also the Farm Workforce Modernization Act introduced by a number of members including Rep. Dan Newhouse from Washington.

So there are the building blocks in a few different ways to continue the conversation on labor in the new Congress. The discussions around what’s going on at the border may kind of marry into that.

“Obviously, labor is a tough issue to resolve, and so I don’t want to predict anything just yet. But I do think we’ll see a lot of active conversation,” he said.