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An investigative report on the death of an 8-year-old boy on a Dane County dairy farm is spurring a new effort to improve housing conditions for local farmworkers.
Dane County Supv. Heidi Wegleitner says she was inspired to propose an $8 million amendment to the 2024 capital budget to create a Farm Workers Housing Fund after reading a ProPublica report earlier this year that detailed how housing conditions at D&K Dairy in Dane contributed to the death of the young boy, Jefferson Rodríguez, in a farm accident.
“There’s just a lack of protections — and particularly with dairy workers,” says Wegleitner. “That [report] just brought a real sense of urgency and priority to address these safety concerns. There were a number of policy issues exposed in that report.”
Many farmworkers in Dane County live on the farms where they work; Rodríguez lived in D&K Dairy’s milking parlor with his father, who worked on the farm.
The development of farmworker housing may call for a different approach than traditional affordable housing, says Wegleitner, chair of the Health and Human Needs Committee. “The first phase of this initiative is to better understand the problem and better engage the community most affected: farmworkers.” The funding would also be used to identify how much housing might be needed and what legal and zoning hurdles may exist. Remaining money would be used to acquire land and finance housing development. Wegleitner says more county funding would be needed in future years to address the problem.
The Health and Human Needs Committee unanimously supported Wegleitner’s amendment and she expects the full board to give the fund final approval in November.
Farm workers who live where they work are vulnerable: “When employment is terminated and housing is lost, folks have nowhere to go.”
Wegleitner says she’s already started exploring a potential model for farmworker housing in nearby Lafayette County, and an emergency shelter in Syracuse, New York, for farmworkers who have been fired or evicted. Also a housing attorney, Wegleitner says working and living conditions are tied together for farmworkers more closely than for most others.
“If you don’t have safe shelter, it’s really hard to enforce any legal rights you have, including workers’ rights. You need that safety and stability to really exercise your civil rights.”
