Wisconsin Farm Death Used In Availability Cascade Attempt

Here's a recent ProPublica article about a 8 year old boy that was killed during an accident on a Dane County farm in 2019. The headline tells us that officials are moving to address problems facing immigrant workers on Wisconsin dairies. A new employee operating a skid-steer at night ran over the boy at the now closed farm.

The parents are suing the farm and its insurance company and the lawyers have started their twisting of information this way and that for an advantage. Anywhoo, this article nicely demonstrates an attempt by ProPublica to spark an availability cascade; an idea Marc Andreessen discussed in February. In this instance the authors take an uncommon event (had to go back to 2019 to find a death related to an immigrant dairy worker) and try to cause enough outrage that people share the article widely and lead the public to feel that,

What happened to Jefferson and his father is a story of an accumulation of failures: a broken immigration system that makes it difficult for people to come here even as entire industries depend on their labor, small farms that largely go unexamined by safety inspectors, and a law enforcement system that’s ill equipped to serve people who don’t speak English.

It's good to see a man's name cleared in the death of his son but the authors dug up a 4 year old tragedy in order to encourage immigration reform, OSHA oversight of already struggling small farms (farms with under 10 non-family employees,) and for rural police to use better translation services. Wisconsin dairy herds shrunk from 10,541 in 2014 to 6,071 in March 2023. The article also doesn't present the cost of the translation services which may explain why rural police departments consider them a last resort. In general they point out what they see as issues without mentioning why those issues exist. 

Later in the article the authors state explicitly what their reporting is seeking out.

We plan to keep reporting on issues affecting immigrant dairy workers across the Midwest. Among those issues: traffic stops of undocumented immigrants who drive without a license; access to medical care or workers’ compensation after injuries on the job; and employer-provided housing.

I found some Wisconsin agricultural death statistics within these 2017 and 2018 Marshfield Research Reports; out of the 154,000 on-farm Wisconsin jobs, 41 people died in 2017 and 34 died in 2018. Wisconsin is really bad at gathering and presenting useful data as demonstrated by the reports first paragraph which ends saying "due to time and resource limitations, this report had been discontinued from 2007-16." If I had to guess, these limitations returned after 2018 because I can't find more recent statistics. It's similar to the complaints surrounding crime committed while people are on bail. In that instance we lack statistics related to how many people on bail are committing crimes.

It's difficult to make reasonable judgements without pertinent information to guide us.