To point 1: Goat and sheep herding is kind of a weird one, where they are really more akin to H1B workers than your standard exploited immigrant. Raising sheep

To point 1: Goat and sheep herding is kind of a weird one, where they are really more akin to H1B workers than your standard exploited immigrant. Raising sheep and goats is a skill that is typically learned as a child, and there are just not enough qualified sheep and goat herders born and raised in the US. This has been an issue for so long that Boise still has the largest Basque population in the US, because even a century and a half ago, it was hard to find shepherds To point 2: by and large, I'm with you. But the problem stems from the issue that laws meant to protect workers in one operational structure (workers on farms) are being misapplied to a completely different structure. Grazers have more in common with wildland firefighters than fruit harvesters, and not just in the benefit provided to society. There's an argument for raising the salary for a wildland firefighter, but it is truly obscene that the salary of 1 preventative goat herder is potentially double the salary of 1 wildland firefighter. Granted, the cost of the goat herder is probably still less than a crew of firefighters, but if the perverse outcome of this is that it is in fact cheaper to risk the lives of firefighters, residents, livestock, and wildlife than to pay for 400 goats and 1 shepherd, then I'd argue that the worker protection laws failed.