ALBANY — At his orchard in Niagara County, veteran farmer Jim Bittner planned for 20 acres of peach trees this year.

He’s already scaled back those ambitions in half out of concern that the federal government will make it tougher for foreign workers to get visas.

Across New York, worries are rising among farmers over the Trump administration’s efforts to tighten the guest worker program, as well as trade policy, agriculture experts say.

State Agriculture Commissioner Richard Ball, a farmer from Schoharie County, said he hears anxieties of farmers who’ve come to rely on migrant workers to pick their apples and milk their cows.

“We need thoughtful consideration to how we move this country forward and find a way for a lot of these workers to have a legal status,” he said.

The American Farm Bureau reports 50 to 70 percent of farmworkers are immigrants.

Ball said they represent a similar portion of the workforce at New York farms, and about half of those may lack proper documentation to be in the United States.

If federal agents round them up, he told lawmakers at a hearing this week, it would make life “very challenging” for producers trying to get their commodities to market.

Jeff Williams, director of public policy for the New York Farm Bureau, said he’s heard reports of federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents visiting farms in the state this month and detaining a small number of workers suspected of committing crimes beyond violations of immigration statutes.

Farmers are obliged to hire applicants if their identification “looks credible,” he noted.

“The farmers are as blindsided as anyone else if their workers get rounded up by ICE,” he said.

The Farm Bureau is advising members how to respond in case federal agents show up, he said, and it is working with the state’s congressional delegation, as well.

“So far, though, the arrests we’ve heard about have been limited to people with criminal records. And we hope it stays that way,” he said.

Dairy farmer Jim Powers, of the Otsego County town of Butternuts, said a growing threat of raids apparently prompted six Guatemalans at another dairy farm to take off for parts unknown.

A farmer woke up, Powers said, and the workers were gone.

“The word is out there that they are going after undocumented immigrants, and that’s all these big farms use to milk their cows,” he said.

Powers, a Republican member of his county board of representatives, said he sheds no tears for farms that lose workers who were in this country illegally.

Foreign workers often “demand” a minimum of 80 hours of work per week, he said, “so they can send the money back to Mexico or wherever.”

For years, migrant workers have trekked from the Caribbean to pick the apple crop in New York’s Champlain Valley, Niagara Frontier and Hudson Valley.

To get permission to bring in foreign workers under a special visa program, farmers must assure federal officials that they’re unable to find enough Americans to do the work.

“We’re doing everything we can to make sure that program stays in place,” said Anna Wallis, a Plattsburgh-based fruit specialist with the Eastern New York Commercial Horticulture Program, an arm of the Cornell Cooperative Extension.

“We’re waiting to see what the new administration is going to do and see if the regulations are going to change much,” she said.

Foreign fruit pickers tend to be “very skilled and very experienced,” she said, and willing to do difficult work that attracts few Americans.

Such concerns are common on farms in western New York, said Craig Kahlke, a fruit specialist at the Cornell Cooperative Extension office for Niagara County.

Fruit prices would likely “skyrocket” if orchards had to get citizens to do the picking, he said.

“We could not harvest the crop without the foreign workforce,” he said.

He also said it is inappropriate to link the migrant workers, even those who may have violated immigration laws, with those who commit crimes.

“I would say 99 percent of the people who work on farms are not the ones getting arrested and causing the anti-immigration people to get upset,” Kahlke said.

In Appleton, Bittner said he never considered hiring foreign workers until this year, and now he’s preparing to do so only because a labor shortage amid last year’s harvest resulted in fruit staying on trees longer than it should have.

He said he is already trying to calculate how many American workers he will be short this year so he can begin filling out an application to bring in foreign workers.

One of the biggest headaches facing farmers now, he said, are indications from the Trump administration that it will clamp down on immigration and visa programs.

“That worries us because we’re trying to figure out what we’re going to grow and plant on this farm,” he said, “and right now we just don’t know if we’re going to have the labor.”

Joe Mahoney covers the New York Statehouse for CNHI’s newspapers and websites. Reach him at jmahoney@cnhi.com

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