WISCONISN — A new piece by ProPublica detailed why The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) hasn't investigated certain deaths, mostly of immigrants, on Wisconsin dairy farms over the past few years.

"If a worker dies in the course of work as happens on a regular basis on a farm that has five or six employees, then OSHA will likely go to that farm for less than an hour to get a basic understanding of what happened, but they'll ultimately often have to walk away without really looking into what caused this death," said Maryam Jameel, who co-wrote the ProPublica piece with Melissa Sanchez. 

According to Jameel and Sanchez, that's because the long-running small farms exemption prevents OSHA from investigating deaths on farms where there are fewer than 11 workers and no housing is provided for them. Agency inspectors have now cited that exemption in eight of the 17 documented dairy farm deaths statewide since 2009.

"The small farms exemption is something that has been in place since 1976," Jameel said. "This exemption bars OSHA from using their funds to conduct enforcement efforts on farms with 10 or fewer workers."

Watch the full interview above.