> "In the fields, I would say 70% of the workers are gone," she said in an interview. "If 70% of your workforce doesn't show up, 70% of your crop doesn't get picked and can go bad in one day. Most Americans don't want to do this work. Most farmers here are barely breaking even. I fear this has created a tipping point where many will go bust."
Presumably, there will be bigger pocketed entities waiting in the wings to snap up some distressed assets.
Maybe Americans will finally understand that their cheap food and lifestyle has been dependent on essentially illegal slave labor with no rights. You can harvest your crops with legal migrant workers with legal temporary visas and minimum wages and labor protections but you'll have to pay a few cents more for those strawberries.
I know little about farming or harvesting, but I’m curious what types of crops actually require manual harvesting?
Do we really need to rely on stoop labor to hand-pick crops, or has a relatively cheap labor pool allowed farmers to avoid the costs of automation?
If labor is to be in perennial short supply in the future, I wonder if American farmers will simply be forced to turn to crops that allow machine harvesting.
Why doesn’t the government subsidize wages/salaries as an incentive for “Americans who don’t want to do this work for such low pay”? Or I guess they could just automate more.
I heard a report on the radio about a similar situation with cherry farmers in Washington. Many farmers are in a cycle where they have to take out loans to pay for maintaining their orchards during the off-season, and then make enough during cherry season to pay those loans off but not enough that they won't need a loan for the next off-season.
So far there have not actually been any mass raids on farms in Washington, and not many cases of migrants being arrested when driving from California to Washington for the cherry harvest but the workers know what is happening in California and are afraid it will happen in Washington so many are staying away.
What was baffling is that many of the farmers put the blame for this is on bad actors on the left spreading fear among the workers.
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[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 29.9 ms ] threadPresumably, there will be bigger pocketed entities waiting in the wings to snap up some distressed assets.
Do we really need to rely on stoop labor to hand-pick crops, or has a relatively cheap labor pool allowed farmers to avoid the costs of automation?
If labor is to be in perennial short supply in the future, I wonder if American farmers will simply be forced to turn to crops that allow machine harvesting.
So far there have not actually been any mass raids on farms in Washington, and not many cases of migrants being arrested when driving from California to Washington for the cherry harvest but the workers know what is happening in California and are afraid it will happen in Washington so many are staying away.
What was baffling is that many of the farmers put the blame for this is on bad actors on the left spreading fear among the workers.