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There are other solutions. Institute a minimum wage for farm work. Make it attractive to those who would ordinarily choose to work in a factory to work at a f

There are other solutions. Institute a minimum wage for farm work. Make it attractive to those who would ordinarily choose to work in a factory to work at a farm. Break the monopolies on food distribution (probably will require the companies to be restructured by law). Create a national food distribution service to compete with the original companies. Provide minimum prices for farmers with the national food distribution service. Put tarifs on imports. Remove all subsidies for food exports (and stop trying to bomb the world food prices in order to offer loans to countries to buy your food exports when they can't afford to compete with their own home grown products). Ha ha. But seriously, automation and robotics will be much easier to implement.

mschuster91 7y ago
The biggest problem why extremely cheap food prices are needed is that there is a ton of people that are on minimum wage or below who would not be able to survive otherwise. If that is to change and ag products be priced in a way that allows fair wages to farm employees and proper treatment to animals, then wages have to be raised across the board and wealth taken from the rich elites and redistributed to the poor.
batushka3 7y ago
Yes, easier and also it's not building a socialist economy that would end in just another starvation.
- madaxe_again 7y ago
  You might have missed it, but it’s capitalism that’s grievously mismanaging this crisis, and everybody suddenly wants a handout. Capitalism when the sun shines, socialism when it rains.
- krageon 7y ago
  Please leave right-wing propaganda outside of a good discussion. The US-centric view that "socialism" is some sort of great evil is just that: a view that is (mostly) geographically locked and has good examples of working just fine elsewhere.
ess101 7y ago
Agree, automation may indeed be the solution in the long term...but we're not there yet. The solution may indeed require subsidizing wages instead of subsidizing farmers.
Mediterraneo10 7y ago
> Institute a minimum wage for farm work. Make it attractive to those who would ordinarily choose to work in a factory to work at a farm. If you have ever done fruit-picking yourself, you would find that it is back-breaking work, and anyone who has been in it for more than a few years develops health problems. A higher minimum wage might attract a few more young people to do it for a season or two to make some quick money, but it won’t make fruit picking an appealing career choice by which a whole industry can be sustained long-term. Any Western European with any sense would prefer to do anything else even if it means less money (or simply live on the dole), and rely on desperate migrants from developing countries to do the hard work.
- mikekchar 7y ago
  That is a great point. I actually had in my head more like a union job like in the factories (which can also be back breaking and result in health problems). Of course such a union would almost certainly have to be enforced by law :-) And before people say that I've truly gone socialist, I don't really know if I'm actually in favour of my idea. I'm kind of thinking out loud. I really do think that something is fundamentally broken here and it needs some pretty serious surgury to fix it, though. Edit: I should note that while I haven't picked fruit, I have cut rice by hand. Would not want to do it for a full time job, but it was considerably easier than I expected.
jelliclesfarm 7y ago
Minimum wage is a way to perpetuate poverty. It is similar to subsidies. Manual labour is brutal. No one is going to pick it as a long term stable job. But food is a long term issue. We are always going to eat no matter where we are in our time line. Perhaps that’s why it’s cheap. Currently food is cheap and food commodities are traded on the exchange. These two things must change. Another suggestion I have is to subsidize food but for the consumer. Like food stamps. Not farm subsidies. Dairy and grain subsidies have destroyed the sectors. And the environment. They have no choice to keep pumping volume to break even. We have a glut in the market, prices crash and eventually farms shut down..leading to land grabs and shuttering of the sector. The only one making bank is Wall Street and those who sell inputs/machinery to farmers. It’s obscene and perverse. Coming back to labour in food farms. The only solution is automation and erasure of most tasks involving manual labour. We simply must change the way we farm systems up if it has to be automated and use minimal labour. If farming is a career, minimum wage is not a sustainable wage. Once upon a time everyone had a farm and grew for themselves and sold/bartered what was in excess. Now population has exploded, farming land has shrunk and food is cheap..but we still use manual labour to grow food to feed 7+ billion people. Ask yourself this..why isn’t food farming and small farms automated? Simple..because if ag automation steps in, ag machinery will lose their market. They have just miniaturized the machinery used for commodity grain crops but that’s not a good fit. A corn field gets harvested once a year and a farmer doesn’t have to touch dirt and esp so if he had a Netflix watching air conditioned 250k tractor(that he can’t repair anyways) that is smarter than him and his phone. Available on credit of course. Credit lines make this all possible. Within a generation or two, guaranteed the family will stop farming and start selling the land to developers. That seems to be the gentle way to separate a farmer from his land and vocation. And who do you think buys all this land? Pension funds, insurance companies, foreign investors from China, Middle East(just like we buy in South America and Canadian pension funds buy into Australian ag land). Farm REITs are owned by insurance companies(hello, prudential!). Harvard wealth fund spinned off a investment company that bought all the farm land in Paso Robles growing corn, alfafa and food crops from small holder farms and converted it into vineyards. But you know what they own that is more valuable than the land itself? Water rights. Because of how fucked up California water politics is, this company has water rights for their vineyards that has led to a moratorium on water usage for food growing family farms for the past six years. If you want to buy a farm in Paso Robles, the prices are diff and drastically so depending on which side of the freeway you are on wrt Harvard’s water sucking vineyard. Back to small food farms..so the mvp of a 250k smart tractor is a 24k tiny 40HP tractor that does 1/10th of the tasks involved and covers about 1/40th of the farm expense(cost studies available). So the manual costs that is labour from weeding to harvesting to packing takes up 60% of the entire pie. And if it has to be mechanized, economies of scale will fail. Can you visualize this as numbers? And see why labour costs is killing farming? ESP small acreage farms. What we need is automation and ag robots for SMALL and MEDIUM food producing farms to replace labour. AI shouldn’t be used to collect data that makes farmers consumers of ag inputs and machinery. Automation should be reduce costs for the farmer not be used to make them spend more money on inputs and machinery. Not surprisingly, the only people interested in investing in Ag automation are ag input companies and ag equipment giants. And for them if it’s not on a commodity crop listed on the exchange they are not interested. Because it’s a market hedging play for them.

mschuster91 7y ago

The biggest problem why extremely cheap food prices are needed is that there is a ton of people that are on minimum wage or below who would not be able to survive otherwise. If that is to change and ag products be priced in a way that allows fair wages to farm employees and proper treatment to animals, then wages have to be raised across the board and wealth taken from the rich elites and redistributed to the poor.

batushka3 7y ago

Yes, easier and also it's not building a socialist economy that would end in just another starvation.

madaxe_again 7y ago
You might have missed it, but it’s capitalism that’s grievously mismanaging this crisis, and everybody suddenly wants a handout. Capitalism when the sun shines, socialism when it rains.
krageon 7y ago
Please leave right-wing propaganda outside of a good discussion. The US-centric view that "socialism" is some sort of great evil is just that: a view that is (mostly) geographically locked and has good examples of working just fine elsewhere.

ess101 7y ago

Agree, automation may indeed be the solution in the long term...but we're not there yet. The solution may indeed require subsidizing wages instead of subsidizing farmers.

Mediterraneo10 7y ago

> Institute a minimum wage for farm work. Make it attractive to those who would ordinarily choose to work in a factory to work at a farm. If you have ever done fruit-picking yourself, you would find that it is back-breaking work, and anyone who has been in it for more than a few years develops health problems. A higher minimum wage might attract a few more young people to do it for a season or two to make some quick money, but it won’t make fruit picking an appealing career choice by which a whole industry can be sustained long-term. Any Western European with any sense would prefer to do anything else even if it means less money (or simply live on the dole), and rely on desperate migrants from developing countries to do the hard work.

mikekchar 7y ago
That is a great point. I actually had in my head more like a union job like in the factories (which can also be back breaking and result in health problems). Of course such a union would almost certainly have to be enforced by law :-) And before people say that I've truly gone socialist, I don't really know if I'm actually in favour of my idea. I'm kind of thinking out loud. I really do think that something is fundamentally broken here and it needs some pretty serious surgury to fix it, though. Edit: I should note that while I haven't picked fruit, I have cut rice by hand. Would not want to do it for a full time job, but it was considerably easier than I expected.

jelliclesfarm 7y ago

Minimum wage is a way to perpetuate poverty. It is similar to subsidies. Manual labour is brutal. No one is going to pick it as a long term stable job. But food is a long term issue. We are always going to eat no matter where we are in our time line. Perhaps that’s why it’s cheap. Currently food is cheap and food commodities are traded on the exchange. These two things must change. Another suggestion I have is to subsidize food but for the consumer. Like food stamps. Not farm subsidies. Dairy and grain subsidies have destroyed the sectors. And the environment. They have no choice to keep pumping volume to break even. We have a glut in the market, prices crash and eventually farms shut down..leading to land grabs and shuttering of the sector. The only one making bank is Wall Street and those who sell inputs/machinery to farmers. It’s obscene and perverse. Coming back to labour in food farms. The only solution is automation and erasure of most tasks involving manual labour. We simply must change the way we farm systems up if it has to be automated and use minimal labour. If farming is a career, minimum wage is not a sustainable wage. Once upon a time everyone had a farm and grew for themselves and sold/bartered what was in excess. Now population has exploded, farming land has shrunk and food is cheap..but we still use manual labour to grow food to feed 7+ billion people. Ask yourself this..why isn’t food farming and small farms automated? Simple..because if ag automation steps in, ag machinery will lose their market. They have just miniaturized the machinery used for commodity grain crops but that’s not a good fit. A corn field gets harvested once a year and a farmer doesn’t have to touch dirt and esp so if he had a Netflix watching air conditioned 250k tractor(that he can’t repair anyways) that is smarter than him and his phone. Available on credit of course. Credit lines make this all possible. Within a generation or two, guaranteed the family will stop farming and start selling the land to developers. That seems to be the gentle way to separate a farmer from his land and vocation. And who do you think buys all this land? Pension funds, insurance companies, foreign investors from China, Middle East(just like we buy in South America and Canadian pension funds buy into Australian ag land). Farm REITs are owned by insurance companies(hello, prudential!). Harvard wealth fund spinned off a investment company that bought all the farm land in Paso Robles growing corn, alfafa and food crops from small holder farms and converted it into vineyards. But you know what they own that is more valuable than the land itself? Water rights. Because of how fucked up California water politics is, this company has water rights for their vineyards that has led to a moratorium on water usage for food growing family farms for the past six years. If you want to buy a farm in Paso Robles, the prices are diff and drastically so depending on which side of the freeway you are on wrt Harvard’s water sucking vineyard. Back to small food farms..so the mvp of a 250k smart tractor is a 24k tiny 40HP tractor that does 1/10th of the tasks involved and covers about 1/40th of the farm expense(cost studies available). So the manual costs that is labour from weeding to harvesting to packing takes up 60% of the entire pie. And if it has to be mechanized, economies of scale will fail. Can you visualize this as numbers? And see why labour costs is killing farming? ESP small acreage farms. What we need is automation and ag robots for SMALL and MEDIUM food producing farms to replace labour. AI shouldn’t be used to collect data that makes farmers consumers of ag inputs and machinery. Automation should be reduce costs for the farmer not be used to make them spend more money on inputs and machinery. Not surprisingly, the only people interested in investing in Ag automation are ag input companies and ag equipment giants. And for them if it’s not on a commodity crop listed on the exchange they are not interested. Because it’s a market hedging play for them.