6 ms·

"It's harder to find people to do that work every single year" Translation: The wages we pay are crap and we're not going to pay them more.

klohto 5y ago
It’s not a tech industry ffs. The agriculture is already operating on a thin margin.
f6v 5y ago
Raise the wages -> food prices rise. Rinse and repeat.
- danbruc 5y ago
  No, the price increase will be much smaller than the wage increase because the wage increase only goes to the fraction of the population that does the work while the price increase applies to the entire population.
  - pitaj 5y ago
    If you raise the base cost of production in a low margin case like agriculture, then the price of the good must increase or they would be running at a loss.
    - notfromhere 5y ago
      Agriculture is incredibly subsidized, which means cost of production and cost at point of sale do not have a tight relationship
    - erikpukinskis 5y ago
      Yes, but the amounts are tiny. Would you pay an extra 10 cents a pound for your produce? That amount would be life changing for farmers. But the market will always find the place where the work is unbearable and stop just shy of that.
      - f6v 5y ago
        > Yes, but the amounts are tiny. Would you pay an extra 10 cents a pound for your produce? That amount would be life changing for farmers. You underestimate the percentage of the income some people spend on food. That's why agriculture is heavily subsidised.
        erikpukinskis 5y ago
        I didn’t estimate that.
    - danbruc 5y ago
      Of course, but if everyone pays $1 more then the wages can increase by $10 assuming 10% of the population works in agriculture which still leaves them $9 better off. My point was just that a wage increase is not nullified by the price increase as long as not everyone is working in the fields.
      - chongli 5y ago
        if everyone pays $1 more That’s a collective action problem. You can’t get everyone to pay $1 more. If your strawberries (for example) cost $1 more per pint then your sales will drop accordingly. It doesn’t matter if all strawberry farms agree to pay more to their strawberry pickers. You aren’t only competing against other strawberry farms, you’re competing against all other food. If strawberries are too expensive, people will eat candy or potato chips instead.
        danbruc 5y ago
        So it turn out that people or not willing to pay what it costs to produce strawberries at a wage level at which people are willing to do the hard work. That's fine. The farmer should try to lower the costs by automation or switch to producing potatoes for those potato chips.
- colinmhayes 5y ago
  People would import food.
  - annoyingnoob 5y ago
    Its funny, I've lived most of my life not too far from fields growing food. But when I go to the grocery store, most of the produce there is imported. In 2019, California agriculture produced about $50B in receipts, with almost $22B in exports. Our water goes with those exports too.
    - f6v 5y ago
      > Our water goes with those exports too. Now, that kind of nationalism is very uncalifornian.
      - annoyingnoob 5y ago
        Not following you. We've had drought in CA for years now. There are fights over where water goes, and a lot goes to farming. Then a bunch of those farm products are exported. Do we focus on serving the people in CA or the exports from CA when we talk about water regulation? My original point is that even though we produce a crazy amount of farmed goods in CA, we still import things that we grow here and export. Always seems odd to me to see produce from Ecuador in the grocery store when I can buy better quality down the road from a local farm stand.
        colinmhayes 5y ago
        The Ecuadorian produce is cheaper. If you want local produce buy it from the stand. The water rights stuff is pretty messed up anyway, because the us is essentially stealing water that used to go to Mexico.
mensetmanusman 5y ago
There is also a demographic inversion taking place in many parts of the world...
- joosters 5y ago
  But is that a cause or an effect?
sprainedankles 5y ago
I'd push back on that a little bit. I grew up on a farm that's still operating today, and it truly is difficult to find people to work those jobs. The farm pays just as well as any other job in my rural hometown, so from my experience, it seems to be more of an issue with the work itself. The hours are longer, and work is more sporadic/seasonal. When harvest rolls around, farmers need to get the crop out of the ground ASAP. That means 10-14 hour days for 4 weeks straight, otherwise, you'll lose product. It can be physically demanding and monotonous work. But it's also incredibly fulfilling work, and it's a great example of a community-driven effort to accomplish something very important: providing food. So I think it falls into a similar category of "college is over-emphasized and we have a dwindling supply of trades-workers". While in school in a rural farm town, I never once heard anyone say "what about farming?" when discussing future career choices. It's not marketed as an attractive option. Maybe it's as simple as "farmers have the work-life balance of an emergency room doctor while making ~1/6th" (source: Dad is the farmer, Brother-in-law is the doctor) Anyway, it's a problem I think about a lot. I didn't get into farming, but in many ways I wish I had, because it's a highly undervalued skill with a very rewarding outcome: you feed communities. How do we change the narrative? Do we need policy changes? Continued technological advancement? A push to educate the next generation of farmers within schools? I'm not sure, but I don't think it's always as simple as saying "it doesn't pay enough". That _is_ an issue, but it's not the only issue.
- sam_goody 5y ago
  There was an artile on HN about the influence of movies on "cool". After Jurassic park, there was a huge uptick in paleontology, and everything else related, even Veterianism (!). Most of the currents that kids get from movies are destructive to society IMO, but if it could be tapped into - it is a source of influence. Humans naturally copy what they see. If a series of movies with the hero being an entomologist came out, it would do us good. If there were a bunch of farm boys that played with nature in a way that made it cool, we would harvest the benefits for generations.
- delackner 5y ago
  Certainly we need a cultural shift towards honoring ALL kinds of work, but if as you said, the work is hard, sporadic, and long hours, then of course no one wants to do it if there are other options that pay the same but lack those features.
pitaj 5y ago
Paying people to walk through fields picking weeds doesn't sound scalable or sustainable to me.
- AlstZam 5y ago
  It was for the last 11 000 years. With variabilities, but based on demographic only it was pretty scalable and sustainable.
  - NullPrefix 5y ago
    A lot of slave labor was involved in the last 11 000 years.
  - colinmhayes 5y ago
    Most of humanity was suffering for the past 11000 years. Almost everyone lived in extreme poverty.
  - kube-system 5y ago
    A mere 125 years ago it required the majority of the US workforce to farm enough food for people to eat. The mechanization of agriculture enabled much of the technological and cultural progress of the past couple centuries.
partiallypro 5y ago
They actually pay pretty well considering ($15-20/hr in some cases,) it's just very hard work. You also have to consider that farms don't make much money. They don't have massive margins like Google and a single bad weather event can wipe out any profit for the year.
openasocket 5y ago
It's kind of a shitty job no matter how much you pay. The work is seasonal so the people doing this have to move around following the work. It's also in remote locations, there aren't apartments for rent right next to the farm. Often the farm has to provide housing, which of course means they will do whatever they can to cut costs. Internet and cell reception are going to be abysmal, nothing but farmland for miles in every direction. And you're constantly on the move following the next job. Don't get me wrong, there are some serious things that can and need to be done to improve the industry, but even with all of those fixed it's not a job for everyone.
sidibe 5y ago
Manual weeding is really not a job people want to do in the developed world. IMO it's the worst part of farming in that requires working at ground level all day and needs to be done every couple weeks. It will wipe you out physically. Typically people who have to do this for long and have any other job available to them will switch even for a pay cut, but farmers can't really offer much because food production is low-margin (and in the USA they are competing with farms that use herbicides).
ciconia 5y ago
I'm not sure that's really the reason, but at the same time it seems the overall tendency is to invest more in machinery and automation rather than pay better wages.

klohto 5y ago

It’s not a tech industry ffs. The agriculture is already operating on a thin margin.

f6v 5y ago

Raise the wages -> food prices rise. Rinse and repeat.

danbruc 5y ago
No, the price increase will be much smaller than the wage increase because the wage increase only goes to the fraction of the population that does the work while the price increase applies to the entire population.
- pitaj 5y ago
  If you raise the base cost of production in a low margin case like agriculture, then the price of the good must increase or they would be running at a loss.
  - notfromhere 5y ago
    Agriculture is incredibly subsidized, which means cost of production and cost at point of sale do not have a tight relationship
  - erikpukinskis 5y ago
    Yes, but the amounts are tiny. Would you pay an extra 10 cents a pound for your produce? That amount would be life changing for farmers. But the market will always find the place where the work is unbearable and stop just shy of that.
    - f6v 5y ago
      > Yes, but the amounts are tiny. Would you pay an extra 10 cents a pound for your produce? That amount would be life changing for farmers. You underestimate the percentage of the income some people spend on food. That's why agriculture is heavily subsidised.
      - erikpukinskis 5y ago
        I didn’t estimate that.
  - danbruc 5y ago
    Of course, but if everyone pays $1 more then the wages can increase by $10 assuming 10% of the population works in agriculture which still leaves them $9 better off. My point was just that a wage increase is not nullified by the price increase as long as not everyone is working in the fields.
    - chongli 5y ago
      if everyone pays $1 more That’s a collective action problem. You can’t get everyone to pay $1 more. If your strawberries (for example) cost $1 more per pint then your sales will drop accordingly. It doesn’t matter if all strawberry farms agree to pay more to their strawberry pickers. You aren’t only competing against other strawberry farms, you’re competing against all other food. If strawberries are too expensive, people will eat candy or potato chips instead.
      - danbruc 5y ago
        So it turn out that people or not willing to pay what it costs to produce strawberries at a wage level at which people are willing to do the hard work. That's fine. The farmer should try to lower the costs by automation or switch to producing potatoes for those potato chips.
colinmhayes 5y ago
People would import food.
- annoyingnoob 5y ago
  Its funny, I've lived most of my life not too far from fields growing food. But when I go to the grocery store, most of the produce there is imported. In 2019, California agriculture produced about $50B in receipts, with almost $22B in exports. Our water goes with those exports too.
  - f6v 5y ago
    > Our water goes with those exports too. Now, that kind of nationalism is very uncalifornian.
    - annoyingnoob 5y ago
      Not following you. We've had drought in CA for years now. There are fights over where water goes, and a lot goes to farming. Then a bunch of those farm products are exported. Do we focus on serving the people in CA or the exports from CA when we talk about water regulation? My original point is that even though we produce a crazy amount of farmed goods in CA, we still import things that we grow here and export. Always seems odd to me to see produce from Ecuador in the grocery store when I can buy better quality down the road from a local farm stand.
      - colinmhayes 5y ago
        The Ecuadorian produce is cheaper. If you want local produce buy it from the stand. The water rights stuff is pretty messed up anyway, because the us is essentially stealing water that used to go to Mexico.

mensetmanusman 5y ago

There is also a demographic inversion taking place in many parts of the world...

joosters 5y ago
But is that a cause or an effect?

sprainedankles 5y ago

I'd push back on that a little bit. I grew up on a farm that's still operating today, and it truly is difficult to find people to work those jobs. The farm pays just as well as any other job in my rural hometown, so from my experience, it seems to be more of an issue with the work itself. The hours are longer, and work is more sporadic/seasonal. When harvest rolls around, farmers need to get the crop out of the ground ASAP. That means 10-14 hour days for 4 weeks straight, otherwise, you'll lose product. It can be physically demanding and monotonous work. But it's also incredibly fulfilling work, and it's a great example of a community-driven effort to accomplish something very important: providing food. So I think it falls into a similar category of "college is over-emphasized and we have a dwindling supply of trades-workers". While in school in a rural farm town, I never once heard anyone say "what about farming?" when discussing future career choices. It's not marketed as an attractive option. Maybe it's as simple as "farmers have the work-life balance of an emergency room doctor while making ~1/6th" (source: Dad is the farmer, Brother-in-law is the doctor) Anyway, it's a problem I think about a lot. I didn't get into farming, but in many ways I wish I had, because it's a highly undervalued skill with a very rewarding outcome: you feed communities. How do we change the narrative? Do we need policy changes? Continued technological advancement? A push to educate the next generation of farmers within schools? I'm not sure, but I don't think it's always as simple as saying "it doesn't pay enough". That _is_ an issue, but it's not the only issue.

sam_goody 5y ago
There was an artile on HN about the influence of movies on "cool". After Jurassic park, there was a huge uptick in paleontology, and everything else related, even Veterianism (!). Most of the currents that kids get from movies are destructive to society IMO, but if it could be tapped into - it is a source of influence. Humans naturally copy what they see. If a series of movies with the hero being an entomologist came out, it would do us good. If there were a bunch of farm boys that played with nature in a way that made it cool, we would harvest the benefits for generations.
delackner 5y ago
Certainly we need a cultural shift towards honoring ALL kinds of work, but if as you said, the work is hard, sporadic, and long hours, then of course no one wants to do it if there are other options that pay the same but lack those features.

pitaj 5y ago

Paying people to walk through fields picking weeds doesn't sound scalable or sustainable to me.

AlstZam 5y ago
It was for the last 11 000 years. With variabilities, but based on demographic only it was pretty scalable and sustainable.
- NullPrefix 5y ago
  A lot of slave labor was involved in the last 11 000 years.
- colinmhayes 5y ago
  Most of humanity was suffering for the past 11000 years. Almost everyone lived in extreme poverty.
- kube-system 5y ago
  A mere 125 years ago it required the majority of the US workforce to farm enough food for people to eat. The mechanization of agriculture enabled much of the technological and cultural progress of the past couple centuries.

partiallypro 5y ago

They actually pay pretty well considering ($15-20/hr in some cases,) it's just very hard work. You also have to consider that farms don't make much money. They don't have massive margins like Google and a single bad weather event can wipe out any profit for the year.

openasocket 5y ago

It's kind of a shitty job no matter how much you pay. The work is seasonal so the people doing this have to move around following the work. It's also in remote locations, there aren't apartments for rent right next to the farm. Often the farm has to provide housing, which of course means they will do whatever they can to cut costs. Internet and cell reception are going to be abysmal, nothing but farmland for miles in every direction. And you're constantly on the move following the next job. Don't get me wrong, there are some serious things that can and need to be done to improve the industry, but even with all of those fixed it's not a job for everyone.

sidibe 5y ago

Manual weeding is really not a job people want to do in the developed world. IMO it's the worst part of farming in that requires working at ground level all day and needs to be done every couple weeks. It will wipe you out physically. Typically people who have to do this for long and have any other job available to them will switch even for a pay cut, but farmers can't really offer much because food production is low-margin (and in the USA they are competing with farms that use herbicides).

ciconia 5y ago

I'm not sure that's really the reason, but at the same time it seems the overall tendency is to invest more in machinery and automation rather than pay better wages.