I don't feel that you're replying to what the parent poster is actually saying. It's not about asking farmers to make these changes by themselves and without a

I don't feel that you're replying to what the parent poster is actually saying. It's not about asking farmers to make these changes by themselves and without any sort of extra compensation. It's that we really should be looking at the entire system. If farmers couldn't afford to pay reasonable wages _and_ turn a profit, then, at the system level, the externality of those lost wages is being paid somewhere else _by_ someone else. We're just not recognizing that externality or worse, it's being hidden. And frequently in situations like this, where people aren't being paid livable wages, they turn to theft and other crimes. So one of the "externalities" we're talking about here is an increased crime rate. We then pay police to try to curb that, who are remarkably inefficient at reducing crime, so we have to over-pay to try to achieve that goal. If, instead, we formally recognized that externality and addressed it at the source -- for instance, like the parent poster suggested, by subsidies (which would almost certainly be cheaper than the increased police budget that addressing that externality would otherwise demand in our current climate) -- then farmers could pay reasonable wages and keep or even increase their margins to a comfortable level. It's not in our best interests to keep farmers poor or just scraping by either!