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Comment by IIAOPSW | Hacker News Reader

>"can Amerca's farms exist without breaking the law". The answer to which is, of course, yes.

How do you reach this conclusion?

Of course they could survive - they'll just have to raise prices accordingly. So far the American system has prioritized cheaper food over paying workers a decent wage, it seems like now we're on the trend to reverse that.

they'll just have to raise prices accordingly

But without matching the price rise with some sort of import tariff, would people still choose the more expensive American produce over the cheaper imports?

But the thing is, farmers don't really have that much control over the price.

Importing large numbers of foreign migrant workers is a recent phenomenon in agriculture. Farms managed just fine 20 years ago.

So why did the U.S. sign the Mexican Farm Labor Agreement in 1942? The Migrant Labor Agreement of 1951? Why did the UFW hold protests at the U.S. border in 1969-1973? Why did the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 specifically address agricultural workers?

Importing large numbers of foreign workers, migrant or otherwise, has been the backbone of the agricultural labor market in the U.S. since the country was founded. It's not necessarily a good thing, just not a recent thing by any means.

Mexican agricultural workers have always been a thing. But the concentration of farm output to a few regions of California is a recent phenomenon, and the resulting industrialization of agriculture was a thing.

When I was a teen in the early 90s, I worked on a 500 acre farm in upstate ny. At that time it was possible to support a family and a few workers on land like that with a diversified crop of dairy, hay, something like oats and a few other things. The neighboring farm grew vegetables.

That is no longer possible. 90% of farms within 75 miles <250 acres are hobby farms, growing subsidized corn, or are legacy dairy farms that will be subdivisions when the farmer is too old to work or his equipment wears out.

They could exist that way in the past, and they could feed the country, and even provide a surplus. What has changed in the laws of nature, that it is no longer viable, to produce food without importing slave workforce? I thought the USA had a civil war to end the kind of thinking you are representing.

Maybe the age of cheap food (a lot of which is thrown to the waste) ends, but it has never existed in many parts of the world.

> I thought the USA had a civil war to end the kind of thinking you are representing

I think you're over-reading the phrase "How do you reach this conclusion?". The author didn't suggest that it was necessary, only that they were interested in seeing your reasoning. The world is a complicated place, so it can be reasonable to assume a default position that either thing is possible.

They were not competing with food from abroad at that time.

It is my understanding that the US farming sector has always relied on continued access to large amounts of underpaid or slave labour.

Not really. The current situation is tail wagging the dog scenario. Between the politics of water in the west and decades of the Feds ignoring migrant workers, farms are fully corporate.

When you buy a container of strawberries in the market today, you're contributing to a global supply chain where companies own farms all over the Western Hemisphere. Operating companies like that which are like little command economies is expensive, and you as consumer don't want to pay for the layers of administration and attorneys needed.

So the workers pay.

We have millions of people who aren't working. Shipping in people from El Salvador is just a way to have a cheap, easy to control work force.

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