From Spain to Germany, farmers warn of fresh food shortages | Hacker News Reader

From Spain to Germany, farmers warn of fresh food shortages

bloomberg.com

464 pointsmontalbano567 comments

Got a butternut squash in your pantry? Maybe a couple of tomatoes? Cook it up for dinner and save some seeds! Wash off the pulp and dry them out on a paper towel. It's not too late to start some seedlings, and it's a nice way to pass the time. I've also been experimenting with different dried beans that we stocked up on, and most of them have a pretty high germination rate. Roma beans are super tasty and high in protein, though you need a lot of space to get a good amount of them. Lentils are super easy to sprout too.

Another great tip is that once you have a good sized tomato plant, it's super super easy to clone it. You just have to take a cutting at a node and let the stem soak in water. Rooting hormone helps speed it up, but it's possible to do it without. I've cloned about a dozen plants from a single tomato I accidentally started early. Needless to say I'm running out of window sills to stick them as it's still too cold to transplant them.

Frankly I saw this coming in January and started hundreds of seedlings of different tomatoes, hot peppers, squash, pumpkins, cucumber, zucchini, lettuce, and chard to share with my neighbours.

I'm a bit of a gardening nerd and had a big collection of unused seeds from prior seasons, but you'd be amazed at what you can grow that's already in your pantry or fridge. Potatoes are easy to get started but can be a little finicky with soil conditions.

I'm thinking I'll have quite a bit of time to spend in the garden in the coming months. Hopefully I can make a small difference in my community.

Thanks for this! Can you recommend some simple concise instructions on growing tomatoes?

I’ve explored a little in the past, but always seemed to run into fairly impenetrable instructions. A basic list of what to buy (in non-gardeners’ terminology) and some simple instructions would be great.

I'd be happy to! Tomatoes are super forgiving and are a great place to start.

The easiest thing is to pick up a seed packet at a garden supply store. I buy most of mine online or from Stokes. Drying out seeds is fairly easy, but seed packets are less work.

For starting seedlings you only need a few simple supplies. Ideally you have very light, "airy", soil. This usually sold as "seed starter" mix. You can make do with normal potting soil, or even whatever you can scrounge up from outside, but the seedling has to push its way up to the surface. So if your soil is chunky, or has stuff like woodchips in it, a seedling might struggle to breach the surface. A cheap way to make seed sprouting mix is to pass dry soil through a sifter. You can dry soil in the oven at a low temperature, but it's a bit stinky.

You should plant each seed around a 1/4 to a 1/2 inch deep in the soil. I usually lightly poke the soil with my pinky, drop one seed in the hole, and brush some surrounding soil over top. The important thing here is to leave the soil as loose as possible, so don't compact the soil at all if you can help it. Like I mentioned above, the sprout has to poke its way out all on its own, and it's not very strong. You can plant it deeper, but it'll take longer to reach the surface, or may not at all.

The ideal place to plant seedlings is in a covered seed tray, though any type of pot will do. If you have a bigger pot, you can plant a bunch of seeds in the same pot. You'd be surprised how big a plant can get in a tiny pot (maybe 2 cubic inches) before running out of space to spread its roots. If you have a good liquid fertilizer (I have a big jug from a hydroponic supply store that I've been going through for two years now) you can basically grow it anything. Some people use clay pellets or rockwool. A plant needs something to hold onto as it grows. Soil is convenient in that it provides both structure and nutrients, and it's what you already have outside.

Keep your seedlings in a warm place and never let them dry out. I like using a spray bottle to avoid disturbing the soil when things are just getting started. A covered seed tray keeps the moisture and heat in. Plastic wrap, or some other clear cover works fine in a pinch.

Once the plants start getting their "true leaves", i.e. the second set of leaves that look different from the initial seedling leaves, you can remove the cover to give it space to reach up.

Most tomatoes need staking (one wooden stake is ideal, bamboo is great, metal cages are common but I find them annoying) to keep them upright once they start getting flowers. Loosely tie the plant to the stake with yarn or twine.

If you intend on keep your tomatoes in a pot instead of the ground or some sort of raised bed, make sure the pot is fairly large and either has a drainage hole or some rocks at the bottom of it for water to pool. You never want the soil to be soupy.

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Edit: not super concise, sorry about that :) Feel free to ask any questions you might have. Also, don't be afraid to experiment. I was lucky enough to have a mother who grew up on a farm teach me most of what I know, but it really just boils down to:

light + nutrients + water + heat = food

The art is knowing how much of each.

Do you have a blog? I love your writing style.

These are great tips. This year I also started some seedlings early — I used some left over egg cartons as containers, and put them on top of my clothes dryer which is next a window and often warm.

My sugar snap peas shot up the fastest so those are already in the ground. Thinking of putting the rest of my seedlings in the ground this weekend and starting some more sprouts in egg cartons.

Thanks for the kind words! I do, jcdl.net. Only one post on there ranting about ThinkPads though. I never thought to use egg cartons, what a good idea.

Thanks for the additional detail! :)

Growing tomatoes depends a lot on the climate you are living in. Tomatoes grow and ripen ideally above 20°celsius. You can do this also in your flat. Or on a balcony.

Get 1 bucket (volume 10 L) per plant if you do it on a balcony. or on patio next to you southern wall.

never water them from above. tomatoes do not like wet leaves.

if you can get a 2m stick as a support for the plant. have the plants at least 50cm from each other.

to get them to grow, get some seeds from ideally some heirloom variety. if not that's fine. just do not use seeds from supermarket tomatoes as they tend to produce wildly different offsprings (read about F1 hybrids if interested).

get small 8 - 10cm grow pots and put in growing soil. put 1 - 3 seeds on he soil and make it slightly wet. keep it damp, but not wet. when it is too big for the growing pot move it to the 10l pot (don't forget to ensure holes in the bottom).

it might help if you use a little bit of tomato fertilizer.

hope this helps.

> Can you recommend some simple concise instructions on growing tomatoes?

Simple and concise: Don't start with those. Tomato is not the more easy crop to grow. I would suggest to start with Cucurbitaceae like Cucumber or Zucchini, much more easier as long as they have lots of nitrogen.

If you provide some support to climb, Cucumbers can be raised even next to a window. The other need much more space. You pick them continuously when they are still small and non bitter.

You could even raise lattice and harvest it (one leaf at a time) before the end of the quarantine. Fast growing creature. Their only problem is that they are mostly water.

If you absolutely want to try tomato and your climate is correct the easier are the cherry tomato. They give less food par plant but can still produce lots of tiny tomatoes in a continous harvest. Is much more fungus resistant than the other varieties and very ornamental.

I have had a garden for 4 out of the past six years and tomatoes have always been the easiest plant for me to grow an abundance of. That was in Michigan, Missouri, and Seattle too so it was pretty easy across the entire continent.

The concise method is, start them indoors in a starter kit in the window(right now is the time to do this), move them to a raised bed in the sun after they’ve sprouted and are healthy with roots, and make sure they get a lot of water. That’s it. Always had way too many tomatoes.

This is not a criticism, nobody knows until they are taught, just trying to help you improve your use of English (which is otherwise excellent).

The phrase "much more easier" is incorrect. The word "easier" loosely means "more easy" so "more easier" would loosely mean "more more easy" which sounds wrong :-)

Correct usages are "easy", "much easier", and "even easier".

In your case above you can lose the "more" and just use "much easier". If you were to add another suggestion that you thought was easier than cucumber or zucchini then you would describe that third set of options as "even easier".

(Yes, I am stuck home alone; and yes, I do have too much time on my hands lol)

I appreciate your correction and effort. Thank you.

You do not need much. A pot and a shovel will do for the starter.

Try potatoes or carrots. Potatoes sprout anyway if you do not put them cold and dark so there is not so much to do.

If you buy "earth" make sure it is clean (i.e. sieve it or search with hands)! Here it often contains stuff like cockchafer grubs.

We us some old cheap wax cloth like this: https://www.amazon.de/dp/B079SHYV6S/ref=psdc_12964001_t1_B07... So we do not have the dirt on the floor when planting.

BTW: Carrots can be stored for very long. Here is a video how carrots are stored usually in winter time at industry scale. But you can do this at home as well:

https://youtu.be/tZu_e4OkZ6A?t=153

Simple? Live in the US? Go to Home Depot and buy a tomato plant: cost about $4. While you're there get a 5 gallon bucket and a bag of topsoil.

Go home, transplant the plant into the bucket of soil and water it. Put it in a place with lots of sunlight and water it periodically. You'll have tomatoes in about 3 months.

Yeah, you can start from seed, but without experience that can be tedious and it requires far more care and attention. Also, end of March is about as late as I'd want to be starting tomato seeds.

Is there any simple way to speed up / increase chances of germination (of tomatoes, beans, peas, lentils, pumpkins)? E.g. by covering the soil (where the seeds are) with paper / plastic / cloth (as a makeshift greenhouse, to increase temperature and/or humidity), or something similar?

Heat and consistent moisture. I keep some of my seedlings under grow lights in my furnace room beside my servers. Plastic seed trays with clear tops are excellent to reduce evaporation.

Electric heat mats are awesome to stick under seed trays in the sprouting stage.

In my experience, heat is the most significant accelerator for germination. You also want very loose and light soil to help the seeds poke out as easily as possible. "Seed starter" mix is ideal, see my other comment in this subthread for more on that.

Try the paper towel trick: wrap the seeds in a moist paper towel (not too wet, or it will encourage fungus growth). Then, keep them inside a ziplock bag in a warm place for a couple of days, checking on them every day. I keep them on top of the refridgerator where it's nice and warm.

Beans sprout super fast! For very dry seeds (lentils, beans, peas, edamamme) you could soak them in water overnight and just use the seeds that settle down after they've absorbed some moisture.

Ditto. The only downside to this method is having to transplant twice: once to soil pots after sprouting, then to the ground.

If the seeds are in paper towel, wouldn't you just plant it as is and let it decompose?

You want the roots finding real food as soon as possible before exhausting the seed reserves.

Oh yes. You'll destroy the roots if you try to separate it. What I meant is that you will typically only sprout seeds that way. Then you put them in a small starter pot or similar with soil to get them to continue growing inside. Then transplanting them into the ground once ready. This is opposed to just sprouting in the starter pot.

> Ditto. The only downside to this method is having to transplant twice: once to soil pots after sprouting, then to the ground.

Consider getting a soil block maker, it makes propagation and transplanting so much easier:

https://growagoodlife.com/soil-blocks-for-growing-seedlings-...

I'm one of today's lucky 10,000! Thanks for sharing I will definitely look into getting one of those.

"Potatoes are easy to get started but can be a little finicky with soil conditions."

mm have you tried fertilizing with poop?

That might make things worse, you can have too much fertility. Depending... Potatoes like sand soil. Beyond that I'm not a potato growing expert.

I guess this was not a serious suggestion, unless you're in Mars.

There is very little written on the use of vegan poop. One argument against human poop is that it can transfer disease. If it is your own that doesn't seem all that harmful. It might even help convince other humans not to eat your crops.

There are a lot of bacteria in the colon, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's safe to have them everywhere, even if they are your own.

It would be necessary to store poop dry, separate from urine, and to compost it to make it somewhat safe. Usually, a dry toilet is used for this. However, it might be difficult to install and operate the whole process if you're not living in the countryside.

> That might make things worse, you can have too much fertility. Depending... Potatoes like sand soil. Beyond that I'm not a potato growing expert.

Potatoes are super forgiving, I've grown nice sized potatoes and carrots in very heavily compacted clay soil before (it was the farm's 2nd season amending the soil with sand but it was pretty bad) however, potatoes can be grown in many other growing mediums, straw or hay can be prepared if you don't want to go with a soil based system:

https://www.bettervegetablegardening.com/growing-potatoes-in...

The best part is its a closed loop growing system, as after harvest you can use it to add to the compost or even as mulch. I personally prefer soil gardening, and believe it determines taste enough to not want to do it, but if I would do it if I was first starting out.

San Francisco just became the fertilizer capital of the world.

Please do not recommend fertilizing plants for human consumption with human manure!!

It is a practice that has been abandoned for good reasons. The reasons are the propagation of pathogens right into your food chain. You can compost the manure and use that compost for fertilization of fruit trees in early spring. But please do not use it on vegetable plants, leafy greens and such.

Thank you for both having the foresight to plan(t) as well as the willingness to help those around you.

Otherwise you could end up like my neighbor with a strategic reserve level of toilet paper, proud to hoard yet share with no one even when the stores are empty.

I really do not understand this toilet paper thing. I mean as long as there is water, why people do not wash their asses. It is cleaner anyway...

When I was young and we visited grandparents, we used newspaper.

Not to detract from your overall point, but it's not like most people have newspaper these days.

Your comment immediately reminded me this commercial : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbMOLg-2SFw

That’s what I’ve always said. If you smeared a bit of poop on your face or arm, you wouldn’t be content with just wiping it down with a thin piece of toilet paper. You’d probably shower!

So why should your ass be any different?

I use my face and my arm to engage with people, and prepare and eat food. I don't generally use my arse for these activities.

Face is an exaggeration. Its unusual to touch peoples face unless you are very close to them .

It's different because I don't use my ass to open doors, type on computers, prepare/eat food, or scratch my eye. Your face and arms, however, get involved in those activities sooner or later. I don't care if my poop cannon has a bit of residue around the rim that paper can't quite remove, handling shit is literally what it does every day, and it's otherwise stowed away safely.

Granted, I bet a warm-water bidet feels fantastic and I would probably never go back if I had one.

Well take a guess why the left hand in some regions of the world is considered dirty even there is water around to wash? Because toilet paper is seen as improper cleaning.

BTW: You can use something like a small washing towel (I do not know what the proper english word is - in German it is Waschlappen). So you do not have to touch your shit:)

Waschlappen would be something like “Wash Cloth”. Lappen is one of my favourite German words.

Face flannel, I think. The Dutch is "washandje".

I've thought the same thing and after spending time in Asia I got really accustomed to using a water hose. This whole thing (among other things) has made me question the practicality of toilet paper even more, strongly considering installing a hose in the bathroom.

I had the same reaction at first, but after a bit of thinking I reached this:

You can do without it, sure, but if you don't have a bidet then it's inconvenient and annoying. Toilet paper is cheap, easy to store and it does not degrade (in a meaningful timeframe).

Basically, unless you are really space constrained, there are no downsides to having more than needed, so why not buy extra?

I say this as someone who had to go without a couple days because the stores had been cleared of any toilet paper.

I don't understand it because between my girlfriend and me we seem to use about a roll per week. I thought it was because I usually take a dump at work, but even after lock down our usage doesn't seem to have changed significantly. And yes if it does run out then the shower is right next to the toilet and I have visited Nepal a few time where water is the way to clean.

(When I was young schools and public toilets always seemed to have horrendous tracing paper like stuff).

Yeah, it took me a while to understand this behavior. However, it seems you can make a face mask to protect against CV-19 using toilet paper. Please do your research, I found too many links. In the situation you don't have a proper mask, a plastic mask, with holes, to keep toilet paper on your face may safe your life these days.

Start with greens, many only take 4-8 weeks before their ready. Some radishes are ready in 30 days. The rest you mention outside of Chard take 90 days or so.

Yes, I'll also be directly sowing radishes, beets, and climbing green beans. I hoping for multiple crops of greens throughout the year. I will say though that my peppers and tomatoes were probably started a little early for my zone. Some are already bearing fruit in my brighter areas.

The 'preppers' have amassed quite a bit of info on preparing for just such an outcome; I'd definitely recommend hearing them out. The govt. IMO really can't be trusted at a time like this. Reporting from here in India, the overreaction of the state has thrown a wrench into the workings of an, admittedly broken, food supply system.

To add, if like me you don’t have a “green thumb”, know that it’s not a terminal condition. I found the book by Kevin Espiritu to be pretty good at giving a crash course and practical advice on how to grow edibles. And it doesn’t take much: 5 gallon buckets, perlite, compost, loam, and you’re in business.

I like your initiative, the attention and how you've acted to the what I think has proven to be a DIRE logistical and production problem since at least 2008.

But, I noticed this part:

> Got a butternut squash in your pantry? Maybe a couple of tomatoes?

Both of those are out of season, the Butternut squash has decent shelf life, so could have been harvested and stored back in the Fall. However, most of the store stuff you get as a perennial, especially those tomatoes, are going to be hybrids that have sterile seeds.

I really do hope that this Outbreak is what makes Backyard and Community Gardens come back in a way not seen outside of Europe since WWII.

I agree that making clones is an awesome way to increase yield and maintain good genetic lines, this is actually how most MJ/Hemp people got their early genetic lessons--grandmothers and mothers who had spent time with them in the Garden telling them how to preserve desirable genetics.

And it paid off really well for those who could provide a steady and stable genetic line, I met a few of them.

I agree that potatoes are the best intro to gardening as its by far the easiest and if planned correctly can yield quite a lot of harvest for the limited space (think vertical planters).

Maybe its because I had to do this at large scale that my brain has shifted to outsourcing anything not deemed super valuable (fruit tree clones or High CBD experiments) to have in a Nursery, but I really am a fan of these guys:

https://www.rareseeds.com/

I was hoping to get the Catalog this year to share with others as the Gardening Season is coming up, so if anyone is interested in doing that I can buy/send you the money via BTC if you have the hardware to do that as its total Gardening-pr0n!

https://www.rareseeds.com/store/whole-seed-catalog/2020-whol...

> I'm thinking I'll have quite a bit of time to spend in the garden in the coming months. Hopefully I can make a small difference in my community.

So rad, I'll keep an eye on your posts this season! others as the Gardening Season progresses.

Don't forget that it takes a full acre of land to produce enough food for one person.

I’m a big fan of Rare Seeds as well. I got a big order from them early this year.

Coworkers in Shenzhen are already saying that more fancier foods are already getting scarcer in the inland China, and prices are going up by day.

China has done a massive livestock slaughter campaign when the quarantine was declared. That has actually depressed the food prices quite a bit for the first months, but after that, the prices have shot up. This is how they got that much meat: https://mustsharenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Wuhan-R...

The scariest part of it is that China relies ENORMOUSLY on the imported food, despite accounting for more than 20% of global food production.

The government has expected to shut everything down, including food production, and weather the crisis by relying on the remaining food in the supply chain. China has spent a big portion of its national food reserve too: https://pbs.twimg.com/ext_tw_video_thumb/1220714156753653760...

They planned to restock quickly with overseas imports after the lockdown was to be lifted. Now that overseas supply is a big question mark...

I heard the same is going in much of the world. Agricultural business is facing shutdown, and they are cashing out their livestock, seedstock, and trying to get an early harvest done before the lockdowns hit their countries.

And people were saying that we will never see a famine in Asia in the 21st century. That optimism was premature...

Your second link goes to a still image. I assume you mean this [1] video? Though I don't see how that supports the statement that China has spent a big portion of its national reserve.

[1] https://twitter.com/laurie_garrett/status/122072527639456563...

China imports a gigantic amount of food, and ports were first to be hit by disruption. As a person who works in OEM electronics in China, I can tell at least that.

So, at any normal day, China would've been eating 30-32% of world's food by value, while producing 20% of it by itself.

Agriculture has been on shutdown for the past 2.5 months. Farms have slaughtered a large portion of their livestock, and a big portion of the seedstock has been used for food in the last few months too.

Chinese national reserves were said to be able to keep the country going for 3 months under a strict rationing regime, which we haven't seen, but at least we know by many accounts that meat reserves have been released all across China with no restraint.

Now try guessing how much of it left.

P.S. On ports. I initially wrote them being shut down, I correct that they are facing major disruption, with a lot of ships missing their berthing timeslots

Certainly sounds plausible. I was trying to point out that the video doesn't do much in substantiating these claims. If you have another source, I'd be interested in reading more.

Where is the source on Chinese ports being closed? I work in the international trade sector and since March 9th we’ve had record breaking activity on our system.

Even looking at AIS you can see 1000+ dockings over the next 3 days at Shenzhen - https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/data/?asset_type=arrivals_d...

Also air freight volume is off the charts! We’re starting to see airlines use their 777’s with cargo in the belly and boxes on the seats.

I can’t speak to the food security situation at all. However, from my vantage point, supply lanes are screamingly full of something.

How that plays out for individual products ... shrug ...

> Also air freight volume is off the charts! We’re starting to see airlines use their 777’s with cargo in the belly and boxes on the seats.

Yes, after resumption of commercial activities, air freight was record cheap for a few weeks, than it was hit again by airport closures.

Now I got news that SZ airport will be reopening again for freight only flights under some special regime

As for ports, we have a container stuck in Yantian since Feb 14, no news from the shipper when they can load. The freight broken says the shipping company says the ship is there moored, but they have no permission berth or to do anything besides pass instant noodles to the crew.

Yeah, it's best to say we are having a monumental pileup that is continuing since the spring festival

Has the empty container imbalance problem been fixed?

> China would've been eating 30-32% of world's food by value, while producing 20% of it by itself

References? And of course, that is by value... I’m in NZ and it’s been in the news about how our our crayfish (lobster in US) exports to China crashed, but that’s a high value food. China imports a lot of “unnecessary” luxury foods from NZ (deer, fruit, salmon, mussels, etc), although I don’t know anything about volumes of staples like wheat.

> crayfish (lobster in US)

Crayfish is crawfish in the US, not lobster

Crayfish in NZ is the size of lobster in the US.

Now I wonder how big their lobsters are.

Technically, they're langoustine.

Literally, they are kōura. Technically, they are https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jasus_edwardsii

Edit: the dictionary says langoustine are another species, although one of the joys of English is making it mean what you want!

[EDITED. I was talking of the wrong species]

There are some giant crayfishes in Australia. Much bigger than the standard old world crayfishes. Some (Cherax) can be raised in captivity and are very similar to lobsters in size and color, except that they are non marine.

Closing sea ports should not to be a problem for those species at short term (as long as there are reserves of crayfish food remaining of course).

NZ Crayfish are called Rock Lobster in the US.

http://www.leefishusa.com/products/lobster/spiny

One of my clients in NZ sells mussels to US and China and has had to close down production as you dont need them for your restaurants anymore. No other food issues here I can see our local supermarket was well stocked and quiet, though I am out in a rural area

Relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22711661

I have only heard of kiwifruit going unharvested. We’ll all soon know (if product has no coolstores, and assuming farm to supermarket delay is about a week).

> Agriculture has been on shutdown for the past 2.5 months.

Can you explain that in more relevant terms? AFAIK agriculture has been shut down in the US for the past 2.5 months as well (actually more like past 5-6 months), simply because it's not the growing season.

What are the different growing seasons in China, for different kinds of crops?

There is no single growing season in a country as vast as the United States. Hell, look at a state like California with a huge variety in latitude and altitude you can grow pretty much anything at any time in the year somewhere in California.

I stand corrected, but I think the meat reserves were touched first to keep prices down with the african swine plague?

Well before this crisis in mid 2019, China culled a majority of it's hog herd. I think it was African Swine Flu if I remember right. So they were already low on home produced protein when this struck.

The pork supply gap is too big for any national reserve, the gap is 20 million tons. That's why China is importing Canadian pork despite the Huawei situation.

Compounding the matter is the party bureaucracy effectively killed most small farms since villages were completed sealed off, chickens weren't allowed to be sold (or killed in fear of bird flu) and feeds can't be sent in.

The pork shortage drove the chicken market to overheat last year and just right when they were suffering from oversupply during the winter this virus hit. Double whammy.

Likely coming to the US too, big suppliers are ringing very small producers to fill in orders because US can't get any Mexican farmhands in. Canada is exempting and flying in migrant labours. There's also panic in meat supply chains with Tyson strikes. I'd like to think Canada is safe but prices would probably get nutty if there's excess US demand unless we ban exports. Also migrant labours live like sardines, 20+ sharing a 2 bedroom kind of density. Huge infection vector.

RE: China, last I read, China is nominally food secure - produce enough calories to feed everyone domestically on basic staples. There's also massive waste and spoilage in the supply chain. I don't predict a famine, or 5 missing meals to revolution, but shortage of luxury items is probably expected.

That said, global food supply shortage/shock due to everyone adjusting to COVID is definitely "the cure is worse than the disease" scenario.

On the other hand, with everyone being at home, and a lot of bullshit tasks being eliminated/deferred (my driver's license is automatically good for an extra 6 months), caloric demand is probably down 10%.

As our muscles atrophy, basal metabolic rates will decrease too.

Undetermined what kind of hit to population COVID will cause, but I'm estimating <1%.

demand is up in my house, proximity to food storage seems to trump caloric needs

Time to hide food around the house and make dinner a hunt.

Same here. For God's sake. I am more worried about getting diabetes than coronavirus. :p

Agreed. And it's not even due to proximity to the fridge (I work from home, distance to fridge didn't change) - but all the stress from watching the entire human civilization being dismantled by the coronavirus is making me hungry more often.

Ironically, for countries that can contain properly, maybe even net gain in life. HK doctors was talking about how flu season ended months early due to all the measures being taken. I'm guessing road fatalities, work place accidents and all sorts of other causes of death is way down.

Not to mention the massive spike in birth rates that I expect 9 months from now (sooner for China)

The prolonged stress is probably shortening some people's lives. Not sure this is a net positive even if we just count in life-years gained.

>massive waste and spoilage in the supply chain.

Maybe in the west, but not the case in China, food is relatively expensive, so very little is wasted, even poisonous rice can find snack factory buyers. Restaurant waste is colleted by small pig farms.

China's food supply chain has a lot of inefficiencies spread over many small farmsteads with old technology and poor conditions instead of highly mechanized large agriculture farms in the west. I don't remember the exact numbers but lost in harvest, storage, transportation, refining was equivalent to total food imports before it reaches consumers. There's also massive waste in food services, the number is something ridiculous like enough to feed 400 million annually. This was from a study from ~5 years ago.

What makes rice poisonous, and how is it made safe for use in snacks?

Possibly referring to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice#Bacillus_cereus

Rice with heavy metal such as cadmium, it's pretty common so many don't even test it, those that are unfortunate to be tested can still be sold to rice snack factories.

I have friends who are locomotive engineers, none of them have been called out for 3 weeks. Everything is stopping.

I think the US is going to learn why it’s dangerous to centralize food supply. Most of the local farmers in my region (upstate ny) are bankrupt, and much of our production or processing of food is from far away. The half and half from my grocer is processed in Virginia.

The crisis started not even a month ago. What kind of business are people running that go bankrupt in a couple weeks?

At least where I come from, most local farmers can't "go bankrupt" as they are family businesses and have very low operating costs - worst case is sitting idle at home.

There's "family farming" where you have a plot of land handed down to you and you tend to it yourself. A few tractors with PTO extensions, and handled by your family and maybe a few local workers. You'd sell to local grocery chains and markets.

Then there's "family farming", where you have a fleet of GPS-and-climate-control-equipped John Deere's on finance and invest heavily in automated irrigation and sell to wholesalers who provide to national chains.

The former are probably fine. The latter, who provide food for the country, are generally running on huge credit lines with payments to meet and in uncertain times like this can (and regularly do) very quickly go bankrupt.

A bill to bailout farmers will pass the house and senate with broad bipartisan support.

The later in best off. They are businessmen who know their numbers. Their biggest problem now is low crop prices, a situation that goes back to 2015. An increase in demand is the best things for them.

Agriculture is considered essential infrastructure in the US and not stopped. Except they can't get immigrant labor but that is a problem for the small vegetable farmers who don't need or buy the expensive equipment anyway.

Farmers have taken the current administration very hard, and the previous administration wasn’t a bright light either, especially if you’re not a Midwest grain farmer.

Between trade policies (Canadian onion farmers, for example, are importing subsidized onions for 25% of the production cost) and the federal government no longer enforcing anti-trust law (groups of grocery wholesalers are now colluding to set prices via reverse auctions) this is one of the most bleak periods for farmers in the last century.

Other operations are like tenant farmers. Chicken producers are a great example of that. They basically own risk.

Many businesses operate on the edge or need lines of credit that may or may not continue to exist.

Im not sure where you are from, but in general, farming is a cutthroat business with small margins in the US

The exception is rich hobby farmers who have no need to make a profit and some specialty crops.

> ... none of them have been called out for 3 weeks. Everything is stopping.

I had naively assumed (in the US) that agriculture and rail would be considered essential industries and continue as usual? Is this all due to migrant labor issues?

They are, and they do. What you're seeing in Europe and the US is purely a migrant labour shortage.

A bit off topic, but regarding the railroads:

A big chunk of US rail traffic demand over the last decade has been oil, which was already dropping as pipeline construction caught up with demand under the new administration's pipeline policies.

(Tangent: For those not familiar, check out Buffet's meeting/deal with Obama admin re: pipeline policy after Berkshire picked up UP stock for cheap.)

The railroads enjoyed a virtual monopoly on additional oil transport capacity for years, but I suspect the latest drop in oil demand might signal the last element needed to completely end that era.

If true, then they might see a slight/temp bump in rail demand in a few months as petroleum storage fills up, when tanker cars are repositioned as a last resort storage option for over-supply.

Point being, the abrupt drop in rail traffic likely has more to do with the drop in oil demand than grain or any other rail transported product.

Which you could still ultimately blame on covid, but it's not necessarily representative of a collapse in multiple markets. Just oil trimming the excess.

These guys aren’t doing oil runs. In this area, the rail traffic for oil pretty much died last year.

>> And people were saying that we will never see a famine in Asia in the 21st century. That optimism was premature...

I wonder whether people will decide to take their chances with the coronavirus if faced with famine?

Something tells me that people will risk it with the coronavirus rather than die of starvation.

At some point enough harvests will be missed because of lockdown that famines become inevitable. The choice to risk it will probably me made too late.

Not sure why I'm getting downvoted. Food takes months to grow and needs to be harvested within a short window. By the time people realize there's a famine coming it will be too late. Just look at how we could have prepared in January for this virus if people weren't so shortsighted.

which country (except China in Hubei) actually locked down agriculture?

US relies on farm workers from Mexico and is not letting as many in, partly due to suspension of visa operations.

Kazakhstan suspends exports of food staples They are the #10 Global Wheat Exporter

[1] https://www.agriculture.com/markets/newswire/update-1-kazakh...

they are still producing though?

I'm downvoting this because it's a huge claim without adequate evidence. Feel free to cite some sources showing what % of harvests have been missed, etc, and I'll change my downvote.

Migrants can't make it to harvests because countries/states are locked down. Isn't that literally in the article?

There won't be any sources for a while because this is literally just starting.

I mean 3billion people are on lockdown of some sort globally right now. Not hard to imagine it may be hard for workers to get to farms across borders, or even within borders. CA alone will probably see a shortage of migrants. No, I don't know for sure but I'm speculating that it's quite likely.

Supply chains have also been strained because people have been panic buying for what, 3 weeks now? You can't just snap your fingers and double your supply of vegetables.

So, to put it bluntly, people are sitting on ass and their food crops are rotting in the field?

Even if you do nothing the market will probably fix it: Less food in the markets > high demand drives up prices > higher salaries > slightly lower prices

At some point some people are hungry enough to get a... shall we say... real job?

With some regulatory sanity we subsidize it a bit.

Perhaps we should test and quarantine the farm workers when money stops being an issue.

So in other words, after one famine where a large fraction of the population dies, the market will be better afterwards?

Especially with anti-price-gouging laws - this process is explicit forbidden from happening during a crisis.

nah, the regulators will move in and save us from ourselves.

Regulators might be able to legislate food into existence in counties with strategic reserves, but not all places are so lucky. If there isn't enough calories produced, people would die. Most in low GDP countries which are net food importers.

What if there’s simply not enough food?

You harvest what you grow. If there is not enough food we haven't planted enough.

All we need to do is create an app to pick produce on demand, i.e. the Uber of migrant labor. All the hipsters in SF will flock to the central valley for gig work in the fields - problem solved. (I'm only half kidding. If lots of people are out of jobs and there are lots of jobs without people to fill them, it seems like a no brainer, yes?)

Huh? The un already warned about this.

Also, its also not that simple as stated by op.

Its also a supply chain issue. Which could be worse than anything else.

Drivers getting sick. Cargo ship captains getting sick etc etc etc.

Stuff might stop coming even if available in China.

How do you repair your farmers tech? Especially sometimes it is licked behind a paywall, where you cant just use any wheel. It must be from company xxx.

We will find out soon that those paywalls will cause real real real world issues

In a month or so, once the daily deaths subside, people will risk it with the coronavirus rather than having a recession turn into a depression. This will be the correct choice.

ennnnnnnnt. That's the buzzer, signaling that this is some bullshit. No one wants to die period. full stop. Greedy to the very end.

Guess what? Everyone dies. And every day is a choice between things that increase that risk.

Saying "no one wants to die, stop being greedy!" as if you can eliminate all deaths through a simple action is a nice low effort slogan that doesn't make any sense in the real world.

I don't know, an all out war on death could potentially work? We won't know until we try? It would have to involve a lot more than "just" living longer. We already have a lot of that effect. So much that migrants have to produce our food. shrug

> Guess what? Everyone dies

The unpleasant part is not solely people dying, it's the volunteering of other people dying by people who assume they won't die from it, and not for their own survival but to keep a level of personal comfort and luxury.

Assume you are in the group who would die, but economic sacrifice keeps you alive. Now, hands up if you are willing to trade that - to definitely die in April 2020, or suicide today, to prop the world GDP up for a few minutes. What, nobody?

Now assume instead that you're definitely in the group who will be unemployed and bankrupted by the economic costs, but you get to survive COVID-19 and do whatever you can to survive after. Hands up if you would prefer this to the guaranteed death situation? What is that, basically everybody with their hands up?

If you don't believe in the importance of GDP enough to die for it, only enough to support others dying for it, perhaps you really have different motives to the ones you're saying.

Economic conditions have real and immediate health consequences too.

For example, in 2010 US unemployment briefly grew about 6% to a total of 10% in the US and there were 40,000 additional deaths from cancer alone[1]. When you consider heart disease, other illness, drug abuse, and suicide, the numbers are much greater. The often cited number of 40k for each percent unemployment may not be far off if these factors are taken together. We may have already volunteered hundreds of thousands of Americans to die from the economic fallout. If food scarcity becomes and issue, we may have already volunteered millions in the 3rd world to starve to death...

I'm not saying that I know what the correct choice is here, but it isn't as simple as saving lives vs GDP.

[1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

This trend also holds true in the OECD where social programs are more common because there are still budgetary constraints on centralized healthcare. Here is a Meta-analysis showing that the risk of death was 63% higher among those who experienced unemployment in the US AND Europe

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3070776/

Put "COVID-19 deaths" in "can't revive the dead" category, and put "helping people not feel suicidal" in "maybe possible to change" category. Your first link about cancer deaths and unemployment states "Access to health care could underlie these associations", that can go in "maybe possible to affect". "Budgetary constraints on centralized healthcare" - the UK NHS has just had 750,000 volunteers sign up to help out in one week which wasn't part of the budget, so that can go in "maybe possible to affect". The UK government spends £130Bn/year on the NHS and £120Bn/year on education. Half a year of no education for half a year of doubled NHS spending .. that isn't a trivial thing to do, but it's still more plausible than raising the dead, so put it towards the "could maybe affect that" side of things.

Does it have to be "GDP falls and nothing can change to respond to that"?

The UDSA says[1] the United States wastes 30-40% of its food each year - $100+Billion. This ought to mean the food supply could contract 30% and it would be conceivable for nobody to eat less at all, not even go hungry and save money not buying food to throw it in the trash. Most people are overweight, it ought to be possible that the food supply could contract a lot more than 30% for a short period, and not only could it still be enough food to keep everyone alive, many people would get healthier from it happening. Currently the poor would starve and the rich would thrive, but surely that isn't the only way things could be? It's imaginable that a skilled orator could convince people to not spend $100Bn on food to throw in the trash, but to donate it to disease response instead - that's the entire UK NHS budget for many months. That won't apply in developing countries, but plants don't have COVID-19, nor do most humans, and most humans who do, recover. Food scarcity issues are still going to be about resource distribution and logistics, not about actual scarcity of food; not trivial problems which can change with the snap of the fingers, but easier than raising the dead, aren't they?

And even, even, if you don't like being alive in a poorer world, and wish you had died of COVID-19 instead, you can still suicide then, it isn't either-or. But you can't go the other way, regret dying of COVID-19 and then choose to try the alternative problems instead.

[1] https://www.usda.gov/foodwaste/faqs

First off, I wanted to say thanks for the thoughtful response. Second, I wanted to clarify my position in light of your last line.

>And even, even, if you don't like being alive in a poorer world, and wish you had died of COVID-19 instead, you can still suicide then, it isn't either-or. But you can't go the other way, regret dying of COVID-19 and then choose to try the alternative problems instead.

I am in no way concerned about the outcome for myself of my immediate family. We are extremely low risk, have secure income, and savings in cash. I fully expect we will come out of this event better than we went in. In fact, the harder the crash, the better off we will likely be. That said, there are billions (literally) of people on this planet which were struggling and often failing to meet their basic health and nutritional needs. We should be mind be mindful of how our response will impact them.

On to the rest of your comments, I see two main points. please let me know if I misstated them.

1) Covid deaths today are irreversible, future deaths can be mitigated

I agree with this in principle, but in practice I am much more pessimistic that societies will mitigate the 2nd order effects of our response. People are notably bad at balancing highly visible costs today, with less visible and costs in the future. Societies could have come together with radical mitigations to reduce deaths from the 2009 global recession or any of the famines in recent decades[1], but they didn't because they were far away and not obvious.

If I were to summarize my main point, it is that we need to have the right stakeholders considering the long and short term perspective crafting our response to this pandemic, and economic considerations are a valid part of minimizing the overall death toll. Doctors have moral obligation to look out for the best interests of their patients and do not take economic considerations into account, nor should they. We don't want them to decide if the cost of a cancer medication could be better spent feeding the poor, but that doesn't mean the tradeoff doesn't exist.

When deciding how to manage this epidemic, doctors, economists, actuaries, and politicians all need to be involved in crafting the response. In order to minimize the death toll, you need to make accurate predictions of outcome and human behavior. Over-optimism or over-pessimism will lead to more deaths.

2) Existing food waste can be repurposed to feed the poor.

I wholeheartedly agree that food scarcity issues are still going to be about resource distribution and logistics. There will not be widespread famine in the US or UK, but there could be in poor food importing countries sub-Saharan Africa or parts of Asia. Plants will grow and food will be still produced in other countries, but if their economies tank, they will not have the money to buy it.

3) Solving these problems later is easier than raising the dead.

It all depends on how likely you think the solutions are and the death toll for each. If you risk 2 people tomorrow to save 1 more today, your solutions needs to be 50-50 to break even. There is obviously a point where this tradeoff results in more lost lives unless you believe you must always act to save every person you can today.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_famines

No, you don't allow or push people to die just for a few extra greenbacks.

More people die daily from car accidents than from the pandemic. People don't abandon cars just yet.

The danger of the pandemic is that it can grow much bigger if we fail to throttle it. But when the number of daily deaths from the pandemic will stabilize at some low enough level, or, better yet, will be falling with time, people will again consider the risk acceptable, and will go on with their lives and further pursuit of happiness, not mere survival.

In average around 100-150 people die in car accidents each day in the US.

Yesterday 520 people have died because of bat-flu.

Human civilisation has reached the point where keeping our fake paper moving is more important than staying alive. How exciting!

Unfortunately life expectancy and quality of life is very strongly correlated to GDP.

I’m not saying we can’t live without money, or anything like that. But modern society strongly relies on complex economies for even basic functions like food supply.

The health of that economy can be roughly measured using GDP, a significant drop in GDP (such as a depression) strongly suggest that economy isn’t healthy, and then the basics (like food) stop working.

Unfortunately plenty of people already rely on food banks to avoid starvation. You can’t feed an entire country like that.

The short version of the above is at the extreme you can either risk it with coronavirus (~1%-10% death rate depending on the health of your heathcare system), or in the long term risk it with starvation (guaranteed to kill you).

So yes, at certain point risking widespread infection becomes preferable to economic collapse.

In biology the health of a species is in its fertility. High GDP is associated with low birth rate. Life expectancy drives it down even further.

> But modern society strongly relies on complex economies for even basic functions like food supply.

This is as true as it is stupid.

> The health of that economy can be roughly measured using GDP

I would argue that if you have to depend on others you are not fit enough. You do want efficiency but not to the point where it dramatically eats into your resilience.

> Unfortunately plenty of people already rely on food banks to avoid starvation. You can’t feed an entire country like that.

It wouldn't be pretty but agriculture employs amazingly few people, we makes a lot of luxury products we don't need and we feed a lot to our cows, pigs and chickens. If it is impossible or not will depend on administrative tasks/logistics/bean counting. I could see us screw that up tho.

The evidence is not nearly as clearcut as you suggest and periods of economic decline are actually associated with lowered mortality rates.

Past periods of economic decline have very different root causes than our current scenario. I don't think this is an apples to apples comparison.

Yes, and consistently despite varied causes of economic decline, it has led to decreased mortality.

Without paper moving, other things, like goods, can't move efficiently enough to feed 8B of the population.

This was true and tested before IT.

If "before IT" is something like 1960, them, well, the world population was 3B. Also check the levels of deaths from starvation and from infectious diseases, and the cost of food.

No, moving the right "papers" with high speed has made a serious difference.

I was intentionally vague. People seem to read some opinion in it? (given the up and down voting) I have no idea what it means, its just an interesting fact. All I know is that doing it without moving paper was much harder before computers. I didn't mean to say: Because lobsters couldn't do it neither can we. Nor: We have computers now, everything is easy! IT just dramatically changes the puzzle. Not sure we should try history based prediction.

Unfortunately we know how to make more people but not necessarily how to restart a first world economy. And losing old "non-contributing" demographics is much less costly than the young which delays economic consumption and growth by 20+ amount of years to raise and train. It's crass to mention, but these are real considerations. It's down to: you can't work if you're dead, versus you can't work if modern society breaks down and you're dead anyway.

> Human civilisation has reached the point where keeping our fake paper moving is more important than staying alive. How exciting!

If you only knew how many sleep-less nights this has given me for the past 12 years... its terrifying when you add that to the massive amount of misdirected and misallocated time and resources (emergence of SJW, cancel culture Internet trolling, Social Media flexing etc...).

I seriously hoped we had made more progress in fully automated planting/harvesting systems by now--progress has been made, but as seen in this article the Human element is still the bottle-neck/PoF in the system.

Welcome to how our superorganism allocates resources.

Worst case with meat shortages, they'll just have to eat the corn and soy they were feeding to the animals or process the grains into grain based meat substitutes. In general grain production is very automated so there won't be as much of an issue with labor issues in the US or South America impacting the global supply of grain compared to fruits and vegetables.

Animal feed is often under less stringent regulations than food meant for human consumption.

When you're facing starvation, such modern niceties will go out the window.

That logic is good when the farm is next door and you can pay cash $ for a bushel of feed grade corn or whatever. But it starts to fall short when you're still relying on the normal supply chain to get food in a city center.

Desperate and hungry people will be resourceful, but it likely won't be as simple as a lower grade of corn in the produce section of the grocery store.

Stores try new products all the time. If people want 100 kinds of breakfast cereal the store will figure it out by trial and error.

Failing to do so would take a huge number of people whose job description is to do exactly that. If one tries something new that works the rest is sure to follow.

They are puzzling all the time, how much eggs to buy? how much potatoes? how much this? how much that? They never get it exactly right, they are always a few bags of apples short or have to throw them out.

I don't disagree, but see it as a different problem.

I'm presuming regulations wouldn't be updated/waived quickly enough (for feed grade produce, etc), which is part of why famines of this level come to be in the first place.

It's not that stores wouldn't buy it or be willing to sell it, but that companies are much less likely to go against regulations than an individual, even in times of distress.

And to get to grocery store shelves, a product has to go through the hands of multiple companies, depending on level of refinement. But probably at least a producer, a wholesaler/packing house, a distributer, and at least three transport companies. All of which would need to be willing to take the risk of breaking regulations. Which is normally a good thing, since it keeps our food supply chain safe.

It's part of why EPA/USDA/FDA/etc regulations focus on what companies are allowed to grow or manufacture or sell, instead of what consumers are allowed to buy.

So what you're describing is true, but if we're talking about normally illegal-to-sell-food, depends on many people deciding to flout regulations.

This is all in addition to any rationing or other emergency rules that might be put in place (like attempts at government controlled distribution, ala Venezuela)

It sounded like farm picker migration from Mexico was on hold - no visas. But recent news suggest maybe not. Mexico could shut it down too - or might have a better time breaking their constitution to not allow their citizens back in on the way home.

Either way I would bet that with millions out of work unable to pay rent a backbreaking job sounds better than nothing. Especially if so much food is at stake send in the national guard if can't get enough bodies.

Visa's stopped: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/03/18/seasonal-...

Restrictions Eased (yesterday): https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-further-eases-curbs-on-seas...

Quite a lot of animal feed is not fit for human consumption as it was never designed for that purpose. Animal feed is optimized for the biology of the animals eating it to elicit specific outcomes in those animals for the lowest cost. Human digestive and metabolic systems are quite dissimilar to ruminants.

During the last 100 years Asia has seen a significant shift towards eating much more meat as their prosperity has increased, and that's very 'calorie inefficient'; if you have some chickens or a pig at a farm, then that's often a form of "recycling" various scrap; but factory farmed animals consume huge amounts of crops grown for them that have much more calories than the resulting meat/eggs/dairy/etc.

If your daily meal is mostly rice with some vegetables, then cutting down on production means famine.

If your daily meat is processed meat, then cutting down on production means slaughtering the animal stock and processing the soy/corn/etc for human consumption.

It's also good that in the northern hemisphere, where most people live, we can still choose what crops to prioritize for the 2020 harvest; there's some lock-in with specialized hardware and availability of seed stock, but in general we can adapt quite a lot still.

concerning the seeds: does anyone know of any statistics, where the actual hybrid seed is produced, which is sown in the US and Europe? I heard India someday, which means we are in real trouble next summer...

Depends on what you feed farm animals in your nation. They feed cows and goats stuff here that humans can't eat - grass and grain not fit for human consumption.

I remember learning that there is not a single famine in history that's not "wo/man-made" even including the little ice age period. In the sense, the resources and material to grow food was always there. It was always either a logistical, economical, or political issue that creates famine. Not sure how true this is since our world population has increased significantly.

> It was always either a logistical, economical, or political issue that creates famine.

Absolutely not true. Weather/environmental issues have created many famines throughout history.

Just an example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer

> Not sure how true this is since our world population has increased significantly.

I don't think it's true historically, but it may well be true in the modern age. Agricultural productivity has far outpaced population growth, and our crops are much more resilient to weather and pest issues than in the past.

However, distribution is extremely inefficient, especially over large geographical distances. This is how we get significant percentages of all food thrown away, while at the same time having hundreds of millions of starving people or near-starving all over the world.

Fruit and veg 'will run out' unless Britain charters planes to fly in farm workers from eastern Europe. UK urgently needs 90,000 labourers to pick crops that will otherwise die in the fields, warns charity.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/mar/28/fruit-an...

Why have eastern europeans do the work instead of the normal workers? It's not like eastern europeans have any special resistance to corona, nor are their lives worth less.

I guess Eastern Europeans were the normal workers until now.

Oh, well if that's the status quo that makes sense. I assumed the normal workers were unavailable due to quarantine/etc.

No, the 'normal' workers (you mean I guess local) were unwilling to do the work for so little, while intensively supporting this situation by their shopping habits.

I mean whoever was doing the work last year.

My comments in this thread have had some pretty wild score swings, I guess I stepped on a live rail. I'm not familiar with British agriculture politics.. I was thinking only of companies temporarily replacing a sick workforce with another (who would presumably themselves then become sick.) My comments were not intended to be commentary on British immigration, which I have no reason to care about.

The cost of picking fruit such that it being affordable is not coherent with the cost of living of Britain. Such is the case in a lot of places in the first world.

You can keep having affordable fresh fruit, or you can pretend you can pay laborers local prices, driving up the price dramatically, reducing the total size of the market (because nobody's going to be able to afford the new prices), and having even less produce being made, further driving up costs as economies of scale become less effective.

People should pay more for fruit and food if more money is required to fairly compensate laborers. The solution shouldn't be importing a disadvantaged population to exploit for cheap labor.

If our modern economy is so weak we cannot afford fruits and vegetables we should confront and overcome that weakness rather than conceal it by importing an underclass.

Interestingly, it's a shift-by-one kind of situation. I.e. while British or German crops are picked by Poles, Polish crops are picked by Ukrainians... It seems that agriculture everywhere relies on underpaid migrant labor. I wonder if even Ukraine imports some migrant labor for this purpose.

Russia does, from the former Soviet 'Stan republics.

I assume Ukraine does as well.

Russia even had North Koreans logging.

Ukraine does not. Russia is easier to get in and pays more.

Since we can't turles-all-the-way-down with this, where does the chain end? What do they do there?

They have children.

Another solution is increasing the susidies to food production, which would shift part of the cost to people with higher income. This has some disadvantages (the market is distorted by subsidies and resource allocation may be suboptimal) and some advantages (a healthier diet is available for a larger proportion of the population).

I agree that there are many potential solutions and I think society should figure out a good combination. Importing people to do hard work for low pay and poor benefits seems like a bad solution.

See Big Corn in the US.

So the solution you propose means higher consumer prices (which hurts the lower class the most) and to prevent poor people from other countries the opportunity for a higher quality of life

The solution I propose is to fairly compensate people for their work, give them high quality benefits, and tolerable conditions. I don't think that standard is being met by importing disadvantaged people who will work difficult and demanding jobs in harsh conditions for low pay.

Worse, this policy effectively conceals the problem rather than addressing it. If fruit was too expensive for most people to buy, that would be a problem our society would need to solve. If we can pretend things are working fine by exploiting the poor, we don't have to face or solve that problem for a while.

I also don't believe your summary. It's an easy excuse to pretend that allowing the poor to come slave away in demanding conditions to provide you with low cost goods and services is actually for their benefit. Their original countries are deprived of their economic energy and the poor in the richer countries are forced to compete with a vast influx of workers.

The corollary of higher fruit prices is that the fruit workers get more money, more breaks, better benefits, and improved conditions. That's a worthwhile trade.

As an eastern European I think the British should pick their own fruit and pay the appropriate price if they like it so much, otherwise the market is artificially inflated.

Germany has the exact same problem with asparagus.

We can't be everywhere with our low wage expectations.

I think that probably that would make you and your countryfolk worse off.

To try to illustrate, I'll switch the analogy to my own country, which is Canada, where we fly in Mexican labour to pick crops.

If we didn't fly in migrant labour, we'd have to pay Canadians, who are generally a spoiled, lazy, picky bunch (at least compared to the sort of Mexicans who fly here to work, who obviously are not lazy nor excessively picky). This would drive up the cost of fruit, which is perhaps fine. It would also drive up the cost of unskilled labour in other areas, perhaps construction or retail, because there would be less competition for those jobs. That's good news for the unskilled workforce in the rich country. Great.

Of course, not only do prices go up, but actually just less food will get produced. You could argue that that's good, or bad. Fine.

However, now all those Mexican labourers don't have foreign work, so they compete for work at home. That drives down the price of unskilled labour in Mexico, and if there's a minimum wage then it drives up unemployment. The industrious folks who were savvy enough to get the Canadian jobs will take the next-best jobs, displacing slightly-less-hard-working Mexicans from their jobs, and so on. Of course, this is also foreign cash that is no longer coming into the country, so it has effects on the balance of trade, i.e. on the ability of Mexico collectively to import nice things that they aren't making internally. That's probably bad news on a decade-long timescale, but it might eventually lead to a more robust manufacturing economy, I don't know.

So, in summary, suppose Canada stops using Mexican farm labour (or Britain stops using eastern European farm labour). What are the consequences:

All Canadians get more expensive food.

Unskilled Canadians get more pay, probably offsetting the more expensive food for those people.

Less food gets grown in Canada overall, probably, or at least less luxury food.

Unskilled Mexicans are fucked over hard, especially those who are most vulnerable.

Rich Mexicans can hire poor mexicans at even more exploitative rates.

In the medium to long term, Mexico might have a worse balance of trade, but then again maybe that results in positive industrialization in the long term.

I think there's one thing missing in your picture:

Those workers aren't necessarily unskilled. Those who come from my country(Poland) at least are often college graduates.

How do they end up there? Well, the pay is obviously better - especially for a seasonal worker. After all, the GDP per capita difference between the UK and Poland is close to 3x.

The unemployment rate here is(or was before the virus) considerably lower than the EU average, so had they not gone there those people would've found jobs and contributed to the local economy.

Instead we have this weird brain-drain in which the brains aren't utilized to their full potential.

Ironically I'm currently a "seasonal worker" myself, only I work as a software engineer, not fruit picker, or any low-skilled labourer.

Aside from that the coronavirus showed that this approach you present is unsustainable. Like I said before, currently there is so much demand for workers from eastern Europe (Poland, Ukraine, Belarus) that there's simply not enough people to fill all the positions.

Also we have our own fields with fruit to pick - all that is going to go to waste. That's definitely "less food produced" - just somewhere you don't see it.

> After all, the GDP per capita difference between the UK and Poland is close to 3x.

That's a shame it is still the case, as the promise of entering the EU was for wages to normalise across the Union. I guess it will take further integration for that to happen.

Even if that approach was to work, it takes a long time.

Ireland joined in 1973, but didn't really become "rich" like the rest of Western Europe till the turn of the millenium.

It was 6x back when Poland joined the EU in 2004, so a lot of progress has been made already.

It's a lengthy process, but it's happening.

I worked one summer doing migrant labor in agriculture harvesting blueberries in Maine. I migrated with my sister from elsewhere in the US. We were doing it because we wanted money and we were curious about the experience. Alongside us were poor people from Maine -- Native Americans and poor European Americans -- and migrant laborers from south of the border. There was a solidarity among all the groups, and strangely, between all these groups and our overseers against the land owners and Wyman Foods, our ostensible employers. One thing I saw was that the Hispanic laborers were in a lot better shape and in better practice than the other groups. Another thing I saw was that the people who got ahead disregarded the rules we were set. There was a particular technique in raking the berries we were to employ which would maximize profits for the landowners and minimize waste but which was much less efficient per hour. There was another technique, called sweeping, which would maximize the amount we harvested per hour at the cost of many more berries dropped on the ground, so less profit per acre. An advantage the migrant groups had on top of their greater fitness and experience was that they felt less solidarity with the landowners, so they were more willing to break the rules for their own gain. The overseers were cool with this, generally. My point is that this may be a pattern repeated across the globe. It isn't just that the migrants are cheaper and you can cheat them with less consequence. It's also that various parties in the arrangement can shift the burden of harvesting to their preference under the table. I'm not saying that anyone is wrong -- though my preference is that there be less waste -- but that there's something people prefer in having labor from away with different alliances. I'm not certain this is true, but in my particular experience it certainly was. To elaborate still further, I'm not saying this is necessarily wrong. The landowners still made out well, and they were earning profit without labor. The spilled berries went to the birds and insects. I'm just saying there was a non-obvious incentive for the overseers to hire people from away.

> https://web.mit.edu/2.75/resources/random/How%20Complex%20Sy...

> 11) Actions at the sharp end resolve all ambiguity. Organizations are ambiguous, often intentionally, about the relationship between production targets, efficient use of resources, economy and costs of operations, and acceptable risks of low and high consequence accidents. All ambiguity is resolved by actions of practitioners at the sharp end of the system. After an accident, practitioner actions may be regarded as ‘errors’ or ‘violations’ but these evaluations are heavily biased by hindsight and ignore the other driving forces, especially production pressure.

You are missing the market here. If you pay Canadians high wages and you set high prices for fruits you cannot sell them in poor countries. And this means that the profits for that Canadian corporation will be cut in half. And the rich people at the top will suffer.

In the mean time poor countries will start planting their own trees with their own people and appropriate prices for their country. And Mexico will have their own corporation making money.

The problem isn't just cost of living, it's that these are seasonal jobs. You will be out of work for 3-6 months of the year, so although these jobs typically pay slightly more than the minimum wage, it's not enough to survive the rest of the year. Plus a lot of these farms are in remote places which aren't that desirable for young people to live (compared to cities).

Someone else posted that around 10% of what you pay for fruit and vegetables goes to the farmers, so maybe that's where we should start to fix the issue.

nobody has to do the work, the work is voluntary. Eastern Europeans do the work because the wages are still higher than in Eastern Europe, so it makes financial sense for them to move to the UK.

In contrast to the exploitation narrative this is actually mutually beneficial. The food is produced at low cost which is good for consumers (in particular poor ones who would otherwise not have access to expensive vegetables), and the workers who earn higher wages than they otherwise would have.

Time to get the "they're stealing our jobs" crowd out in the fields picking.

This farm labour shortage would have happened in the UK no matter what - once Brexit had been finished if the UK followed through on the immigration promises they made to restrict inflows from EU. Don't know how representative it was but most of the "stealing our jobs" crowd was people who don't work from a sampling of interviews they showed on the BBC.

Maybe the "stealing out jobs crowd" are the ones competing for the lower wage jobs. I got the impression that Brexit voters were often towards the lower and of the earning spectrum. While I am for staying in the EU myself I can see why these people don't feel like they get much out of EU membership.

Low cheap food chain in general is sustained by cheap labor worldwide. Now that borders are closed the chain is in part disrupted, so it doesn't work.

With 3 million people in the UK still without work that want it - and many more laid off, redundant or self-employed without clients, the solution should be obvious. Pay a decent wage and you'll get the people. The era of cheap labour is over.

I understand what you're saying but in this economic climate (of a massive layoffs) you won't even have to pay a "decent wage".

A deflationary crisis is not supportive of high wages. Not in the least.

I don’t think English people want to do this kind of work ...

If the 80% of salary from the government came with strings attached (i.e. "basic job", not UBI "basic income"), this wouldn't be a problem (provided that either masks are provided as well, or work is organized so that social distancing is maintained).

They don't want to do it because of the salary.

Give the recession some time to work its magic.

And this is where we discover that the most important jobs that keep society running pay the least.

They pay the least because you don't need qualifications to do them, and supply of non-qualified people >>> demand. Simple economics.

The article here, and the discussion above, is a situation where clearly the demand is high but the supply is low.

Then pay more. As a white collar worker I'm not offended that some blue collar workers make more than me. And if I have to pay more for food so we actually have a country, with people who care for each other, and not just a giant economic zone with the disappointing selfish behavior we've observed in this crisis, that's fine with me too.

I don't know about the UK, but I've talked to California farmers who (off the record) tell me they quit advertising locally for workers because at $25/hr they still couldn't get people to work (most wouldn't apply, the ones who did quit after less than a day). Immigrants (not always legal I'm sure but I know better than to ask that question) are happy with $13/hour.

So pay more than $25 an hour. There is surely a salary that people will accept to do the work.

I don’t know why everyone assumes that manual labor only deserves near poverty wages.

No one will pay $5 for an avocado.

Clearly, you've never been to Japan ;-) We've got $50 grapes! And that's for one grape... not a bunch... But I think you are correct that most North Americans especially are geared toward buying the cheapest produce available, often regardless of quality or production methods. I think it's slowly been changing over the years, but people still baulk at paying prices that would sustain small family farms without imported cheap labour. However, every time this kind of discussions come up, I feel it necessary to point out that vast majority of cost in food production is distribution, not production. This is due to the practical monopoly on food distribution that some companies have. You could actually raise the production price a pretty hefty amount without affecting the final price terribly if you regulated the distribution. Of course, what would the poor Cargill's do? They wouldn't be able to have swimming pools full of money. That won't do...

People said similar things about cotton before slavery was abolished. The world managed to survive.

Then grow less labor intensive things.

People will absolutely pay $5 for avocados if that's what the price goes to. Avocados are among the easier things to pick though, so this doesn't really apply to them.

Tomatoes seem to cost about $3 at my local grocery store and are not nearly as good as avocados.

Have you ever been to brunch in San Francisco?

The cost of the raw food is 10-15% of the price of a meal. (Source: my wife ran a popular restaurant for 4 years.)

I agree - there should be no job that nobody will do, only jobs that people won't do at the price you want to pay them.

And what this really means, is that maybe certain products - like $7 bins of pecans from Walmart, or $1 heads of fresh lettuce - have been under a market that wasn't sustainable, and a lot of these food products that we take for granted should be luxury items again.

People quit after a day because they are in poor shape and those jobs are really hard on the body.

I read a story a while back where this guy went to work as a bike messenger and the first couple of weeks his body hurt every day, but he eventually really got into it once his body adjusted.

Maybe you could tell the gringos that they have to ease into the work. They only get to work 1 hour their first day, then 2 hours their second day and eventually work up to 8 hours a day so they don't give up.

Yeah because it is badly paid and physically demanding.

People in Britain were eating slugs they found on the ground before Polish explorers brought fruits to the country in 1549.

> Pay a decent wage and you'll get the people. The era of cheap labour is over.

or maybe some labor intensive fruits and veggies will no longer be economically viable.

They will become a delicacy.

The UK only needs low skilled workers for soft fruit that need to be hand picked.

It's fine with every other crop. Maybe farmers should just switch to those.

Cheap "British" strawberries are not worth the workes' abuse and low pay.

I suspect we'll see a return to "pick your own" that used to be prevalent before Eastern Europe opened up.

There are still lots of PYO strawberry fields around where I live (north east UK). They didn't go away.

Actually, this is a golden opportunity for east european countries to grow their agro industry. COVID now gives legal grounds to keep workers in their own country, so they neither catch the virus nor enjoy british racism. This can help their economies as well.

There's plenty of agricultural industry in EE (at least in Poland), it's just that it pays a pittance, so the locals prefer to go west, while farmers employ migrants from poorer countries.

That's such a fucked up cycle.

Doesn’t it prosper everyone? What happens if the workers from the poorest countries aren’t allowed to work in the wealthier countries? Surely they and the wealthier countries are all worse off? “Non-zero-sum game” and all that...

I've noticed that often people who think fruit picking and other "undesirable" jobs should be done by locsl people, never express any interest in doing the aforementioned jobs themselves.

So you think we should force the people to stay in the poorer country?

You can't force people to stay in a country, but you can certainly prevent people from coming in a country.

I dont think we should - COVID does. People are forced to stay in their own countries due to travel restrictions. And it is likely this pandemic will last for a while, and with summer coming, people might just as well work locally until this nightmare is over.

how can they work locally when they're not allowed to exit their flats?

also the fear of gettting C19 in EE is much greater than in Western Europe.

I think EE population will be the last one actually going outside. and there were reports of people saying they will never go out again like before.

I am not sure if the fear is greater - the fear is ending up in public hospitals in some of those countries, but people are pretty static and cities / homes not as crowded as in WE and as such more difficult to spread the virus.

But re workers, restrictions of leaving ones home only apply to non essential work.

Indeed, but with growing costs and lowering stocks in WE, and people forced to stay in their own countries, things could change. Ideally for the benefit of of workers too as EE farmers might have to increase wages as well. Those who own plots of land could even start farming on their own and coop to sell in WE countries.

You can't grow 1 ha of tomatoes and go sell them them to supermarkets. They want stability of hundreds of kilograms every day.

I sincerely hope that Eastern Europeans will not fall for it. After being discriminated, ridiculed and targeted with Brexit now they are being seen as indispensable all of a sudden. English people have no shame. As a Pole I find their xenophobic two faced culture repulsive.

To be "fair" (definitively not the right term here), it's not exclusive to English people. As a frenchman in England, French people have a disgusting xenophobic culture towards eastern europeans too

Plant your Victory Garden now. (You should have a garden anyway or you're just not living the good life, eh?)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victory_garden

One packet each of your favorite veggies: $10-$30. The next three months of spring & summer: priceless.

If you live in an apartment or condo fill your windows with plants using little planter boxes and whatnot. Every bit helps.

It takes a full acre of land to feed a single person.

I'll grant you that for the sake of discussion (although I don't think it's strictly true), but that acre doesn't have to be all in one place eh? Every bit helps.

My sister's neighbor farmed in his (San Francisco) backyard and got about 3~4 crops a year, all year round. It wasn't enough to feed their whole family but it helped.

In fact, 1 acre is actually very difficult to get enough food out of. The more common estimate is actually 3 acres for a more varied diet.

1 acre full of potatoes is not what I want in my life.

This doesn't really track with Agricultural futures. They are all down in the last few months [1]. Either this is bait for retail investors or the pros are asleep at the wheel.

[1] https://www.cmegroup.com/trading/agricultural/

The bulk commodities which have futures markets will likely be fine. Grains are mechanically harvested, so they don't need much in the way of labour. Meat might be a little more in short supply, but not due to labour shortages so much as problems in China. The problems are with fresh food like fruit and vegetables that aren't well suited to futures trading.

Historically problems in fresh veg supply has translated into higher prices for both meat and grains as consumers switch their preferences.

The futures markets for grains and meats are both running lower right now. The pros think that demand is going down due to economic activity and the supply chain issues aren’t going to make a dent in that.

I have no position but the reading of the markets is that no one is worried about food yet.

> The pros think that demand is going down due to economic activity

Does that make any sense? Do people eat fewer grains when economic activity goes down?

People aren't the only consumer of grains. You have biofuels, as well as livestock feed. Biofuels are likely having a bad time with the breakdown in OPEC. With livestock, people might eat a bit less meat, but I donno if that's really gonna move much. But directly to your point, grain alcohol products might drop a smidge with restaurants out of commission for months. Even if people only drink marginally less, they'll be paying way less for it and I imagine some of that margin cut trickles down the supply chain.

More darkly, there may be 1 percent fewer people around to eat bread, steak and drink vodka.

Meat takes a huge hit in economic downturns. Meat is what eats the grains sold in futures markets.

The obvious case of the epidemic in China progressing into a global pandemic wasn't clear to traders back in early February. I'm not sure the market is a beacon more than it is a barometer.

If you really believe that, then you have an opportunity to make a ton of money.

I did make money from the crash but this shortages stuff isn't as obvious as the pandemic was.

> This doesn't really track with Agricultural futures.

Excuse me but "Orange juice futures are the best performing asset so far this year" [1]

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-52030133 [3 days ago]

Since restaurants are one of the major sources of food going to trash, I was wondering whether the current crisis would not actually have an opposite effect with more food being on the market. Sure, not all types of food but on the other hand people have been buying a lot of nonperishable goods from what i have seen last few weeks which would also indicate lower demand in the near future.

Surely a Freakonomics question.

>restaurants are one of the major sources of food going to trash

Is that the case? I would have assumed that restaurant kitchens are a lot better at avoiding wastage and random spoilage than home cooks. I guess there's left-overs, but you'd also have that at home.

AFAIK catering (not eat-in/take-out restaurants) waste ridiculous amounts of food, because they overprovision for events and then throw uneaten food away.

If the host plans ahead and brings some cheap cardboard cartons, they can tell guests to take what they like before leaving. Maybe in some places regulations or liability wouldn't allow this, but I've seen it done and it results in very little food being thrown out.

There is an app here where you can buy up unsold restaurant food at a cheap price.

My sister used to be a cook for two one-star restaurant and a five-star hotel (now in a better paid yet more laid-back job). Your assumption is normal (i had the same) but its false. Even when they reduce some leftovers for sauce/juice, they trow away a lot of food to make it look good.

And its even worst for the "grande cuisine" where they throw away multiple dishes when someone at the table goes for a piss and the waiter forgot to tell the cooks.

Maybe in fast-food or with bar cuisine this is not the case, but from what i know, they are probable the most inneficient users of food.

It may seem a little overly paranoid, but I went to the store a couple of days ago and bought enough new fishing line to re-spool all of my reels (which have sat mostly untouched for nearly 20 years, as I'd drifted away from fishing for fun), and some new lures, bobbers, etc. And tomorrow I think I'm going to go out and do a little fishing, just to make sure I still remember how, and to make sure my gear all still works.

I don't necessarily expect to be reduced to needing to fish to feed myself, but at least I have one backup plan if all else fails. Now, note to self... go order that roll of snare wire that I meant to order months ago, and forgot...

Except ALOT of people fish for fun. Most lakes are stocked, and as soon as food becomes a shortage i'm pretty sure lakes will stop being stocked.

Yep. I'm not saying one could support oneself through nothing but fishing (depending on a lot of details, of course). But I see no reason not to make that one component of a strategy for procuring food. And even if it only serves for a limited period of time (until your local fishing hole is all fished out), that may be enough time to bridge to the point where other options become available.

I think that ideally, one would use a combination of fishing, trapping, hunting, foraging for wild edibles, gardening, plus buying whatever food remains available for sale, to handle a shortage situation. Perhaps no one of those mechanisms is sufficient by itself, but the combination may be.

If you have pets, don't forget they have to eat too. I just ordered a half year supply of dry food. I wouldn't be surprised to see pet food shortages as global food shortage rears its head.

Tangentially related, NPR aired an interview the other day with undocumented migrant workers (in the US) living very close together when traveling (sleeping sitting up together in a van) and having very limited access to water for bathing and hygiene when lodging at farms where they were working picking produce; it's likely this causes grave loss of life in the migrant community, and decimates produce farms economically this season.

Edit: This is not intended as a political comment, only an observation of a component of the pandemic macro.

https://www.npr.org/2020/03/18/816644358/covid-19-threatens-...

Undocumented migrants have for all effect become the modern day equivalent of slavery without the associated compasion.

Many happy to lambast such people and yet, be first to complain if their avocados go up in price or out of stock.

Hopefully, some level of amnisty and clean slate is driven here as currently without that, will only shoot themselves in the foot on many levels.

After all, many live day by day, kinda hard to carry on if that is removed from them and more so, kinda hard to isolate if they have no other choice.

That is sadly one area that politics needs to agree upon and deal with, otherwise the impact will be wide upon many fronts.

That has been an issue from the beginning and has a long history of success, failure, etc. See Cesar Chavez etc.

The endgame is for those jobs to be automated also.

> Hopefully, some level of amnisty and clean slate is driven

In the absence of the actual border and viable border enforcement a proper border would enable, that will only make the problem 10x worse, as a significant chunk of Mexico will try to go North in hopes of another "amnesty" in the future.

The total number of immigrants to the US has dropped dramatically as living conditions in Mexico have improved over time. This keeps getting repeated but does not agree with evidence.

> total number of [illegal aliens] to the US has dropped

Given that the US government was prevented from _counting_ them in the 2020 census, I doubt this very much. As an immigrant myself, I also took the liberty of replacing "immigrants" with "illegal aliens" in the quote above, to be more precise.

>Undocumented migrants have for all effect become the modern day equivalent of slavery without the associated compasion.

Except for the fact that it's a choice - they aren't kidnapped and sold, they are choosing to work in (to us) shitty conditions because the conditions in their home countries are even worse. If you want to talk compassion - have some compassion for what they are running from.

I'm actually a little stunned at your disregard for the realities of slavery, both modern day and historic.

I’m stunned you believe they have a choice. Choice is one of the greatest fallacies of modern economics, responsible for extreme harm.

I suspect that the groups of people that lament undocumented workers and those that enjoy avocado toast don’t overlap much. The former are conservatives, the latter are generally young, city dwelling liberals.

This may not apply here but you can't have your cake and eat it too. Exploitation doesn't have to be active but can emerge from perverse incentives, ignorance, and malicious opportunism. I imagine a large faction of people espousing more liberal viewpoints are at worst willfully disingenious or at best optimizing for the emotional/time investment of supporting ethical behaviour.

My opinion, not taken as fact: young, city-dwelling liberals have been some of the most corrupt in this regard. This includes idly participating in second-hand exploitation, but also actively reinforcing exploitative practices because they align with a personal economic incentive.

I've had exactly the opposite experience. These city-dwelling liberals are quite conscientious about what they buy, supply chains, and their impact on the world.

It's definitely a spectrum that transcends anecdotes. I'm colored by people saying one thing and doing another, but I always keep an open mind because of this; looking for proof of action rather than intent. In that case, I think I was wrong in referring to a group of people under a constructed label as if they were the same person and judging them with my own presupposition.

I'm guessing they have little contact with other groups, so they're probably fine until the virus gets in there, and then it goes very bad very quickly.

Disclaimer: I don't have any relevant expertise, and comment on forums because I'm bored in virus lockdown...

> Disclaimer: I don't have any relevant expertise, and comment on forums because I'm bored in virus lockdown...

Lol. This should be a Surgeon General warning required to be attached to every online comment. To wit:

SURGEON GENERAL'S WARNING: The overwhelming majority of users making online comments likely do not have any relevant expertise and comment on forums because they derive personal satisfaction from commenting on forums.

Extremely anecdotal but in Australia we are seeing people from the retail sector looking at farm work, often the domain of backpackers who are now.not traveling.

It is a rebalancing so will likely come with some issues but if cafes/stores etc remain closed perhaps we will likely see these workers head to farms and balance the issue.

I'm not sure this will happen as the state borders are being closed and governments are strongly advising people to stay put. Also the federal government is looking at an 80% of wage scheme similar to the UK which must reduce the pressure to move just to cover living expenses.

In the US I expect prime meat to be considerably cheaper than usual. With restaurants not buying there will be a glut and I expect regular stores (instead of just speciality shops and suppliers) will be getting it for awhile.

If there’s 1 thing the US has it is food and the supply chain is excellent. If anything this is an opportunity for the US to make a move on trade with Britain and possibly the EU to export our Ag there, for awhile anyways.

I hope you’re right. What’s the situation at the southern border though? Aren’t most of our workers migrants (often undocumented)?

Only some farms use immigrant labor. They are in trouble. There will be plenty of meat as there is much less labor involved in general. Fruits and vegetables could be left to rot in the field though for lack of labor.

Anecdotal but at Costco the other day all beef was sold out except the prime cuts. I ended up buying some after noticing the price wasn't much higher than what I used to pay. Now, granted, I don't remember what prime meat used to cost, so maybe it was always competitive at Costco?

On the day the President declared a national emergency, all the meat was sold out at the local HEB, even the wagyu stuff -- everything. But that was... two weeks ago, and it was probably the start and peak of food panic buying? Today at the local H-Mart there was plenty of everything.

No doubt the supply chain is catching up. I think things will be fine for many commodities, especially less labor intensive ones like staple crops. I worry about meat, because, AFAIK, it is fairly labor intensive. I think we may see shortages and price increases in a month or two if the virus doesn't subside.

So we have labour shortages in countryside and unemployed people in urban centers. Problem?

The only reason people are unemployed is that they are confined in their homes.

Once they can head to the countryside to pick strawberries, chances are they can just head back to their regular job too.

Not if a lot of small businesses shut down. In which case it will take a while for the jobs to come back.

Farms are essential. If you are willing to do "back breaking" manual labor there are farmers who can give you the papers to get out of your house. You may not like the location you end up in.

Working outside is orders of magnitude safer that working in an office.

Low wages for field workers (e.g. picking berries) has stunted automation of these tasks, though I think we're now at the level of robotics (especially computer vision) where it's feasible.

We are definitely at this stage. So long as ruling class wishes they can make huge automation improvements in agriculture in just couple of decades and easily feed the current world population.

Sadly, I think this is an example of what I would maybe call the HN Dunning-Kruger approach to many problems: "just" use IT/AI/robots/etc. There are many companies who have been working in this space for a long time, there's a reason why it's still manual work — it's freaking hard. Berries are a good example of this, personally I'm intricately familiar with the strawberry industry, but I believe it applies elsewhere too.

Strawberries are very tender. If you apply too much pressure, it will mulch and one berry going bad is usually enough to get the whole box moldy. The second tricky bit is that you want to pick strawberries with the right amount of stem remaining: too little and you risk hurting the berry, too much and the stem will break other berries in the box, leading to mold again.

One final difficult problem is finding the berries: strawberries often grow fairly bushy, especially so if you grow one of the varieties that gives large berries. To find the strawberries in the bush, you usually gently move around the leaves to see if there are any. This is again a very "feel" based movement, too little movement and you miss the berry, too much and you damage the plant.

I'm not saying this won't ever be done. As mentioned before, there are companies who are actively working in this space, many of them for many years already. I do think however that the problem is considerably more difficult than what may be observed at first.

It has been done! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCivsotZEjk

There's actually several designs out there for picking strawberries, but like the OP said, expensive robots aren't competitive with cheap labour. If the labour pool dries up, they're more economically viable.

There's a very big difference between a proof of concept "can pick some berries" and a solution that's viable at scale, even if ignoring financial limitations. The video edgewise admits to it as well:

> The country's largest supplier of berries has made use of the robot at one of its berry fields.

The operation shown in the video is likely not viable for actual pick and sell with a number of the issues I outlined above. As I said, there are many companies working on it, but claiming it's a solved problem is simply handwaving away the truth.

>If the labor pool dries up, they're more economically viable.

I wonder if strawberries would cease being an economically viable crop before this level of mechanization becomes viable.

Like all robotics, a solution needs someone willing to develop expert domain knowledge, not a generalist software engineer with an enthusiasm for the latest out-of-the box AI techniques. And part of that expert domain knowledge is almost certainly going to be knowing to start with something easier than strawberries. My best guess is apples, but I'm not that expert.

But, since you provided a thoughtful analysis of why strawberries are hard, here are some thoughts on the problems you mentioned (to be clear, I don't think I'm solving strawberry picking in a random HN comment, I just thought it was a thought-provoking problem to discuss):

> If you apply too much pressure, it will mulch

My robotics knowledge is super out of date, but AFAIK applying a reasonable amount of pressure is stupid hard. Can you avoid ever touching the strawberry and just always grab it by the cut stem?

> The second tricky bit is that you want to pick strawberries with the right amount of stem remaining

Always grab too much stem, then trim it down on the way to the bin, so you can do this on a known background instead of the middle of a green mess. The trimming cutter may even be designed to round down the stem.

> This is again a very "feel" based movement, too little movement and you miss the berry, too much and you damage the plant.

Can you get away with combing the entire plant to the side, or is the plant fragile too? Failing that, a robot can stick its eyes right in there and scan every strawberry-sized voxel of space.

There was a recent Planet Money episode[1] about this.

[1]: https://www.npr.org/2020/03/25/821593542/episode-984-food-an...

It's not simple as that, and that's a problem that people have been working on for a long time. Some crops need to be reengineered to be friendly to mechanical pickers: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/how-to-pick-a-pepper/

And even then the yield is bad:

* https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2018/03/20/592857197/ro... * https://www.growingproduce.com/fruits/berries/florida-bluebe... * http://www.beilkefamilyfarm.com/blog/2015/7/blueberries-mach...

Hopefully this may incentivize people to be a bit more self-sufficient. Gardens that you grow your own, allotments - the mentality of that has been driven away over decades and now people are starting to smell the roses and realize they can't eat them. So in many avenues - complacency gets highlighted more and I'm sure many and much will change on the back of this period in time. Overall I'd say for the better. Certainly the environment is doing better, so not all side-effects that bad, but even the bad ones, may well get exacerbated and become fear/panic driven.

Equally many manual aspects of farming have long been on the verge of better automation and with that, robots.

However that drive will only see less people working and the knock-on effects of any change has ripples.

But let's not overlook the whole import/export aspects and SPain for example exports a huge amount of fruit and veg, how that pans out over this period will be of note.

But for some perspective: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/E...

Shows the export and import of food in EUrope as a whole is somewhat balanced. How that balance plays out this year and for few years after will be interesting.

Though I don't see any fear of food shortages, sure may be case of some food items being more expensive.

But such articles, whilst are a caution warning, they themselves can drive fear and panic and they as always do more damage as any toilet roll can attest.

[EDIT spellings and grams]

Where (physically) do you expect 500.000 (a small town example) people garden their own food? They'd need to travel outside town, garden, then get back (and all this while also commuting to work on a daily basis).

Also, the amount of tools every single person would need to buy.

"Decentralisation" is a goof idea, but not feasible in the real world, IMHO. And this is a small town example, leave alone a huge capital like Madrid or Barcelona.

Surrounding farmland, greenhouses if necessary. Can't scale now, but this is the result of fragile ag supply chains. Lessons for the future. Not just ag, manufacturing capacity and black swan preparedness in general.

Fragile systems break more easily. Make sturdy systems humans rely on, even if more costly and less efficient.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allotment_(gardening)

In Britain and Germany, allotment gardening was promoted as a social measure and by all accounts it was successful.

It's successful at giving people the option to occasionally put some fresh produce on their plates. It's not enough to keep yourself fed all year round, let alone your family or everyone else who doesn't have an allotment. If an acute food shortage hit right during harvest season I might be able to hold out for a few weeks, but any other time of year would be pretty bad.

> It's not enough to keep yourself fed all year round

In 2019 I produced almost 300 Kg of my own food at home without really trying hard, so maybe not all year round, but is possible to notice a difference. The garden had provided me with at least a piece of fresh fruit each day of 2020 and this point is covered until june-2020 at least.

The problem is trying to obtain your food without space, without feeding your plants, and relying in magical products. This never works as intended.

People needs to understand also that producing food at home is more expensive (but the quality is better).

Possibly too successful. The waiting lists are usually very long: https://www.edinburghnews.scotsman.com/news/edinburgh-allotm...

Tools can be shared.

It's also amazing how little land is needed to grow enough food to live on. One person can be fed from around 9 square meters. In dense cities people may not have that much land, but in many areas, people do have that much land in their yards.

That's preposterous. You need 5-10 acres to be self-sufficient in the steady state.

Do you have a source that the 9sqm claim? It seems... completely unbelievable.

My wife's parents grow various vegetables in an area of that size, and there is no way it could provide all their vegetable needs.

If you grew potatoes you’d get 15000-45000 calories out of 9 sq meters. Not enough. 9mX9m (81sqm) and at the high end of yield you could get above starvation.

At least in the UK, I thought you could only harvest potatoes once a year? There is a 2-week school holiday in October, which in some parts of Scotland are still referred to as the "tattie holidays", because that's when the potatoes are harvested (I did it as a kid, it was back-breaking work...).

Did you honestly just call half a million people a small town? That is a major metro in many parts of the world.

Your idea of a "small town" has the population of Sacramento or Atlanta (and almost the population of Frankfurt, if you prefer Europe). I live in what would reasonably be considered a small town in the northeast US outside a major metro. The population of our town is about 7,000 people. (And most people would have the room for respectable garden.)

Every bit counts and even on a small balcony it’s possible to at least grow fresh herbs and a few other things in pots and containers. There’s also the indoor microgreen approach. There have been some cool prototypes that look about the size of a mini fridge and can grow a decent amount of fresh salad greens.

This is a very naive take on the world. You'll need at the very least half an acre to feed yourself sustainably, and that's if you're highly optimized.

It's also backbreaking work, and you won't be able to do much else except subsistence farming.

In short, it's not practical for the vast majority of the population. The closest we can probably get to this model is instead CSA memberships, supporting farms right outside the dense urban areas which can leverage economies of scale to feed several hundred people.

I mean, sure, grow your spring onions, your herbs, and a tomato plant. It's nice. It keeps you connected to where food comes from. It's a yummy addition to your plate.

It won't feed you in an emergency, though.

Note that it's fine to leave the supply of staples like wheat to large farmers with economies of scale, since that's heavily mechanized and doesn't require many workers, plus the workers it does rely on can be fairly effectively distanced. It's mostly the stuff like fresh fruit and vegetables which is the problem. Those are less reliant on economies of scale and more on cheap imported labour.

Exactly, I grew tomatoes in my flat few years back, was so choice picking a ripe tomato on christmas day grown indoors on a window ledge and no additional lighting needed.

Sure can't grow it all, but certainly makes a positive dent in my needs.

Yikes, you grew tomatoes indoors? How did you stand the smell?

Was not an issue at all.

OK, i'm not saying we all grow all our own food, but certainly a little helps and a step in the right direction and you can bet many will avenue that and what they can in the times ahead now.

Certainly growing your own herbs in a flat very sustainable.

OMG Garden in Auckland is an urban garden that produces 1000NZD per week in commercial produce sales. They think they can get to 1400 per week.

Small <500 sqm plot between buildings.

They have full time farmer.

Is that 1,000 NZD profit, or revenue? It also looks heavily reliant on volunteer effort, basically free labor.

Revenue I think. They have a full time farmer. I don't have all the details, but I think it's main focus is education and as a model.

Here's an idea, put everyone's half acres together, then use automation to reduce the labour needed, freeing people to do other useful work! We can share the food, and share the labour!

This will work as long as some malevolent dick doesn't come along and decide they want more than their fair share ...

It'll be a common area people can share. We'll just need to avoid any sort of tragedy.

luckily there has been some research on averting such tragedies: https://wle.cgiar.org/content/elinor-ostrom-%E2%80%9Cnon-tra...

You can grow a surprising amount on even 0.1 acres. Here's a video where a family grows 6000 pounds on about 4000 square feet.

https://youtu.be/NCmTJkZy0rM

Granted, they have the whole family pitching in with the labor and it's a full-time job for them.

Is there a good resource for a reasonably educated individual on the theory of farming. That is the theory about growing any foodstuff or useful growable product (livestock,plants,edible mushrooms, even houseplants and pets) and selling those products. Managing the economics, top soil, automation, machine repair and maintenance.

Look for Storey's guides for things like basic country skills and small-scale animal husbandry (rabbit, goat, etc.) There is also probably an entire aisle of urban homesteading books to look through at the local bookstore.

Not many calories in what they're growing, either.

I think this is also naive. You don't need an acre, nor is it backbreaking labour. The biggest time sink for home gardeners in my experience is watering, which you can solve by timed drip irrigation. Some plants like beans and peas are so easy to grow that they'll take over if you don't manage them. Potatoes are also pretty robust.

However, growing year-round is hard. It's relatively easy to feed yourself over the summer/fall if you're dedicated, but maintaining enough to feed your family over the winter is much more difficult and requires planning (and if anything goes wrong you lose the crop).

The biggest advantage for me is growing crops which are very expensive in stores and are easily wasted - like bagged salads, tomatoes that taste good, etc. Plus you can pick weird heritage varieties. We get a small veg box once a week and a small plot in our garden and we rarely buy vegetables when we go shopping.

> like bagged salads, tomatoes

salads, tomatoes are extremly wasteful form of transporting water so the benefit of growing your own is enormous

Well, yes, I was specifically speaking to the self-sustainable part. (And really, growing enough to eat year round? Yeah, it's back breaking. Not when you're 20 or 30, but come back to me when you're in your 50s :)

I'm totally in favor of growing the things that you mention - and combined with a CSA, it's the best of both worlds.

But I really, really, wouldn't want to grow all the staples myself and be dependent on it.

What is your take on vertical farming [1]? If this was more widespread, we could take large loads off the farming sector and support the promise of grown local benefits.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_farming

Vertical farming takes just as much labor as horizontal farming and the capital expenses are higher. The economics only work for highly perishable luxury crops, not staples.

To be fair, they did say "a bit more self-sufficient". I have a half-dozen raised garden beds, herbs and fruit trees on a very standard-sized suburban block. I can cook occasional meals that are largely from the garden and definitely supplement staples (protein, pasta/rice from the shop). In recent weeks, I've paid more attention to sowing seeds and looked at adding chickens. With reliably laying chickens, we could do a meal/day at least.

It's sad, but here in CA, most people don't have yards and there's nowhere to grow food. It's especially dumb because there's miles and miles of undeveloped land everywhere (at least in the east bay suberbs), not being used for anything in particular except maybe some farms with cows on it: I'm sure they're taking advantage of huge tax wholes because they're sitting on land that would cost 10s of millions of dollars in property taxes were it taxed at the same rate that people need to pay.

Also, there's no community compost which means people need to buy all of it at stores like home depot, making it expensive because they have to bag it and warehouse it, etc. The nearest compost I have to my house where I can get compost is nearly 35 miles away.

I live in a flat, it has windows and window ledges and I grow things - sure not enough to sustain, but makes a dent in the right direction, also helps flats air quality.

As for compost, i'm supprised as I live in London and can easily get it. But appreciate that it may be a case of supply/demand and if no demand, the supply moves away.

Seems like an opportunity business wise in the times ahead as if you have that issue - many others will.

SF Bay Area is not really representative of California as a whole. Most people outside of the dense cores have a place for a small garden. State is large and diverse. Los Angeles is a lot less dense and most people have at least a balcony on which you can grow stuff in pots. Won’t sustain you as the only source, but will provide greens and some variety. Yards are pretty common and usually green. Water shortages have led to some converting to hardscape, but that can be reversed.

Prop 13 is an issue, but the level of development opposition in Bay Area is another matter all together compared to the rest of the state. Where little you can build developers end up cramming every last inch with profit-producing structures. Couple with crappy commuting infrastructure and you have what we are living.

You can drive out as far as fairfield, about 70 miles outside of the bay area and still see housing communities packed together like slums with nothing but yellow and green for miles in every direction.

The lots in those communities (including Fairfield) look to be reasonably sized - some pools even. That’s plenty to have a few beds of greens. It’s not acre-sized, but that’s hardly a requirement.

What do you propose then, Los Altos or Atherton-sized lots?

10K sq ft lots isn't too much to ask for is it? especially when there's open land in every direction you can see as far as the horizon. It doesn't even look like all that open land is used for anything at all.

i'll never understand the CA obsession with keeping so much land undeveloped at the expense of humanity.

I think saying that most people don't have yards in California is misleading. More people have yards in California than in many other places where there are more dense cities.

Just FYI that if you’re in Northern California I believe that Mission Trail or whoever has a centralized compost where you can pick up what you need. In normal times, at least. I’d imagine that service is currently shut down, but worth checking.

> incentivize people to be a bit more self-sufficient

The drawback to this is the opportunity cost. Comparative advantage is the benefit of the current set-up. Although 'self-sufficient' may sound warm and nice.

> Certainly the environment is doing better,

I wouldn't be so sure (yet) about the overall outcome. For example, the EPA just suspends enforcement of all environmental laws "because corona".

https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/489753-epa-sus...

> The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued a sweeping suspension of its enforcement of environmental laws Thursday, telling companies they would not need to meet environmental standards during the coronavirus outbreak.

> The temporary policy, for which the EPA has set no end date, would allow any number of industries to skirt environmental laws, with the agency saying it will not “seek penalties for noncompliance with routine monitoring and reporting obligations.”

I really don’t get this. How is this helpful against the pandemic?

What? No more illegal pangolin for dinner?.

Honest question. How is the EPA suspending enforcement aid in the fight against Covid-19?

The EPA says not only that your new chemical plant can't dump waste in the river, but also that before you even start your factory you have to file elaborate plans explaining all the measures you're going to take to make sure it never happens.

If we want companies to quickly spin up new factories for ventilators and masks, it's a good idea to let them start the factory now and file the plans next year.

> Hopefully this may incentivize people to be a bit more self-sufficient

This has nothing to do with "people". Securing the food supply is a matter of national security, which is why such a shortage of labour should have never been allowed to even happen. The correct way to go about this would have been subsidized pay for local farmhands, a directive that a given / high percentage of food crop must be preserved at any cost and regulation that subsidies that already go to agriculture do not go into profits but actually trickle down.

I also read, the nurses that were commuting from other EU countries to work in Germany are now going back to help their home countries.

mind sharing a source? Would be interested to know abou this since I have been defending the reason some countries are at a better position than others Healthcare wise is due to brain-drain in those segments.

That sounds a bit hard to believe. Walk away now and you'll probably never be employed in the country ever again. If they were OK with wages in their home country they would not be cross border commuters to begin with.

Perhaps they wanted to be closer to their families and the communities they grew up with.

May have something to do with Germany closing their borders: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-51905129

This is false, at least in Spain.

Farms are working normally except that they increased prices a bit. But that's normal due to the situation.

Where did you get that info ?

The news in France reported strictly the same situation.

Polish Worker ( which are majority in field work in rural area ) are sent home due to quarantaine, thus there is not enough workforce to harvest fruits and vegetables. More than half of the production of small farmer is at risk of being lost , and theirs salary with it.

Societies are at risk of much bigger collapse.

You can make your own "vegetable" even in big cities. Tomatoes and peppers are really easy to grow on window or balcony. You can seed them yourself but much easier is to buy young plants.

I am also using sprouting jar [1]. Just buy any bio quality seeds and you have you own sprouts grown in 4-7 days, Bio quality is important as normal seed are often chemically treated.

I also like garden cress which you can easily plant on paper tissues or cotton wool. It is really delicious with bread and fresh cheese.

It is far from 100% vegetable replacement but it is tasty source of vitamins. Especially home grown tomatoes are way more tasty than those sold in normal groceries because they are picked too early to last longer.

[1] Something like this https://boulderlocavore.com/sprouting-101-homemade-sprouting...

Doesn’t the Netherlands export the majority of Europe’s fresh food? As long as the supply chain doesn’t break down, I don’t see how it would be possible for Spain and Germany to run out of food.

Especially since they’re all in the EU, even if the Netherlands wanted to close off their borders, there’s no way they really could.

A drop in supply in food all at once could raise the price causing considerable issues.

I'm not sure what you mean by countries in the EU not being able to close their borders, they can.

They can and recently did.

Based on the greenhouses I could identify on google maps spain's part seems much larger.

Netherlands - https://www.google.com/maps/@52.021357,4.5405597,46292m/data...

Spain - https://www.google.com/maps/@36.7995257,-2.4654344,60237m/da...

I am not sure about fresh food, but The Netherlands is world's second largest agricultural exporter (and no, it's not only flowers):

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2017/09/holland-...

Also, it's not only about size, also efficiency. Scroll down the article and look at the insane yields per square mile for tomatoes, chilies + green peppers, and cucumbers. No other country comes even close.

That's import+export for you. It's not all local produce.

The Netherlands are the biggest re-exporter of fruits and vegs. In terms of both quantity and value, they are behind Spain:

https://www.freshplaza.com/article/2135083/netherlands-world...

> The Netherlands is the biggest exporter of fresh vegetables though, both looking at quantity and value

Not sure if blind test can determine whether you are eating Netherlands' tomato or styrofoam.

The only good tomatoes from these parts of the world I have tasted were cherry ones. Not sure whether it is cultivar, climate, agricultural practice or terroir. But they taste nothing like real tomatoes.

I think most people never tasted a real tomato...

That's not how it works. There are numbers and the Netherlands exports as twice as Spain. Probably because they have a smaller population, so they consume much less internally. Also it rains a LOT in the Netherlands while Spain is mostly Mediterranean. There is a reason why North Africa didn't have a big population until very recently.

Spain grows most of the fruit and veg, whilst the netherlands grow mostly flowers.

The demand for flowers has somewhat waned and recently saw an article of flower farmers in Africa suffering as nowhere to sell and case of piles of flowers composting away. The impact in that market will be very impacting.

Netherlands does lots of pigs and tomatoes too. Apparently a fair amount of dairy as well.

The Netherland's flower exports top the charts, but they export almost as much (each) meat, dairy and vegetables.

https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/news/2020/03/agricultural-exports-h...

You might try searching the term "Netherlands feeds the world" and perusing the many articles that turn up and perhaps reassess your ideas about the Netherlands.

You are on a different continent, we can just look at the labels on food to see where it comes from.

We also get to see the trucks carrying the food. Go on any French autoroute and 2 out of 3 of the trucks will be from Spain.

You mean registered in Spain. Where is the trailer registered? And what does the place of a vehicle registration has to do with the origin of the cargo they carry?

The trailers have the names of Spanish vegetable companies written in big letters on their sides.

> whilst the netherlands grow mostly flowers.

38 km² of flowers in glasshouses and 272 km² of flowers on open ground.

Total agricultural land use is 18163 km², 11815 km² of which is for growing grass and fodder, most of the remaining 6347 km² is food for human consumption, dominated by potatoes and grain.

So not even 3%.

We do not grow mostly flowers.

Aha, thank you for the correction.

The flowers, however, are overrepresented in most satistics of production and export measured by value - there's a world of difference in the harvest value from an acre of wheat and an acre of roses.

Netherlands provide seeds to all Europe and Spain buy a lot of their seeds to them. They do extensive research on vegetables

https://archive.is/hczJN

What is limiting robot-assisted telemetric food harvesting? Why cant I connect to the web with a gaming console, play farmer and be rewarded for it?

The data could eventually be used to develop self-harvesting farms.

There's already automated computer assisted surgery, so is this really that far off? Is it desirable?

It runs eventually into a similar problem as self-driving cars and the looming unemployment of truckers.

What's Earth's carrying capacity for humans? We can be our own existential risk.

This pandemic will boost automation for sure. I hope, I can transform my side project to robotics startup afterwards. Current home office regulation saves me commuting time and I can do more development for myself.

Outdoor machinery is hard topic by itself. It’s not comparable to controlled environment where surgery robots operate. It’s permanent dirt, dust and changing weather conditions.

> There's already automated computer assisted surgery, so is this really that far off? Is it desirable?

It's a question of cost and development effort versus utility. You can train a good picker/harvester within just a few weeks and that person can work the fields seasonally for decades while doing other productive things for the rest of the year.

Designing, building, deploying, and maintaining a machine complex enough to harvest asparagus, strawberries, and salad, however, is a very costly endeavour that yields very little benefit. The machines would cost billions to develop, millions to build, and are only usable for a short time of the year and for a very limited task.

A minimum-wage field worker can do the job faster and cheaper and a machine would basically need to run half a century just to pay for itself - and that doesn't even include the development costs.

Don't make the mistake to underestimate the amount of technology required to replace a human being for doing "simple tasks". Things that are simple for humans are incredibly hard for machines and vice versa.

I hope we get there. Things have gotten closer. The ideal is being able to harvest something like a strawberry without ruining it and it turns out to be rather difficult. With enough attention and investment, this is certainly a solvable problem. Let’s hope our attention spans get a little longer and we can stay focused on the need to innovate on food security when this is all over.

Meanwhile in Australia: https://www.sbs.com.au/news/coronavirus-crisis-food-supplies...

The take away from this article must that we have to automate Ag.

Any job right now that is considered ‘essential job’ and exposes the worker to covid is the exact job that needs to be automated.

What is happening right now is a cautionary tale and answers the question, “what jobs should we automate?”

Another more UK-centric Guardian article that may be of interest:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/mar/28/fruit-an...

Why aren't they just raising wages? There are many people who can work and need jobs simply a matter of finding the clearing price and passing it on to us consumers which I'm very happy to bear.

The price is set by wholesalers, especially supermarkets. I'm not convinced they can re-eqilibriate the market before the harvest spoils.

If the wholesalers want the product to sell it, then they will change the price so that it makes sense to harvest it.

If this price is too high, the wholesalers will not be able to sell it and choose not to buy it

Then that would indicate there is no market clearing price for the product so farmers will stop producing it. I.e. people can't afford it anymore.

IIRC there's a lot of futures trading in food just because of this issue - so that you can get market equilibrium and price setting done beforehand, not between harvest and delivery as the food is spoiling.

There are many people who can work. Will they though? It is hard labor. If you can get enough to live on without working why would you take that job? I wouldn't take farm labor of the type they need if I had any other options. Driving a tractor I could do, but there are plenty of those people already.

I must be reading the introductory paragraphs incorrectly. Because it seemed like a wealthy landowner was complaining that the virus was preventing them from exploiting the desperately poor to do the actual work of producing a crop (and opposed to just rent-seeking on some family land). Dooming Wimbledon to mere cream without strawberries or something.

But I probably misunderstood because mind kept drifting to what would become of those immigrant farm laborers once covid19 is alight in their country. The ones we pay so little they don’t have access to decent healthcare. So we can save €2 on a carton of berries.

Anyone have good sources on what foods aren't dependant on farm labor? Can the world get by on them for now? I.e. corn, beans & oil? Maybe apples?

at this point this is the New main topic

médical research and logistics have been reorganized, now critical economic structure has to be ensured

do countries list immunized people to know who can fill in rapidly ?

should people learn how to ration more ?

> From Huelva to Hamburg and Newcastle to Naples, Europe’s farmers are struggling to find people to bring in rapidly ripening fruits and vegetables, which frequently must be hand-picked, usually within a window of just a few days. They typically rely on seasonal workers from eastern Europe or northern Africa, but fears of the coronavirus are keeping hundreds of thousands of migrant laborers from leaving home, and controls on once-unfettered borders are stopping many of those willing to make the trip.

This is a recipe for shortage. Unlike funbucks dashed off by central banks without so much as breaking a sweat, it takes actual work to grow, harvest, and distribute crops. It also takes time.

All of these things can't be faked the way that currency can.

I am up for doing some fruit picking if it can be organized correctly. The strategy of allowing in migrant labour would be a political fiasco.

There is a platform for Germany by the ministry of agriculture organizing it and it seems they had 30k prospects last week: www.daslandhilft.de - one problem as I understood is that this is not all unskilled laborer work, but the there is quite some machinery involved where skilled personal is required.

My experience organizing groups for picking tells me this feel good effort doesn't work.

I'd be interested to hear more about what you think will go wrong. It seems like this is an important problem to solve.

Search for images or videos of asparagus or strawberry picking. Or try holding small bottles of water in each hand, bend over with your arms stretched out, hold for 8 hours.

Also the standards, produce being wasted too much.

<disclaimer: have been volunteering for an org fighting food waste by organizing volunteer pickers>

It's simpler than you think.

1. Commercially viable picking actually requires some training (identify pickable fruits, avoid damaging plants, don't half pick)

2. Farmers (rightfully) don't like people who have no knowledge in growing crops hanging around in their fields. They just do dumb things like drink from irrigation pipes (for some crops irrigation is periodically mixed with fertilizer or pesticides).

3. Volunteers are not trustworthy. You have 30 RSVP-ed and 5 show up. Picking season is usually a narrow window of opportunity.

4. Most importantly - the vast majority of people (from the subset of human race who may volunteer for picking in the first place) really don't know how to work consistently for 8-10 hours. They show up 8 AM (3h too late), then they sit down to drink coffee. Your equation is 10 volunteers ~ 1 professional labourer. And then you have to bring professional labour anyhow to clean after them.

All in all, this doesn't work.

Hmm... So I wonder if this could be ameliorated by:

1. Paying people rather than recruiting volunteers. Presumably the normal pickers would be paid, so there should be funds available for this assuming that the right people can be found.

2. Recruiting and training people well ahead of time. This would give time for at least some level of training. The initial training could be online in video form so as to avoid wasting too much time for those overseeing the process.

3. Some kind of app to facilitate the process. This could potentially allow growers to reach a much wider audience. It could also help with the time-sensitive nature of the problem ("pickers required at X place now").

There are a lot of people out of work at the moment. It seems that diverting some of these people to food picking would be a win for everyone if it could be achieved.

You missed the part where it was always migrant labor that did this work? The article is specifically about the fiasco of not letting in these people. Or, more accurately, these people saying “no thanks” to the prospect of working for minimum wage while risking their lives.

Hopefully this won't lead to any actual starvation? As I understand it, staples like grains and root vegetables can mostly be harvested by machine. While it would be sad to waste fruits and leafy vegetables, I expect you can survive without them for quite a while, especially if you have access to multivitamins.

I don't think there's much risk of serious food shortages. We'll just be eating more staples and fewer exotics and luxury foods. That may mean less meat, so we can use the grains those animals would usually eat to feed us. The economic impact on farmers, as on many other industries will be pretty traumatic and we'll have to decide as society how to deal with all of that, but we'll still be able to eat.

The meat price across the globe has actually seen a U shaped move. A lot of panic slaughter was done when people though that they need to sell their meat before the price crashes through the floor. And before that, there were people capitalising on historically high meat prices because of ASF in China.

Now it is shooting up again across the globe as lockdowns spread to more countries.

Industrial meatpackers are making a killing now thought

Zero risk of starvation. The labor-intensive produce at this time of year (and the next 3 months) is mostly asparagus and strawberries. Grain & corn is all machines. If there’s a second wave, or it takes very long, olives could become a major problem (Nov/Dec). Not for nutrition, but economically and my breakfast routine.

There’s still a lot of fresh fruit in warehouses. Apples, for example, which will last until the end of year.

> olives could become a major problem (Nov/Dec)

I don't think so. My country is a top olive oil exporter and I can tell you that stocks and harvest are at full capacity. Many people (my father included) did not harvest this year because of the low prices. Many exporters are also struggling to sell their produce.

If they can't get picked in time, they can can them, freeze them or dry them. Some will spoil beyond recovery, but not all has to be lost either.

uh you have to pick it before you can preserve it

Overripe fruits don’t sell in Tehran market, but you can do other things with them. So instead of two weeks to pick, you have maybe four, depending on the fruit.

> it takes actual work to grow, harvest, and distribute crops.

I look forward to the test of "Europeans don't want to do _____ work" when the shit-pay factor is removed.

do you also look forward to the 10x grocery shit-bill you will be stuck with?

Yes.

Sure if it means people are being paid a fair wage. I should pay more for things where I'm exploiting labor tbh.

Somehow I think your keyboard bravado will vanish once you start paying 60-70% of salary for just basic necessities. And even if I were to concede that you - presumably high paid tech workers - were willing & able, imagine the fate of the pensioners, bus drivers, retail workers...they barely make ends meet as it is.

So we should continue exploiting, is what you are saying?

I am not thrilled about the situation, but the alternative, unfortunately, is far worse. The people in Ukraine/Moldova etc. will go deeper into poverty, and people in the west will have to contend with sky-high inflation.

One reason for poverty is because active people are working in foreign countries.

Isn't the point of this change to give farm workers (who like bus drivers, retail workers, etc barely make ends meet) the ability to cover their basic needs more easily. If we could implement this across all low-paid jobs, I would more than happily pay a greater proportion of my own salary on these goods.

Things already are expensive and with all the automation the salaries make up a crazy tiny amount of it.

have you read the article?

Asparagus are pretty labor intense. Apparently last year NL markets forced the price down to half of what it costs to grow them while prices in the store stay the same.[1]

Say a kilo of asparagus costs 6 euro in the store and has about 16 spears.[2] Say field work in pays 12 euro, 32 spears or 2 kg. One employee harvests 30 kg per hour on average.[3]

2 kg worth of pay for the worker and 15 kg vanished into the market? 40 cents of the 6 euro goes to the field worker which is a lot!

I would love to pay 6.40 for my asparagus if they raise the pay to 24 euro.

I would also quit my job and go work there.

(In Spain the asparagus might be cheaper, have more spears in a kg, people earn 3 euro per hour and they might be less productive. It's hard to calculate from here)

[1] - https://www.1limburg.nl/prijs-asperges-dramatisch-laag-helft...

[2] - https://www.ah.nl/producten/product/wi99045/ah-asperges-wit

[3] - http://www.engelsmachines.nl/EN

The free variable that consumes all available spending money tends to be rent. If food prices go up, I'd expect real estate prices to stop growing so fast. It would be a welcome change.

Tomatoes are not very expensive to begin with. While rents have gone up significantly, food hasn't as much. People spend a much smaller proportion of their income for groceries nowadays than a few decades ago. Maybe this will change.

Related, tfw you pay the one remaining person running Prime Now deliveries a $100 tip in the hopes that they keep working because there's fucking nobody left even though Amazon said it'll pay associates an extra $2/hour. xDD

The labor during harvest is significant, but not that significant. Even at a 40% hike for harvest labor costs, you wouldn't see a 40% increase in price. And it would actually be good for the local economy, but bad for the workers from Eastern Europe, they depend on harvest season.

Numbers I've read is that farm labour accounts for ~10% of retail food cost for fruits.

https://www.prb.org/usfarmworkersfoodprices/

If that doubles because they have to pay local labour rates, the price would go up 10%. Possibly less if it just eats into the margins through the rest of the chain.

We might also see a shift toward less laborious foods, which is fine by me.

You realise such transitions take crop cycles - if the current crops fail because lack of labour and it leads to a food shortage food prices will go through the roof.

...and not to mention everything is interconnected in an economy. If food prices rise by x%, there is a cascade effect on the prices of everything, not just groceries.

It frequently goes the other way. If people are spending more on food that lowers the demand for services which thus lowers those services costs. Housing for example is limited by people’s ability to pay for it, with clear long term trends showing an inverse relationship between housing costs and food costs.

PS: In the short term inflation and deflation can be caused by a huge range of effects, but in the long term it’s bound by government spending and taxation.

Farming doesn't strike me as high margin. This increase in costs could send many farmers out of business. That will push up food prices.

Seems unlikely, the operations would probably just be consolidated with another agribusiness company. "Farmers" are something of an anachronism in most of the agricultural supply chain.

Well, alternatively you’re just paying people slave wages to do this work so you can have cheaper groceries. Don’t forget that.

That’s not just an “Europeans” problem.

It's not going to happen. Europe will handle it better than anyone else if they use their imagination and not loose their minds - https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2017/09/holland-...

The Dutch vegetables are picked by Polish workers though. The problem remains: https://nos.nl/artikel/2328611-wie-gaan-de-asperges-steken-n...

I love how this Fed has got people thinking employment is irrelevant.

Sure, maybe if some people stopped working for a few months, it wouldn't matter to much.

But we still need energy and water and food (and Internet). And most of this requires actual work being done. Not just updating numbers on a spreadsheet.

Yeah but infrastructure is already up. A lot of the work required for upkeep doesn't require as many people as is required to build it out in the first place.

It's funny how everybody (in the first world) just takes for granted the fact that a large part of the agricultural workforce is low-paid migrant workers. All of us want our food to be available all year round, and cheap. It's been my opinion for a while that food prices do not represent the real cost of food production when taking into account all the externalities. Low-wage labor is just one of those externalities.

Modern market economics is a ... marvel ... of numerous uncosted externalities.

Pollution, labour, externalised risk, unaccounted systemic risks, natural resource depletion and formation costs, political power, corruption...

Maybe right wingers and xenophobes will finally understand why migrant workers are a thing. I doubt they'll appreciate all the work migrant workers do after all this is over, but hopefully the general populace will understand that voting for a bunch of fear-mongerers might lead to a situation where they actually have to pick their own produce.

Maybe it has to get worse before people understand just how connected the world is and that local actions do actually have an impact on the world.

I severely doubt it though...

Nobody forced the farmers to become reliant on migrant workers though.

It was just a simple decision for them: cheap labor that's available today or expensive labor... They mostly went with cheap, and now they don't have anyone available.

Tough luck I guess, but it always was just a question of time until this happened.

At least in the UK, the countryside has basically turned into a vacation and retirement area for wealthy Londoners. It's pretty much impossible for people to afford to live where the labour is needed on any sort of pay that would make farming actually viable, which restricts it to workers from lower cost-of-living countries that cram into cramped accommodation for the length of the season and then return home. Not sure about countries like Spain and Germany.

The countryside everywhere in UK ? Or just around London ?

Everywhere in England at the very least. Wales and especially Scotland might be a little better. The south and around London is probably worse, but even rural Yorkshire is pretty bad.

Scot here. The countryside is open to everyone, and the "right to roam" makes it even moreso.

But I haven't seen much different in the rest of the UK - honestly, to claim the countryside is a giant retirement home seems absolutely absurd to me.

Around London and a lot of the "south". But come out to Yorkshire or Northumberland and you can buy a farm and some land for very little. Living outside of the city in Northumberland(say within 30 minute driving distance to Newcastle) can be stupidly cheap.

> Living outside of the city in Northumberland(say within 30 minute driving distance to Newcastle) can be stupidly cheap.

Shame there aren't many decently paying jobs there, though. Unless you work remotely I'm not sure what there is compared to the south east?

That wasn't the point though - the point was that farm workers don't live close to farms anymore, because British countryside has gotten really expensive. Well, if you work at a farm in Northumberland you can rent a room pretty much anywhere in the area for a few(3-4) hundred pounds, maybe even less.

Obviously that doesn't negate the broader point - North of England isn't where most farms are, after all. And places where most farms are, are expensive.

You make it sound as if the farmers were the only ones affected if they fail to get in their harvest.

That wasn't my intention at all. Fresh produce will get considerably more expensive this year, thats for sure.

Especially fruits as they're often very hard to harvest through automation.

In the coming years I'd wager that a lot of farms will increasingly go for automation now. That'll have it's own consequences.

The effect of this virus on our global society is gonna be massive and will likely bring a lot of changes.. not necessary good ones either

>Especially fruits as they're often very hard to harvest through automation.

So very true and an area in which the robotic revolution has always been mooted to happen soon, for many years...

However the transition will have an impact as once you remove those jobs, you shift the issues. So yes, automation will make things cheaper in one hand, but more expensive in another.

Products which require a lot of manual effort to harvest are generally luxury goods, not essential for feeding the population.

If for whatever reason it seems that this year there's not going to be enough migrant labor to harvest your strawberries, then when the spring comes you can plow that field over and plant potatoes, which will require much, much less labor and feed more people from the same field.

This year is very much not 'business as usual' both in production and also in consumption. Just as most other fields, farming needs to adapt to the changing situation; IMHO it's counterproductive to invest a lot of resources to try and preserve the status quo - we're going to see that some farm products become harder to grow, or harder to transport, or are more difficult for people to afford because of economic problems. It does not mean that we should heroically strive to preserve our ability eat as before, if that means that we're going to be eating less of product like that - less fresh food year round (greenhouses or imported), less meat, less fruit, etc, than that should be accepted, and it's okay; and it's okay if the circumstances force the farmers to switch from high-value labor intensive foods back to cheap, efficient staple crops.

A prime example is the scenes I've seen from Netherlands sizeable flower plantations; as flower purchasing in most of their export markets is way down, a lot of the harvest is just discarded. I'm certain that some of that field/greenhouse capacity will be repurposed for basic food growing instead.

Strawberry to potatoes is a poor gamble. They like different soils. Even ignoring that, when you harvest all those potatoes you are selling into a market that already supplies all the potatoes people want so prices will drop.

> Nobody forced the farmers to become reliant on migrant workers though.

Not strictly true in a competative market that races for the lowest possible cost. It's the toxic company culture mentality that in this case, the shareholders are the customers and they want to have their cheap food.

Hence many farmers been squeezed via large corporations and dairy farmers and many others operate upon margins that are just insane and unsustainable that many end up producing at a loss overall.

I mean, the market does. Most people won't pay an 50% on food because the farmers pay a living wage.

How much of the cost of food is from how much it costs to harvest it? I find it difficult to believe that even doubling the cost of harvesting would cause the price to increase by 50%.

Labour does play a big part in farming and things like fruit - a lions share of the costs in farm to market.

Overall - this may be of interest: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

i don't understand this line of thought.

> Nobody forced the farmers...

The markets did force them, right? If a farmer started making more money from using cheap labour, then the rest would need to follow suit.

> It was just a simple decision for them...

It doesn't seems like anything about this subject is "simple" as farming is big and wide.

1. some farming is loss making in the EU even with cheap labour 2. without cheap labour this subset would need to be subsides 100% (vs ~80% as it is now) 3. you simply cannot fight against ultra low wages from developing countries; you either adapt or die

Moloch did force them.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

Some years ago, I saw a comedian mock the idea that immigrants were a threat to American jobs by joking that he had always wanted to be an underpaid farm laborer and can't make that dream work because the illegal immigrants took all those jobs.

In America, it used to be common for young men in high school and college to do construction work during the summer. Now, it's mostly immigrants.

When I was still a military wife, they changed the fitness test to be less stringent for younger members because they were having so much trouble getting qualified recruits. It really pissed my husband off because they didn't make his test any easier. He was in his thirties and was told "You've been working out for years. You are in the best shape of your life."

Developed countries are turning into nations of couch potatoes who turn their noses up at hard physical labor and probably couldn't do it if they wanted to. Or could but it would be extremely hard on them and there would be additional personal costs akin to training for a marathon.

> In America, it used to be common for young men in high school and college to do construction work during the summer. Now, it's mostly immigrants.

Because college or college-bound adults are, if they are motivated enough to work in the first place, mostly focussed on work that provides a competitive advantage in college admissions and post-college careers, which trade labor mostly isn't.

And because young people are less physically fit than they used to be, so they don't have the muscle and stamina required by such jobs.

But the reasons why are almost irrelevant. The pertinent detail is that employers can't fill these jobs without immigrant labor. Most Americans don't want them at any pay rate.

At 20 USD/hour I think you would be able to fill these jobs.

But if you want to make that salary picking fruit, then we'll have to pay more for it -- or you'll need to have some automation to increase productivity.

I doubt we'll want to pay more, consumers would rather buy imports instead.

Everything I have ever read indicates that white Americans don't want farm labor jobs even if you pay $20/hour.

That's because they would never be able to afford basic things like:

- college education ($30K-$75K/year, preceded by purchasing a shack for $800K in a good-school town)

- health care ($25K/year for a high-deductible family plan)

What's the point?

Or do we consider education or healthcare luxury now?

America has long treated both education and healthcare as luxury items that only the rich deserve.

We need to fix those things. They are negatively impacting quite a lot of people. The lack of healthcare is hardly peculiar to farm labor jobs.

In the US school is free for 13 years. After that there are scholarships for the poor.

Healthcare is expensive, but there are programs for the poor.

When you move out of poor things get hard quick though because you don't get the above and so you have to come up with the prices you quote.

What people want to do work that damaged their body, is subject to short term changes in demand due to weather and has high income instability, and leads to no future growth?

$20/hour for temporary backbreaking work in exchange for not being near friends or family, having to move constantly, having to live in a rural area (not what most people want), having no upward income mobility.

The people that do it, do it because they have no better option. Not because they want to.

> The people that do it, do it because they have no better option. Not because they want to.

Isn't that most people in their current job?

Yes, but I would say as you go down in income, there’s almost zero of “wanting” to do the job and mostly “needing” to do it.

Whereas an engineer might answer that they like the work they do, I doubt someone bending over all day and picking strawberries would.

I've been dirt poor for years. I'm a freelance writer by trade. I like writing. I've always wanted to be a writer. I hate being poor, of course.

I've been told for years to "go get a real job." I'm medically handicapped. For that and other reasons I can't readily "just go get a real job."

The fact that you hate the working conditions and pay doesn't mean you inherently hate the work. There are people who garden as a relaxing and enjoyable hobby.

The assumption that all poorly paid people hate their work and all well paid people enjoy their work sounds like classist prejudice to me.

I knew someone (a programmer, in fact) who made good money, got fed up with the job and they we're told by someone close to them "You can't just up and quit. A job at Home Depot wouldn't even cover your car payment."

I've also seen stuff on the internet from people who are miserable, desperately want to change jobs and feel stuck because they make good money and can't readily walk away from their good income. They have family to support or college loans to pay or whatever.

What you find is that even people who are overall happy will bitch about their job or whatever, if only because it's a socially acceptable bonding ritual. Bragging to the miserable people around you about how everything in your life works wonderfully well all the time is a good way to get everyone to hate you.

There are real quality of life issues for low paid work, farm labor work, etc. But there are farm laborers who live in Mexico and work the fields in the US because they like living in Mexico, they have no desire to move to America and it pays ten times better than jobs in their town.

Not all of these people feel exploited or victimized. Exploitation isn't a good thing in any job, but it's not somehow the inherently part of doing physical labor and inherently not part of the picture for jobs with better public perception.

Everybody has days when you just want to be lazy. A job won't give into that feeling.

Every job has something you don't want to do. Either it is tedious and boring, or it is hard in same way. Many of those things could be ignored (my windows at home are dirty...) in your personal life but the job forces you to do them.

The above factors means even if you love your job there are things to complain about.

The army has relatively low wages (but good benefits, which have been quietly eroding for decades), separates you from family on a routine basis and puts you in harm's way where people may be literally trying to kill you. They advertise it as "an adventure."

Some people join the army because they actively desire to get away from their family. Not everyone has some loving, cherished family situation.

Young people seem happy to be separated from their family for a few months to backpack across Europe or go play digital nomad.

During WW2, we promoted Victory Gardens and lots of people got on board.

I have tried to suggest that we should be checking our county extension office for info and trying to foster Victory Gardens in the face of the pandemic. We shouldn't wait until people are actually going hungry. But I'm a big fat nobody and I don't have much pull, so it's not exactly catching on like wildfire.

Most people work because they must. Even rich people have to do at least some work to effectively manage their wealth or it will run out. They just typically have more pleasant working conditions, but it's sort of a myth that rich people don't have to work.

They are less compelled to work at any particular thing right this minute so they can still eat next week, but when rich people do nothing at all but spend money, it eventually runs out.

(This may not be true for billionaires, but a million isn't worth what it used to be. This is generally true for most people, even people with a fair amount of wealth.)

Migrant labor was $20-25/hour over a decade ago in parts of the rural US where I knew the rough market rate. You are greatly underestimating what a market clearing wage that would entice people to live out there looks like.

The $100+k oil companies are required to pay to entice Americans to work in their remote oil fields is much closer to the reality.

Aren't oil companies looking for skilled labor?

The reality is, the proportion of your fresh fruit cost that is migrant labour isn't very much. If that cost only were passed on, we wouldn't see much of a difference in price.

Kinda how like Walmart could double the wage of its retail employees by increasing its prices by 6%.

And then Walmart would fail because everyone would shop at target or Another store. In a low margin business, every percent counts.

'cept Walmart has been raising its corporate minimum wage. Then there's Costco that has always paid a wage about the prevailing for retail. No shortage of price-conscious customers at either.

Everyone was raising wages, so everyone’s prices also went up, and Walmart still likely has the best cheap:convenient ratio. Point is Walmart can’t choose to raise everyone’s wages 6%, unless everyone else does too, because the whole reason people go to Walmart is it’s the cheapest.

Costco targets people with more disposable income, so not exactly a comparable market.

Historically, Walmart thrived in relatively small town, rural areas. When I was homeless in downtown San Diego, I had to take a bus elsewhere to occasionally visit the Walmart. There aren't any in the downtown area. They don't typically do well in the big city.

You presume people have those options. You presume they can readily and conveniently get to them in a way that makes financial and logistical sense.

In my small town, people who hate Walmart and are happy to drive an hour to a bigger city once a month to "visit the city" and do some of their shopping grudgingly shop at Walmart because it's the only source for a lot of things, even if you are happy to pay more money just to spite Walmart.

People from even smaller towns around us take the bus to shop here (or drive here), mostly at the Walmart. My small town is a regional shopping hub and has shopping and eateries more like a city several times larger because of it. We still can't reasonably get away from shopping at Walmart.

Don't get me wrong. I'm a Walmart fan and wouldn't have moved here if there was no Walmart. I'm just saying I've spoken with a local who hates Walmart and grudgingly does some of their shopping there anyway because they can't always find reasonable alternatives, try though they might.

Historically Walmart drove out all the other shopping in small towns that was barly hanging on as the place locals went when they needed something fast. Until Walmart opened in my town we planned monthly trips to the city an hour away for most of what we needed. The local shops had some things, but the high prices and poor selection meant we couldn't afford to shop local often.

Note that Walmart of then is not the Walmart of today. They used to have quality products at a good price.

I would suggest advertising some fruit-picking jobs at a guaranteed $50/hour to test your theory that Americans don't want them at any pay rate.

That's not "my theory." That's what I have read over and over for some years now.

At that pay rate, your grocery bill will rise 5x-10x and while that might not bother you, there are several people from whom that's a death knell.

Not a chance. When you're paying a couple bucks a pound for fresh ______, it didn't take 15 minutes of a migrant worker's time to plant/pick/care/pack that pound.

My guess is that the migrant worker proportion of retail cost is <10%. Quadrupling their income would increase retail cost by 30%.

edit:

> What would happen to consumer food costs if farm wages rose and the extra costs were passed on to consumers? The average earnings of field workers were $9.78 an hour in 2008, according to a U.S. Department of Agriculture survey of farm employers, and a 40 percent increase would raise them to $13.69 an hour. If this wage increase were passed on to consumers, the 10 cent farm labor cost of a $1 pound of apples would rise to 14 cents, and the retail price would only rise to $1.04.

https://www.prb.org/usfarmworkersfoodprices/

Again such a naive viewpoint, in an economy everything is interconnected. If the prices of groceries rise, there are knock-on effects on everything. Yep, EVERYTHING From healthcare to housing, to transport, and whatnot will rise many-x and this bravado will evaporate in the time you took to read this post.

And benefits when your purchases go into the pockets of a local instead of foreign remittances.

A long time ago, I read that you could double the wages of farm laborers and it would add like two cents or four cents to the cost of a box of breakfast cereal.

If that.

Many farm-products have negligible farm-labour cost in their production: beans, rice, tomatoes, pulses, potatoes, onions, grains...

Their farm costs are in land, storage, drying and expensive equipment. They're not being picked by hand and manually weeded.

And even then, the price difference between the farm-gate and grocery store is massive.

But the small and medium sized farms that do those things by hand with the local work force will not be able to afford to pay their workers.

Breakfast cereal has very little farm labor. It takes seconds for a combine to harvest all the wheat you would eat in a year.

Fruit and fresh vegetables are much more labor intense.

If you spend $1 on food, the farmer gets like 12% of that. Total. For everything. Seeds, fertilizer, gasoline, labor, tractors, whatever.

You could quintuple the pay of fruit pickers and your grocery bill would go up maybe 50%? Less?

It does not need to be most Americans and a lot of office workers would prefer to be farmers if the wage were correct.

We have markets - let the prices rise and we will see more farmers in the future.

E; I know it is not your theory Doreen - but it is a popular species of liberal (meaning democrat + republican) political propaganda.

Everything Moravec's Paradox ever said, everything Peter Thiel ever said about automation - it's right in front of us now.

Thiel also said companies shouldn’t have big cash reserves because it is a sign of running out of ideas.

Hello Slow Ban my old friend.

For growth technology firms that is true - I remember his debate with Eric Schmidt - he was really arguing being a technology firm should be a temporary award contingent on how the firm behaves instead of a title. Technologies mature into infrastructure and stop being thought of as technologies.

This is part of his thesis that technology companies should be monopoly companies - and that the regulator should treat companies like Google as monopolies but the companies producing new value should be classified as different and given a honeymoon period.

His pointing at a technology rust belt is evocative evidence for the position.

It could be hard for Google to weather a downturn without cash reserves. Ad revenue could dry up substantially.

It would have to be quite a downturn to be a real threat. They would have to have revenue drop by more than their large profit margin and their access to debt markets.

I'm not saying they should not - I'm saying they have been slowly becoming infrastructure and a regulator should delay antitrust if they are building up more infrastructure for future technology - Rodney Brooks has been saying there needs to be improvements in the road networks for self driving to be sped up.

Ctrl-F "raised pavement markers" http://rodneybrooks.com/agi-has-been-delayed/

I don't know if I'm right about those - but I am saying the technology giants are not putting their money where their mouth is.

> It does not need to be most Americans and a lot of office workers would prefer to be farmers if the wage were correct.

Most everyone would prefer to be farmers (= farm owners = capitalist of at least the petit bourgeoisie, if not actually the haut bourgeoisie) instead of wage laborers.

But, no, I don't think that many office workers would prefer to be manual laborers, whether farm laborers or otherwise. Sure, with enough of a wage premium they might be lured away. But there are limits to the ability to pay higher real wages to farm labor, because food cost is a major basic expense to start with so higher nominal wages for farm labor necessarily (because while there is lots of aggregate profit in food, there's not lots of proportion of profit, which is where the room for absorbing wage increases without price impact comes from) means higher price index, which reduces real wages for everyone, including the farm laborers.

Some people do white collar work because they aren't physically capable of doing hard physical labor.

That includes me.

One thing missing from a lot of conversations is the detail that modern medicine is good at keeping you alive after a serious medical crisis. It's not so talented at restoring you to full function. The result is a lot of disabled people and that fact rarely enters the conversation about labor trends.

I suspect another element is that we have more pollution and what not impairing the functioning of pretty much everyone, but saying that risks being accused of being a conspiracy theory nutter. But it's been on my mind a lot here lately because pollution is down across the globe, traffic is down in my small town and my energy is -- "coincidentally" -- up and I'm getting more done than usual here lately, in spite of my underlying condition being an incurable genetic disorder.

I don't claim I know what to do - but I don't like us jumping straight to the answer that this would not work - it is like the meme "we've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas".

This is where an imaginative government or community runs experiments - there are people like Elon Musk's brother - have they not been thinking about this?

If we have a large number of people turning their hand to something new - the solution space will open up and we might see new business models in production and distribution.

The political is part of this - there are now large numbers of angry young people wearing masks in the cities.

I don't think most would prefer to be farmers. Farm labor is one of the most dangerous occupations in the US: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/27/the-10-most-dangerous-jobs-i...

Being a solider is dangerous. Being a nurse is dangerous.

The real problem isn't just wages - it is also that our society decided some jobs are for people not bright enough to get into university so stigma hollowed the pride of the working class and that is what really cheapened and demoralized their labour.

Mike Rowe nailed it.

Not sure how attacking "young people" as weak solves anything. It's simply what the job demands.

If you are working in construction chances are you are stronger than someone sitting at a desk. Put the person sitting at the desk in the construction job for a month and I bet they build some muscle.

Same as sitting the construction worker at a desk 8 hrs a day will make them physically weaker.

This is the reason for the boom in gym membership in the last ~15 years.

I'm not attacking young people as weak. It's a known trend, a trend that even the federal government implicitly acknowledged by lowering fitness standards for younger military members but not older members.

Gym membership may be up because we've lost a lot of other avenues for getting some exercise. Lifestyles have changed in recent decades. Kids are much more likely to play video games instead of playing sports with neighbor kids out in the yard or street.

I'm not against vide games. My kids always played a lot of them. But I also made sure they had opportunities to get some physical exercise, if only so my insomniac oldest child would sleep some and he couldn't sleep if he didn't get some physical activity in on a daily basis.

I've done physical work and it's fun at first, and I do like the physicality of it, but it gets boring fast and that I object to. After getting boring it gets soul destroyingly dull. I mean, working eg. in a warehouse can make people hollow. OK, some do like it, but many I knew didn't. Most tolerated it because they had no choice.

It's a very good thing for a period, as a part of growing up, but as a career, or for long periods. It's not good.

There will be plenty in the fields who would have had a career as a scientist, technician, engineer, who the world is now deprived of that because they are forced financially to work in a field (in the literal sense).

The world at large can make it work if people are willing to do these jobs for short periods of time in their youth before moving on to other things.

The world is going to die of starvation if we literally can't find anyone who will do this work at all for any amount of time at any pay rate.

That basically seems to be New Zealand's (and Australia's?) mode of operation. Give the rich countries' young adults fresh out of school a work&travel visa for a year and extend it for a few months with sufficient farm work. They have fun doing new and interesting things and return to their countries with a good impression of yours. Of course that won't work if every place tries it though. I wonder how they're faring right now.

Thanks for that.

I live in a small town with high unemployment and an excess of homeless people. I have fantasies of putting together an "irregular jobs/work" program to help connect locals with remote work, gig work, seasonal work, etc.

My theory is that if you can find some way to connect people to "irregular jobs" who don't want (or can't reasonably do) "regular jobs," a lot of people would be willing to work who aren't working currently.

When I and my sons were homeless, we tried to figure out how to find something like day labor jobs and we were mystified. I asked around on the internet and got a smidgen of feedback, but we never figured it out.

I feel like something went wrong somewhere along the way and America no longer knows how to help people find work of that sort anymore. But maybe some of our social ills would improve if we found a solution to that piece of it.

I'm with you. I'm optimistic that if the market can set a fair price there's plenty of work. As someone from maybe a generation after you I'd have been happy to work in the manual labor sector if it paid better than my job at Staples but alas it paid far worse.

> Some years ago, I saw a comedian mock the idea that immigrants were a threat to American jobs by joking that he had always wanted to be an underpaid farm laborer

Oh, I heard that too, years and years ago and always wondered who it was. Somehow the internet has delivered!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PewDctni5c#t=90

That's some pretty sharp comedy writing and delivery.

Farmers generally aren't the ones getting rich though are they? I think that says a lot.

> Farmers generally aren't the ones getting rich though are they?

Yes.

I mean, not the decreasingly relevant to reality American mythical archetype (always invoked in political context as if it were the mainstay of American Life) of the independent yeoman farmer class, but the actual corporate agribusiness industry which has long displaced it in owning and operating farmland.

To get past the paywall:

document.body.dataset.paywallOverlayStatus="hide";document.querySelector("#graphics-paywall-overlay").remove();

This is such a weird comment, you might as well say no one forced humans to be such social creatures allowing viruses spread easily. People make relatively optimal local decisions based on the situation at hand. It's ludicrous to suggest they should have foreseen this situation and just paid more for labor. That kind of second-guessing could be applied to basically 90% of the world right now, and the other 10% just got lucky.

Its not a weird comment. The current global mode of production is engineered to ONLY work when there are no global crisises at hand.

Guess what: we have a global crisis at hand now. Which means that the neoliberal modus operandi fails without a struggle. It just collapsed overnight.

And if you think otherwise, just answer me this: if tourism cedes to exist, what do wild west neoliberal goverments do (with their current lack of social safety nets) with their 8-10% of their "workforce" having zero capability to get an income?

Why are farmers responsible for this? How do you propose they would have paid for more expensive labor without broad collusion to keep prices high?

Easy - farmers can’t pay more because they would be outcompeted by those who pay less. Race to the bottom which ends predictably bad but which players in the market can’t do anything about short of illegal price fixing or temporary workers unionizing (like that could happen).

It could happen if there was a political will to have a framework for it to happen. There is not any in many countries, so that's that. Well, we will rethink these frameworks in the coming months, I am sure of that.

s/cedes/ceases/ (I don't mean to criticize, I've been noticing a lot of malapropisms recently. Auto-incorrect I imagine.)

Thanks, I was actually pausing a bit to check that word (in my head, at least), and concluded that I have no idea how it should be written :D Ceases indeed makes more sense!

There is a faint whiff of hypocrisy in hiring foreign labour, it suggests to me that some sort of cash-in-hand deal is afoot that isn't in line with local labour practices.

This is a serious and concerning situation. However, it also has a certain schadenfreude of wealthy Europeans waking up in horror at having to pay local wages in excess of local social safety nets in order to grow their own food.

> it suggests to me that some sort of cash-in-hand deal is afoot that isn't in line with local labour practices.

Absolutely. It's exploitative to be sure, at least here in the US. Farms don't want to pay more for labor, and in some cases (perhaps the plurality of them), the migrant laborers are paid under the table to avoid the tax burden on both ends. Of course, this means the company doesn't have to worry about payroll taxes, workman's comp, unemployment, etc., and the workers aren't going to register with the IRS to get a tax ID.

Additionally, the laborers are paid so little it's difficult to think of this in any other way than as a form of slavery sanctioned by the state as it turns a blind eye to what amount to egregious violations of labor laws.

Part of the blame I place on us as consumers. If we weren't so price sensitive to things like fresh produce, perhaps we could pay more such that things are done above board and we become less reliant on migrant labor. Either way, something has to change.

There’s certainly exploitation happening, but it’s just as true that these were relatively good jobs for those that did them based on costs of living in their home countries. As such, this practice has been important to reduce differences between richer and poorer countries, not just in Europe but also between the US and Mexico, for example.

That Schadenfreude seems to be prevalent among the far right here, who might just as soon become the object of it when differences start to widen again and thousands of people start seeking a better live by migrating outright.

>Nobody forced the farmers to become reliant on migrant workers though

They had the alternative to give up, maybe try to find a job in the city or suicide? I am wondering if you imagine this farmers having a big pile of cache because they cheeped out on workers.

Maybe I am wrong so please let me know what would you do if you own a farm and you can't find a job nearby, some people will abandon their homes and go in a big city to work there but not everyone can do that or enjoy working on some assembly line and live in a concrete block.

We are in a time of crisis and the first instinct is to close ourselves but I think we should not throw away what the “free”(almost in some cases) movement of people made possible:

Cheap good food => more people can afford to buy it => less hunger/suffering in the world.

Here is another example:

Cheap technology => more people have access to computers => more innovations are possible => more cheap technology => better life quality.

> Cheap good food => more people can afford to buy it => less hunger/suffering in the world.

You can have cheap good food with mechanical and/or high-scale production. Just means you'll be eating bananas instead of strawberries. And whatever's in-season or canned out-of-season instead of fresh anything year-round. And chickpeas instead of beef. Sugar instead of honey. Lettuce instead of kale.

If anything, this is an opportunity to make cheap food even cheaper instead of using that land resource to make luxury fresh fruits/herbs year-round.

People will complain about it non-stop though.

If the authorities at various levels allow undocumented workers to exist, then they will filter into the economy and market forces will definitely force farms to take them on.

This is not about farming though: it's the canary in the coalmine for the entire economy.

You cannot just stop the economy and print magic money and expect everything to be ok.

We have to be smart like Koreans and control this virus effectively so we can progressively get some of the gears going again, because pain is coming otherwise.

And it's was a simple decision for you too: do I pay this much for my food, or expensively more?

But people want cheap food. I pay about double the price for my “fancy” milk which is locally produced and supposedly uses more sustainable and ethical practices. How many people would be OK with paying double the price for food? Probably not many judging by the myriad of much cheaper milk.

At least in the US, I don't think people appreciate how expensive "expensive" actually is to encourage people to work in a part of the country where no one wants to live. You see the same issue with hiring labor for oil fields in places like North Dakota, where it requires six-figure pay to entice a marginally skilled worker to move out there.

Agriculture has an identical problem in terms of the market clearing wage for labor, except they don't have the profit margins of the oil fields that allow them to throw $100+k at farm labor to make the problem go away. In that version of the world, it would be better to be farm labor than a farmer. It should also be noted that in some parts of the US, the migrant labor is not "cheap" either by any normal definition as they are paid well above the median wage in the US since they have all of the leverage.

When I was growing up a significant fraction of farm labor in my area was ex-convicts from all over the country. The labor supply was so short that it was one of the best paying jobs that would readily hire an ex-convict. You still see some of this but it is greatly reduced, mostly just convicts who are from rural regions and are already accustomed to that environment.

The "no shortage if you pay enough" viewpoint is rather myopic. The same people will be crying hoarse when prices of even basic necessities increase 10x or more, and there are food riots and possibly starvation.

Many people in the west don't realize how good they have it

How are their options today limited by that decision? It’s not like there is some class of expert fruit pickers that was decimated and would take years to train again. Unless they had the power to deny their domestic workforce whatever other opportunities they had that made them unwilling to do farm work, it would have ended in the same spot.

Holly shit since this whole pandemic thing has started, I couldn’t stop thinking about the preppers who must be popping champagne every night and be so happy all their work was for something after all. Everyone made fun of them, but now they’re the ones laughing. The rest of us? We’re just clueless. Seriously, if society was going to collapse I don’t think I’d last very long. I could maybe trade some tomatoes for a couple bullets but then what?

Preppers are just a more extreme version of the people who have a gun for defending themselves. A bad enough emergency can wipe out everything you have.

I guess you could compare this to IT plans for disasters. Most of us have barely any backups for most things. Yet there are those who have multiple off-site backups that are tested often whether they work.

Being prepared is how you survive and thrive in 90% of situations. While I am not one, I never thought it made sense to make fun of them. Folks who laughed at them played a stupid game and won a stupid prize...

paywall

Paste this into the console:

document.body.dataset.paywallOverlayStatus="hide";document.querySelector("#graphics-paywall-overlay").remove();

Easier to use a browser that has your back, like Brave or Cliqz

This is what happens when you dont invest in equipment to harvest in your crop. Rather than relying on cheap migrant labour.

To get past the paywall, paste this into the console:

document.body.dataset.paywallOverlayStatus="hide";document.querySelector("#graphics-paywall-overlay").remove();

I think it is unethical to put information regarding an epidemic behind a paywall.

We want information about the pandemic, don't we? If we do not pay for it, all we will get is what people figure out in their spare time while confined to their homes. Without paywalls, we would just have Kickstarters like "If everyone who wants to know whether farmers are able to produce fresh fruit gives me $5, I will go and ask them!"

You can always get the information by word of mouth or waiting. The amount you're not willing to do that is the amount you should pay to see it now. (I don't pay and just read the reaction in the comments for free.)

I disagree, I think when it comes to a pandemic or any other public safety issue, immediate access to information should be free.

FWIW NYT has disabled the paywall on all their articles about coronavirus (although there's still a loginwall).

We shouldn't be putting prices on human lives.

If the NYT gives it for free, that means you should read the NYT, not steal from people who don't give it for free.

Putting prices on human lives is a good idea. We do it for food, we do it for car safety, we do it for relative risk analysis. Putting a price on groceries means the government can subsidize food fairly, rather than having individuals break the locks on the grocery stores and say "food should be free".

not sure if this will help the situation...

And that's what your average HN reader does not understand when they talk about keeping the country closed down forever. Groceries aren't put on the shelves by a grocery fairy. They can't be put there by the government or a central bank. They actually have to be grown or imported, both of which can be problematic if you shut everything down and disrupt the supply chains.

I'd go to the fields at once if it be worth my time.

That means 50€/hour plus benefits, and fully paid transportation and accommodation.

There are enough jobless people in Germany that should be able to pick any number of fields. For this kind of money, that'd be a no-brainer.

Here we have two problems: Wages are too low to pay for higher food prices that could sustain local field labour, and the majority of average people are already having their hands full with and pockets empty from paying rent, gas, transportation, emergency fund & food as-is. That means, all other jobs also don't pay that well here, and there is simply no local money that could pay high prices.

It's the consequence of having an export-oriented economy: labour must at all cost be as low as possible.

> It's the consequence of having an export-oriented economy: labour must at all cost be as low as possible.

In what type of economy would that not be the case then?

If you’re not export oriented, you need more consumer purchasing power, so higher wages.

Seems illogical to me. Companies are paying the wages of only their own workers, but not of their customers.

> There are enough jobless people in Germany that should be able to pick any number of fields. For this kind of money, that'd be a no-brainer.

Following your thought: if it is worth their time and effort. They can’t earn more than €450/month to not have their Krankenversicherung affected. And then, there are taxes, tax classes and whatnot. What if they earn too much and they lose their unemployment status?

The situation requires changes in law.

> Wages are too low to pay for higher food prices that could sustain local field labour, and the majority of average people are already having their hands full with and pockets empty from paying rent, gas, transportation, emergency fund & food as-is.

Food isn't the issue on that list. Expenses for food have been stable for 20 years at ~14% of income (down from 45% in 1950). Given that these issues would only affect a few fruits and vegetables (but not grains, potatoes, rice, meat, dairy, which are the main foods), higher wages for harvest workers wouldn't make a significant dent in the average German's budget. Yeah, asparagus would be 20% more expensive and so would tomatoes, but the former is rare and somewhat of a luxury anyhow and tomatoes are cheap - at 1,99€ a kg, you won't notice a price hike to 2,49/kg in your budget at the end of the month.

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