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