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Comment by datenhorst | Hacker News Reader

> Reed employs a group of highly skilled operators from South Africa

This is mentioned as an afterthought but struck me as strange . Migrant workers commuting from South Africa? The article even mentions their wage at $30/h.

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My brother is good friends with a family that has a fairly large farming operation near our hometown. Their dad puts out blog posts periodically and in one of them he mentioned something about the South African workers being delayed or unavailable due to the pandemic.

I would guess they maybe make a good labor pool due to being in the opposite hemisphere, so they can come up to the US during their off season. Not sure on that though.

I was surprised when I read about it, and then a little less surprised when I read it in this article. Guess it's a thing.

We have the same thing here in Norway, both in fruit and vegetable farming (planting, weeding in ecological farms) as well as in sheep farming were sheep shearers fly in from Australia/New Zealand after finishing the season down under.

I'm guessing the extremely expensive Norwegian labour costs make that viable? In Ireland, I never heard of sheep shearers being brought in from Australia or New Zealand (in fact the flow of young workers has been in the other direction since the 2008 crash).

My understanding was that the sheep shearers were specialists and the others were cheap labor.

Note that Norway has strict laws and regulations when it comes to wages, but especially this year it has become clear that certain farms finds all kinds of ways to fleece some of these people anyway:

- rent out overpriced "flats" with bunk beds that are the bare minimum allowed standard

- changing terms after people arrive

- generally try to skirt regulations in every way possible

That's very depressing to hear to be honest.

$30 an hour sounds good until you realize you only work for short spurts at a time. There are months where you have jack shit to do and yet you still must eat and survive. And there aren't a ton of jobs that are willing to let you take off days or weeks at a time to go work your farming job. "Sorry boss, rain is coming, so ill be gone for the next 3-5 days, that is fine right?" "Sorry no, I can't come in for an emergency, im busy doing 16 hour days in a combine for the next 2 weeks."

Migrant workers? Why aren’t they expats?

Locally (where we have a lot of folks who come from other countries to work in agriculture), I've always assumed it's about duration: If you come to work the season, you are a migrant worker. If you come to stay on a semi-permanent basis, you are an expat. But maybe I've been using those words wrong?

That sounds reasonable, but I didn't see anything in the article to indicate that these mechanics were only there seasonally. Perhaps I missed it.

H-2A visa holders. Even American farms source global labor. Given his location, it's probably better than trying to fight the brain drain and sort out the unreliable burnouts left in the local labor pool.

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