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Comment by joosters | Hacker News Reader

"It's harder to find people to do that work every single year"

Translation: The wages we pay are crap and we're not going to pay them more.

I'd push back on that a little bit. I grew up on a farm that's still operating today, and it truly is difficult to find people to work those jobs. The farm pays just as well as any other job in my rural hometown, so from my experience, it seems to be more of an issue with the work itself. The hours are longer, and work is more sporadic/seasonal. When harvest rolls around, farmers need to get the crop out of the ground ASAP. That means 10-14 hour days for 4 weeks straight, otherwise, you'll lose product. It can be physically demanding and monotonous work.

But it's also incredibly fulfilling work, and it's a great example of a community-driven effort to accomplish something very important: providing food.

So I think it falls into a similar category of "college is over-emphasized and we have a dwindling supply of trades-workers". While in school in a rural farm town, I never once heard anyone say "what about farming?" when discussing future career choices. It's not marketed as an attractive option. Maybe it's as simple as "farmers have the work-life balance of an emergency room doctor while making ~1/6th" (source: Dad is the farmer, Brother-in-law is the doctor)

Anyway, it's a problem I think about a lot. I didn't get into farming, but in many ways I wish I had, because it's a highly undervalued skill with a very rewarding outcome: you feed communities. How do we change the narrative? Do we need policy changes? Continued technological advancement? A push to educate the next generation of farmers within schools? I'm not sure, but I don't think it's always as simple as saying "it doesn't pay enough". That _is_ an issue, but it's not the only issue.

> pays just as well as any other job in my rural hometown, so from my experience, it seems to be more of an issue with the work itself. The hours are longer, and work is more sporadic/seasonal

If it pays as much as other jobs with shorter, less sporadic hours, it's underpaid.

Over the course of the year you make the same. However some months you make a lot more/less than others.

My uncle was a farmer, and I had odd jobs on the farm. I remember the potato harvest as being cold, back-breaking and utterly boring hard work. I've also been a fruit picker, wasn't much better.

But. I survived my early 20's on these kinds of jobs while I sorted my shit out. I'm grateful for the experience and the ability to support myself while I did that.

> But it's also incredibly fulfilling work, and it's a great example of a community-driven effort to accomplish something very important: providing food.

I'd love to take a break from my job once in a while to do some other, probably more manual work.

I think everyone used to go back to the countryside to help with harvest during summer, bur I feel overspecialized these days. How about incentivizing companies to take more part-time workers (as in, do not make it difficult to do so)? Together with minimal wages, it could be quite interesting. I also think having a broader skillset (more people helping) would help quite a bit: If I worked part-time at a bakery, I could probably help them with their computer/electronics troubles, for instance.

Vocation Vacations.

There was an artile on HN about the influence of movies on "cool".

After Jurassic park, there was a huge uptick in paleontology, and everything else related, even Veterianism (!).

Most of the currents that kids get from movies are destructive to society IMO, but if it could be tapped into - it is a source of influence. Humans naturally copy what they see.

If a series of movies with the hero being an entomologist came out, it would do us good. If there were a bunch of farm boys that played with nature in a way that made it cool, we would harvest the benefits for generations.

Certainly we need a cultural shift towards honoring ALL kinds of work, but if as you said, the work is hard, sporadic, and long hours, then of course no one wants to do it if there are other options that pay the same but lack those features.

Manual weeding is really not a job people want to do in the developed world. IMO it's the worst part of farming in that requires working at ground level all day and needs to be done every couple weeks. It will wipe you out physically. Typically people who have to do this for long and have any other job available to them will switch even for a pay cut, but farmers can't really offer much because food production is low-margin (and in the USA they are competing with farms that use herbicides).

It’s not a tech industry ffs. The agriculture is already operating on a thin margin.

They actually pay pretty well considering ($15-20/hr in some cases,) it's just very hard work. You also have to consider that farms don't make much money. They don't have massive margins like Google and a single bad weather event can wipe out any profit for the year.

Paying people to walk through fields picking weeds doesn't sound scalable or sustainable to me.

It was for the last 11 000 years. With variabilities, but based on demographic only it was pretty scalable and sustainable.

Most of humanity was suffering for the past 11000 years. Almost everyone lived in extreme poverty.

A mere 125 years ago it required the majority of the US workforce to farm enough food for people to eat. The mechanization of agriculture enabled much of the technological and cultural progress of the past couple centuries.

A lot of slave labor was involved in the last 11 000 years.

It's kind of a shitty job no matter how much you pay. The work is seasonal so the people doing this have to move around following the work. It's also in remote locations, there aren't apartments for rent right next to the farm. Often the farm has to provide housing, which of course means they will do whatever they can to cut costs. Internet and cell reception are going to be abysmal, nothing but farmland for miles in every direction. And you're constantly on the move following the next job. Don't get me wrong, there are some serious things that can and need to be done to improve the industry, but even with all of those fixed it's not a job for everyone.

I'm not sure that's really the reason, but at the same time it seems the overall tendency is to invest more in machinery and automation rather than pay better wages.

There is also a demographic inversion taking place in many parts of the world...

But is that a cause or an effect?

Raise the wages -> food prices rise. Rinse and repeat.

No, the price increase will be much smaller than the wage increase because the wage increase only goes to the fraction of the population that does the work while the price increase applies to the entire population.

If you raise the base cost of production in a low margin case like agriculture, then the price of the good must increase or they would be running at a loss.

Of course, but if everyone pays $1 more then the wages can increase by $10 assuming 10% of the population works in agriculture which still leaves them $9 better off. My point was just that a wage increase is not nullified by the price increase as long as not everyone is working in the fields.

if everyone pays $1 more

That’s a collective action problem. You can’t get everyone to pay $1 more. If your strawberries (for example) cost $1 more per pint then your sales will drop accordingly. It doesn’t matter if all strawberry farms agree to pay more to their strawberry pickers. You aren’t only competing against other strawberry farms, you’re competing against all other food. If strawberries are too expensive, people will eat candy or potato chips instead.

So it turn out that people or not willing to pay what it costs to produce strawberries at a wage level at which people are willing to do the hard work. That's fine. The farmer should try to lower the costs by automation or switch to producing potatoes for those potato chips.

Yes, but the amounts are tiny. Would you pay an extra 10 cents a pound for your produce? That amount would be life changing for farmers.

But the market will always find the place where the work is unbearable and stop just shy of that.

> Yes, but the amounts are tiny. Would you pay an extra 10 cents a pound for your produce? That amount would be life changing for farmers.

You underestimate the percentage of the income some people spend on food. That's why agriculture is heavily subsidised.

I didn’t estimate that.

Agriculture is incredibly subsidized, which means cost of production and cost at point of sale do not have a tight relationship

People would import food.

Its funny, I've lived most of my life not too far from fields growing food. But when I go to the grocery store, most of the produce there is imported.

In 2019, California agriculture produced about $50B in receipts, with almost $22B in exports. Our water goes with those exports too.

> Our water goes with those exports too.

Now, that kind of nationalism is very uncalifornian.

Not following you. We've had drought in CA for years now. There are fights over where water goes, and a lot goes to farming. Then a bunch of those farm products are exported. Do we focus on serving the people in CA or the exports from CA when we talk about water regulation?

My original point is that even though we produce a crazy amount of farmed goods in CA, we still import things that we grow here and export. Always seems odd to me to see produce from Ecuador in the grocery store when I can buy better quality down the road from a local farm stand.

The Ecuadorian produce is cheaper. If you want local produce buy it from the stand. The water rights stuff is pretty messed up anyway, because the us is essentially stealing water that used to go to Mexico.

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