Finding a job while you're on probation can be incredibly difficult, and I'm sure there are plenty of people on probation who would be incredibly happy for the work.I'm not. It's incredibly difficult, dangerous, physically-draining work. It comes with no benefits, so no medical care for you when you mess up your back bending over all day. Farm workers are exempt from many of the protections which are given to other American workers, which are no great shakes to start out with. You have to move to the middle of nowhere, away from your normal support network, where you have little to fall back on if something bad happens to you or your employer turns out to be particularly egregious. For the most part, your other choices have to be deeply awful before you'll do farm labor.
Why do you, and apparently others, consider it "ludicrous" that we solve a simultaneous (unskilled) labor shortage and a labor surplus by matching those two together? This seriously seems like a no-brainer to me. You have holes and pegs. Pegs go in the holes. No more problem.Ok, so a hospital in Atlanta has to cut back on staff, and they lay off some people. Let's look at one of those newly unemployed people. She's a fifty-year-old woman who worked the night shift as a ward clerk. She has a high-school diploma and was making $30,000 a year. She's a little overweight and has some arthritis in her knees and hands. The reason that she worked the night shift is that her daughter is a single mother, and she takes care of her daughter's two-year-old twins during the day while their mother is at work.
If CSAs can survive selling onions for $2-$3/lb without relying on illegally underpaid labor, then presumably the megafarms can do the same.I think, though, that it's important to think for a minute about how the CSA model works. The idea of a CSA is that conventional agriculture requires farmers to take on two unfair burdens. The first is the burden of high capital outlays. Farmers have to pay for lots of stuff before they see any returns. And the second is the burden of risk. Sometimes the weather doesn't cooperate or crops are wiped out by disease. In conventional agriculture, if that happens the farmer is screwed. With a CSA, the customer invests in the crop, taking on some of that risk. If it's a good harvest, the customer gets extra produce. If it's a bad harvest, then the customer doesn't get a good return on investment, which is a bummer but means that the farmer doesn't go bankrupt. CSA prices don't have to factor in the cost of the risk and the initial capital, because those are paid for upfront by the customer. That's part of the reason that CSA prices don't seem very high: the costs of initial investment and risk are invisible to most middle-class CSA customers.
I wonder if that same model couldn't happen with other produce throughout the country?There was a pretty big agricultural cooperative movement in the US in the early 20th century, which was mostly copying stuff that was going on in other countries. I don't know this history at all, so I don't know what ever became of it, but cooperatives were once seen to be the thing that would save small American farmers.
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posted by unSane at 6:22 AM on June 23, 2011 [96 favorites]