As Readers of this Blog know, this Blogger’s father was a Trotskyite; in practical terms that meant he had this Isaac Babel/Pol Pot syndrome that field sweat cured intellectual elitism, so he made sure all of his sons had to work in the fields one summer.
This Blogger had to spend time on a cattle ranch in the Oklahoma Panhandle, near Guymon, sorting out various forms of cow dung.
Every year, in my youth, recruiters would come down from the Connecticut River Valley to recruit Brooklyn boys to work in the tobacco fields of Connecticut, harvesting Connecticut Shade Tobacco. One year, my brother, doing his Trotskyite duty, went off to the John Steinbeck fields to curb his intellectuality.
“Connecticut shade tobacco is a tobacco grown under shade in the Connecticut River valley of the U.S. states of Connecticut, Massachusetts, and southernmost Vermont, and is used primarily for binder and wrapper for premium cigars.”
“More than 700 acres of Connecticut farmland were planted with shade tobacco in 2011. Since then, those shade plantings have plummeted by nearly 80 percent, a decline that has some experts fearing that this iconic, century-old crop is about to vanish forever from the state's landscape.
A major reason for the drastic decline in shade tobacco in both Connecticut and Massachusetts is competition from places like Honduras and Ecuador, according to agricultural experts. Farmers in those nations are harvesting and selling what they call "Connecticut seed" tobacco, paying far lower labor costs and undercutting sales of high-quality shade tobacco from this state.
Experts say Honduran "Connecticut seed" tobacco for cigar wrappers can sell for $33 a pound, while this state's shade tobacco farmers have to sell their product for $50 a pound to make a profit. Connecticut officials say using the state's name to sell tobacco grown elsewhere is deceptive and should be stopped.
The O.J. Thrall Co., once one of this state's premier shade tobacco growers, is selling 325 acres of crop land in Windsor and Windsor Locks. State and local officials say prime farmland offered for sale in the Connecticut River Valley is almost always bought by developers for industrial or housing projects and is never used for farming again.
One 67.2-acre plot of Thrall tobacco land on Day Hill Road in Windsor is on sale at $13.5 million. A nearby 21.7-acre plot on Baker Hollow Road is listed at $2.4 million, and another 26.8-acre section of Thrall land on the same road has an advertised price tag of $3.37 million.…. One of his top aides at the agricultural agency, George Krivda, said Connecticut River Valley topsoil "is not measured in inches, it's measured in feet, and once it's paved over it's gone forever."
….Markowski Farms, a West Suffield-based family operation that is planting about 75 acres of shade tobacco this year, is one of only a handful that is still doing so in Connecticut and Massachusetts.
Connecticut Valley tobacco, and particularly the premium shade-grown variety, has long been considered one of the finest cigar-wrapping tobacco products in the world. …….For decades, tobacco farming in the Connecticut River Valley was one route for new immigrants to make a living in this state. Today, farmers like Markowski say they have to import guest workers from Jamaica and other Caribbean and Latin American countries to do the hard, skilled manual labor shade tobacco requires.
Markowski said his workers are getting paid $13.28 an hour, compared with $1.50 an hour that field hands on Latin American tobacco farms are earning. "We say a day's pay here is a work week's down there," Markowski said. And those far higher labor costs are a major reason why
Connecticut tobacco farmers find themselves at a competitive disadvantage.
"Labor costs are the biggest component driving shade production," said Andrew Urbanowicz, a broadleaf tobacco farmer in Enfield and president of the ConnMass Tobacco Growers Association…..HARTFORD COURANT.”
This Blogger appreciates that there is a labor shortage in the fields of the Lord, a Labor Shortage exacerbated by President Trump’s crackdown on illegal aliens, which supplied most of the field workers of America.
The Liberal solution is to allow more illegal aliens into the country to sustain the agricultural work force. This Blogger wholly disagrees.
“KSBW TV Action News 8…SHARE to show your appreciation for Central Coast farm workers! Harvesting crops is back-breaking work. It takes a skilled person to cut, clean, and trim 10 stalks of celery in less than 30 seconds.
Monterey County's agricultural industry is worth $4 billion. Without farm workers, crops would rot in the fields. They wake up before sunrise to harvest vegetables and fruit for dinner tables across the U.S.”
The importation of illegal alien labor to work the fields of the Lord,regardless of how attractive that option is to the beleaguered farmer, would be a critical mistake for the future of the Republic, for the Robots are coming to replace the farm workers.
“SALINAS, Calif. — As a boy, Abel Montoya remembers his father arriving home from the lettuce fields each evening, the picture of exhaustion, mud caked knee-high on his trousers. “Dad wanted me to stay away from manual labor. He was keen for me to stick to the books,” Mr. Montoya said. So he did, and went to college.….Mr. Montoya is among a new generation of farmworkers here at Taylor Farms, one of the world’s largest producers and sellers of fresh-cut vegetables, which recently unveiled a fleet of robots designed to replace humans — one of the agriculture industry’s latest answers to a diminishing supply of immigrant labor.
The smart machines can assemble 60 to 80 salad bags a minute, double the output of a worker.Enlisting robots made sound economic sense, Taylor Farms officials said, for a company seeking to capitalize on Americans’ insatiable appetite for healthy fare at a time when it cannot recruit enough people to work in the fields or the factory.
A decade ago, people lined up by the hundreds for jobs at packing houses in California and Arizona during the lettuce season. No more......….In a 2017 survey of farmers by the California Farm Bureau Federation, 55 percent reported labor shortages, and the figure was nearly 70 percent for those who depend on seasonal workers. Wage increases in recent years have not compensated for the shortfall, growers said.
Strawberry operations in California, apple orchards in Washington and dairy farms across the country are struggling with the consequences of a shrinking, aging, foreign-born work force; a crackdown at the border; and the failure of Congress to agree on an immigration overhaul that could provide a more steady source of immigrant labor.…. about three-fourths of crop workers in the country were born abroad, and they are overwhelmingly undocumented. Beefed up border enforcement has rendered “follow-the-crop” migration within the United States a “relative rarity,” according to the United States Department of Agriculture.
Growers in many states, like Florida, a citrus behemoth, have turned to the H-2A guest worker program to import labor from Mexico. But they complain of government red tape that delays arrivals and of unpredictable weather patterns that can prompt fruit to ripen prematurely, before workers are scheduled to show up — which both result in losses.
Taylor Farms brings in about 200 workers a year on the visas, about 10 percent of its seasonal labor force. “The program is not always dependable and our items are perishable,” said Chris Rotticci, who runs the harvest automation division of Taylor Farms, which is also looking for ways to replace humans. “But we have to do it. We don’t have enough people.”
Ideally, growers say, Congress would pass a bill to legalize undocumented farmworkers who are already here and encourage them to stay in the fields, as well as include provisions to ensure a steady flow of seasonal workers who could come and go with relative ease.
California’s $54 billion agricultural industry cannot afford to wait. As the country’s epicenter of both technology and agriculture, the state is leading the move to automate in the fields and packing plants.
Driscoll’s, the berry titan based in Watsonville, Calif., has invested in several robotic strawberry harvesting start-ups, including Agrobot, which uses imaging technology to assess a berry’s ripeness before it is harvested. It is currently in test phase.
Driscoll’s, the berry titan based in Watsonville, Calif., has invested in several robotic strawberry harvesting start-ups, including Agrobot, which uses imaging technology to assess a berry’s ripeness before it is harvested. It is currently in test phase.
Last spring, Christopher Ranch, a giant in garlic, began using a 30-foot-tall robot to insert garlic buds into sleeves, the nets into which they are bundled for sale in supermarkets.
“It’s a real workhorse,” said Ken Christopher, executive vice president of the company, whose headquarters are in Gilroy, Calif. “We can do more in a half shift than we could do in a full shift.”
Bartley Walker, whose family business rents and sells tractors, now offers a robotic hoeing machine with a detection camera capable of identifying the pesky weeds that sprout between row crops like broccoli and cauliflower.
“The weeder is not as precise as a human with a hoe,” Mr. Walker said, “but it extracts 90 percent of the weeds.” What is more, one machine replaces 11 workers......
All told, the company plans to double the number of automated harvesters, which cost about $750,000 each, in the fields each year — until nearly everything can be machine-picked.
On a recent morning, a machine that employs water-knife technology severed romaine heads as it moved through row after row of a lettuce field that stretched as far as the eye could see…..Guadalupe, 55, who described herself as the “foreman,” watched over them. Not one of her six children, all adults, works in agriculture. “They did this during vacation when they were teenagers. Now they have office jobs,” said the Mexican immigrant, who would only give her first name.
Wheat, soybean and cotton crops have long used automation. Delicate fruit, like peaches, plums and raspberries, as well as vegetables like asparagus and fennel, will remain labor intensive for the foreseeable future.….Labor challenges are the main reason Taylor Farms is building a second plant in Mexico, due to open early next year. “If we can’t find workers here, it is a logical place to grow,” said Mr. Borman, the executive….NEW YORK TIMES.”
“Ideally, growers say, Congress would pass a bill to legalize undocumented farmworkers who are already here and encourage them to stay in the fields….”
Somewhere in the next world, this Blogger’s brother is dying again, this time with laughter. No one who has worked in the fields wants to stay in the fields.
Being a field worker is a dying art, like being a blacksmith; the robots are coming. That leaves the Republic with two problems: a) how to solve the current field worker labor shortage and b) how to accelerate the coming of the robots.
For its own survival, for its own integrity, the Republic cannot give another amnesty to undocumented workers, not in this Anthropocene. Another amnesty will merely open the floodgates, and the Republic will be overwhelmed by unskilled labor drawn from a pool of 148 million unskilled migrants on the move.
There is a sunset on the viability of farm workers doing their craft; the Republic has a TEMPORARY need for more farm workers, but NO NEED for importing more citizens. We can legalize the workers, but we cannot offer them citizenship; the Republic does not need more citizens in this zero sum world of limited resources. We can legalize farm workers with temporary work visas; and protect the future of the Republic by denying the offspring of all holders of those visas, Birthright Citizenship. A visa program devoid of Birthright Citizenship for the children of visa holders, would attract farm workers willing to come to America to make money, and then return home to build up their homelands. Robots are going to produce vast numbers of unemployed farm workers, and not all of them can be civil rights lawyers or activists. That will cause a lot of social discontent. Legalization without Citizenship or Birthright Citizenship is the solution.
“According to a Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan could cost taxpayers a total of $2.4 trillion by 2017 when counting the huge interest costs because combat is being financed with borrowed money..”
The Federal Government should set up a program allowing for interest free loans to farmers, in order that they can buy robots, thereby replacing labor with robots.
The quicker the Republic can bring robots to the fields, the better the chances that America wil not face a social catastrophe caused by unemployed and undocumented farm workers.
“Facing a diminishing workforce, some farmers in the United States are looking to artificial intelligence as a means to adapt to the changing labor landscape. In Florida, for example, Gary Wishnatzki of Wish Farms is rolling out AI-powered robots that are capable of picking his crops…..According to Wishnatzki, his farms need around 600 workers to harvest his 600 acres of crops every two or three days. Thus, during season, workers are faced with very few rest days. In a statement to CBS News, Wishnatzki noted that his farms’ labor force, a significant number of whom is from Mexico, has been facing challenges over the past 15 years…..In order to address his farm’s shortage of workers, Wishnatzki looked to automation through AI-powered robots. He co-founded Harvest CROO Robotics, a company aimed at developing a machine that can pick crops using robots and artificial intelligence. A few years later, Harvest CROO has created an AI-powered robot that uses imaging technology to determine which berries are ripe enough to pick. The technology behind the AI-powered robot was described to CBS News by Paul Bisset, Harvest CROO’s CEO.
“We’re collecting 50 to 100 images a plant, and all of those images are fed into our AI system in order to tell us, OK, this is a good berry, this is one we want to go after,” Bisset said…... Alex Purdy, the head of John Deere Labs, stated that the future of farming lies in advanced tech….CBS.”
In Orson Welles’ sublime film, THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS, the automobile destroys a society based on the noble equine. The Republic is back there again, Robotics will destroy a world built on unskilled manual labor.
In fast food restaurants across the nation, across the world, robots are being introduced to flip burgers and wait on tables( see pictures below).
There will be robotic buses, and robotic cars, robotic taxis and robotic trucks. Japan is developing cutting edge robotic maids and caretakers.
The heaviest burden on the Republic in the 21st century is to retrain its working class; the first step in doing that is culling the working class of the illegal alien, and the undocumented. For the Robots are coming to decimate the working class in America; it should be only working class Americans who survive that decimation.
Workers in the field
Brooklyn boys in the Connecticut tobacco fields, 1955
Robotics in the fields
Robotics in fast food, flipping burgers, delivering
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