This is a great example of how low farm wages lead straight into dysfunctional food systems.
On what planet is the most effective way to load multiple tons of goods on a truck "Have someone chuck it in the air 5 gallons at a time"? https://t.co/KMLWOugWSx
— Dr Sarah Taber (@SarahTaber_bww) October 18, 2022
Dr. Sarah Taber is always a worthwhile read, if you’re curious about where our food comes from:
Obviously this wrecks people’s bodies.
But it also takes so long to move the goods that the only way to make it pencil out is pay people nothing.
Hence the myth, “Oh farm jobs just can’t pay well.” 🙄
Nope. That’s from underinvestment, not “farming’s just like that.”
But there are other problems with relying this much on manual labor.
Getting thrown around like this bruises & crushes the product. Crushed, leaky produce makes everything else around it mold too.
Bad handling is a direct cause of food waste!
I appreciate a job well done as much as the next person. People do manual labor jobs with the same skill and precision as professional athletes, and they should get the same recognition for that skill.
But “ooh nice job” recognition doesn’t pay the rent. Manual workers shouldn’t just get oohed and ahhed over when their tiktoks go viral.
They should get paid enough to save and send their kids to school.
And if they were, most of the jobs they have wouldn’t exist anymore.
Jobs like this exist because both the goods and the people throwing them around are disposable. That’s what jobs like this are about.
It’s just weird how fast “respect for workers” bleeds into look-how-much-I-support-the-common-man performances that ignore what those jobs really mean for human lives or supply chains. that is all.
(also this isn’t about OP [original poster], which is a crop physics appreciation post that I support 100%)
(it’s just some thoughts on how videos of people doing hands-on work tend to get interpreted on social media in general)
There seems to be some confusion in the replies about what I mean by “equipment for this job.”
In this case the tech solution is a conveyor belt. They’re rugged, widely available, & not expensive.
They’re making this guy do this bc they’re too cheap for a conveyor belt.
“There’s manual labor!” =/= “it’s a remote, poor subsistence farm.”
Pay attention to the video. It’s got:
-A big crew
-A truck with 5+ tons of perishable goods. This means reliable roads that lead to a bulk market in 1-2 hrs drive.
-Electric/cell phone towers in the background.This is a cash crop farm, not a subsistence operation.
And it’s got enough access to infrastructure that it’s clear they don’t use manual labor bc it’s the only option. It’s about low labor costs, not lack of alternatives.
keep the salty replies coming, i live to crush agrarian pipe dreams with basic logistics & labor economics.
Did the asshole caucus just have a meeting or something?
Within the last 1-2 hrs, the angry replies & QTs have shifted to “But what would poor people even DO if we didn’t GIVE them jobs that destroy their bodies.”
I’m sure that if you asked them, all those people would insist they Love & Respect The Common Worker.
But give them the right prompts, & their real thoughts on the poor come spilling out. “They’re dangerous, inadequate, & couldn’t survive without generous patronage of the rich.”
This attitude has a name. It’s called paternalism.
It’s the idea that poor people are fundamentally broken and dependent on wealthier people to “give” them things.
Meanwhile back in real life, it’s wealthy people who can’t survive without poor people giving them labor & advice.
I hope that someday, we can answer the question, How did Homo sapiens survive before rich people arrived to give us all jobs.
Looks like the original video was made in Turkey.
Possibly.
At least, the language associated with it is Turkish. https://t.co/KtH21BietU
— Nobilis Reed (@Nobilis) October 19, 2022
lurker
first – maybe –
impressive post too though
laura
THERE IS NO UNSKILLED LABOR!11! God bless the working man, if he can’t do it, no one can. (Apologies for the gendered phrase.)
Also, the wages are too damn low.
Baud
I fear that most workers would prefer having their jobs than risk reforms that could cost them their jobs.
Unions help where they exist because they can probably figure out where the right balance is.
Mike in Pasadena
Impressive what that man does over and over without losing a tomato and returning the bucket to ground. Still, the right way is a conveyor belt and a man at the top directing the belt to ensure the fruit drops at the right place. Classic abuse of employees.
Bill Arnold
Quoted just to see it again.
Gvg
That has nothing to do with American low wages for migrant farm workers. No US tomato farmer would put up with destroying his crop that way. He wouldn’t even be able to sell those tomatoes down the road for sauce at a factory.
There is plenty of real cheapness that destroys bodies here without wasting outrage on something far away and possibly not recently that we can’t do anything about.
Real farms have quite a lot of mechanization mixed in with a lot of manual labor. There is also a lot of really tight calculation about how much everything costs.
gene108
Turkey looks more likely than the USA. The women’s dress seems very uncommon here.
cain
@Bill Arnold: It’s a mystery!
Another Scott
Yet another example that (nearly) all videos are misleading, and using them to make grand points about the state of the human condition is risky.
As pointed out above, https://www.tiktok.com/@by.kral_21 is the source.
This one shows people in the trailer and multiple people tossing the baskets up.
Yeah, farm work is hard, skilled work and such laborers should be paid more (and have back-saving devices to improve their productivity and reduce injuries).
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
Brachiator
@Bill Arnold:
This video suggests one answer. The History of the Entire World.
Jobs come with civilization. Ancient hunter gatherer societies may have been more egalitarian, but everyone had to scratch for food.
Baud
@Another Scott:
Yeah, it’s kind of like what we criticize the media for doing.
Starfish
If you want to know what industrial food production in the US looks like, the United Farm Workers account on Twitter is not a bad place to start.
I really love following Sarah Taber’s account too. She is great.
jonas
The real problem with agriculture and wages, both in the EU as well as US (and I can only presume in places like Australia, Brazil, etc.) isn’t that farmers are evil dicks who love to pay their workers next to nothing in spite of the skilled labor they provide and light cigars with $100 bills as they watch their laborers groan under the weight of their tasks. It’s that the consolidation of the food processing, marketing, and grocery industries have created a market situation in which producers are told what they’ll be paid, rather than setting prices, and then have to somehow raise and harvest their crops to meet those prices, which are always being hammered lower by ever-shrinking number of buyers in the retail market. So yeah, installing a fancy automated harvester system sounds great, but what are you going to do if you invest in that (using what credit/loans?) and then the one single wholesaler who deals in your particular crop tells you tough shit, your costs are now too high and they’re not buying from you any more?
If Democrats want to ever regain the rural vote again, do what Elizabeth Warren has been yelling herself hoarse over the past decade and break up these damn grocery, food processing, and feed/seed oligopolies.
Martin
Yeah, I’m glad they’ve sort of sorted that video out, because I’ve driven past my share of tomato farms (they’re all in California by the way, because half of all farmworkers are in CA, because CA is now on the downslope from our worst anti-immigrant racism) and never seen anything like that.
CNN has a feature right now talking about how tomato farmers in CA are ramping back production, and the photos from that feature look exactly like every farm I’m seen.
Don’t get me wrong, things aren’t ideal, but the median farmworker wage in CA is $17/hr. That’s not super in a state with the cost of living that we have, but it’s steadily pulling slightly above the wage floor and compared to other states still pegged at $7.25 it’s downright generous. And CA farms at least do pretty well in terms of investment. They don’t invest like midwest farms – you won’t see many million dollar John Deeres, but that’s mostly because those tractors are basically worthless here. You do see a LOT of improvised equipment that is uniquely suited to harvesting one kind of crop. And the infrastructure for packaging, transport, etc. tends to be pretty good. We have worker groups that specialize in setting up irrigation, that go from farm to farm doing that, etc. CA has scale, and one benefit of that scale is that equipment gets used pretty efficiently, so that equipment gets purchased.
But read the NYT piece. Food prices are going to climb because CA is out of water, and we’re idling fields. High water use crops aren’t sustainable at current prices in a lot of cases, and either those prices will go up or those fields will grow something that uses less water. And about 100% of tomatoes grown in the US are grown in CA. Same for salad greens, etc. These foods can be grown in other states, but farmers in other states don’t know how to do high labor crops where 1000 acres will need 1000-2000 workers. Most other states don’t have the workers, and they don’t have the infrastructure and organization that CA does.
Here’s a good article on how bees are handled. It’s such a big bit of infrastructure that bee hijacking is a big problem, and new legislation has been passed to address it. You have to be specially licensed to care for honeybees. There are entire businesses here dedicated not to raising honeybees, but just for being the intermediary coordinators for billions of bees moving in and around the state.
Read the article and look at the almond orchard there north of the 46 on the way to Paso Robles. This isn’t the Wonderful farm, which is up off the 33 (they are responsible for Cuties, Pomwonderful pomegranates, and Wonderful pistachios – you’ve probably seen TV ads for most of those), but a different one. Those squares you see are half a mile on a side and I estimate there are about 4 million almond trees there. They’re 160 acres each. Just distributing the bees requires a small army of workers. Pruning 4 million trees, harvesting 4 million trees, etc.
You can’t produce the volume of food that CA does operating the way that video suggests. There are lots of problems in the ag community here, but the labor being incompetent/inefficient isn’t one of them.
JaneE
I wonder if part of the problem is the owner or even some of the workers don’t want to change a practice that worked just fine 100 years ago. Or someone decided that the effort to set up a more modern solution was not worth it.
Chip Daniels
Speaking as a white collar professional architect, its true that if people like me switched places with people like that field crew, that guy throwing tomatoes could do a passable job for a few days doing my job, but I wouldn’t last eight hours doing his.
And that pretty much holds true across the board.
schrodingers_cat
How will this help the Democrats win rural areas?
Mike E
Meh I’ll comment on the new post.
Starfish
@Martin: I am not sure if you ever read A Kingdom from Dust. It is a long form piece about The Wonderful company that was written in 2018. It is really well done, but extremely long.
Roger Moore
@jonas:
I think this gets at a really important point about how anti-trust law has been hijacked. Historically, one of the most important reasons for anti-trust law was not monopoly power, i.e. the power of a single producer, but monopsony power, i.e. the power of a single buyer. Railroads and mills would use their power as single providers to producers to charge exorbitant prices. Today, though, the accepted legal standard is that market dominance is only a problem if it results in inflated prices to the buyer. Buyers squeezing producers is not considered to be a problem.
Martin
@jonas: Yes and no. I mean, it’s really complex. Most focused ag centers have (and always have had) cartels to manage prices. Marketing Order 989 set up a local cartel here in CA that set production limits in order to stabilize market prices – not unlike OPEC, etc. That existed until 2015. That was also the cartel that Cesar Chavez was fighting against with the Delano Table Grape strike. So at the same time they were controlling supply to raise prices, they were also underpaying workers. The federal government set up a cartel that the workers could directly organize against for working conditions, and got coordinated abuse instead.
So yes, in many places you do have what you describe, but in the largest agricultural areas, the growers have so much market power that they can resist those efforts. I mentioned Wonderful above. These folks aren’t getting rolled by Stop N Shop. And while farms around the US don’t look like this, it’s also true that the majority of farm workers are in one state where lots of farms do look like that.
One thing that CA farms are pretty good at is marketing their product, so you aren’t getting a generic strawberry, you’re getting a Driscoll Farms strawberry and those brands get pretty broad reach, nationally in the case of Wonderful. That’s what the California raisins were in the 90s. The Got Milk campaign for California dairy. And so on. All of those insulate those industries from being reduced to pure commodities and give them some degree of pricing power.
The grocery consolidation is a big problem, but I don’t think it’s driving things in a way that really trickles down to workers. I mean, we know from the Delano Grape Strike 50 years ago that shit wasn’t good then either. I mean, the whole point of the consolidation is to extract additional money from consumers that they can keep. They do that because their ability to cut wholesale costs is limited, and that’s the normal pattern – the floor becomes a floor, so you raise the ceiling. Wonderful charges grocers more, grocers consolidate to charge consumers more. The decision to fuck workers was made long before any of that.
Kristine
This brought to mind Howard Schultz’s reaction to unionization at Starbuck’s. His attitude is so very “happy family disrupted by ungrateful children.”
Unless I’m in your will, I’m not your kid.
ETA–sorry, thought it was Open Thread. Checked too late. But, restaurant, so food-related.
Jacel
Seeing those tomatoes being flung around reminds me of a long ago Napa winery tour (Napa Mumm?) where the guide credited quality of their product to the LYTs. When asked, he explained that LYTs were “Little Yellow (plastic) Trays “. Their grapes when picked were loaded in reasonably sized trays that would be stacked in a truck, preventing the fruit from being crushed by its own weight prematurely.
Martin
@Roger Moore: The problem are the two sided markets. Railroads are an intermediary, so they if they have monopoly power, they also have monopsony power. As such they had incredible market control – still do, which is why I think the feds need to nationalize the rails and take back the physical infrastructure that the railroads only own because the feds gave it to them.
Compare that to an Apple which has clear monopsony power but not monopoly power. They aren’t a two sided market because they are not a component or service supplier to anyone (famously so). They don’t limit consumer choice, but they do very seriously influence component suppliers and other upstream industries. I mean as an example my son, who is an engineer up in the valley was trying to get some components shipped last month and the normal single digit number of days was 3 weeks, and he didn’t understand why. The why was that Apple prebooks the majority of US delivery capacity in the US over two weeks in September for shipments of iPhones. They do that months in advance and it means if you are trying to ship anything in volume during that period and either didn’t reserve capacity or are willing to pay about 10x your normal rates you aren’t going to ship jack shit.
That doesn’t impact the prices that consumers of Apple products pay, but it might impact a host of other consumers because Apple has thrown a big wrench in the shipping system, etc. Mind you, monopsony issues are complex in other ways because Apple isn’t forcing UPS to keep supply capacity so close to demand. That’s more of a problem of US finance philosophy to not carry underutilized capacity, and if that results in non-linear cost effect on consumers, oh well.
AM in NC
@jonas: This. All of this.
Roger Moore
@Martin:
Windfall profits when demand exceeds tightly constrained supply is the big advantage of squeezing out underutilized capacity. Spikes in gasoline prices when there’s any kind of hiccup in supply are a great example. Producers have no incentive to work at increasing supply and every incentive not to.
dexwood
Late 70s, I picked chile on my wife’s uncle’s Los Lunas, NM farm. It was backbreaking. That day gave me an education into the lives of those who do that work everyday. The rattlesnake under a large, shady chile plant gave my heart and jump-back reflexes a workout.
jonas
@schrodingers_cat: Farmers and ranchers may love their guns and their rural, “rugged individualist” lifestyle and whatnot, but they hate Monsanto and Tyson and JBS with the heat of a thousand burning suns.
jonas
@Chip Daniels:
You’re absolutely right. Knowing how to pick vegetables or prune fruit trees or milk a cow (or operate the machinery to do so) is absolutely fucking skilled labor. Most of us sitting here at our computers wouldn’t last five minutes doing what these people do.
jonas
@Martin:
You’re right — in certain areas and with certain products the growers have consolidated as well and have the power to contend with the grocery cartels (almonds, anyone?). That’s pretty rare, though, and is emblematic of how consolidation around industrial agriculture is bad all-around — for workers as well as consumers. We all remember The Grapes of Wrath. But outside some *very* industrialized/corporatized ag sectors in California and the Midwest, family farmers and ranchers (and their workers) are hugely screwed by the packers’ oligopoly.
jonas
@Roger Moore:
You’d think after like 40 years of AQMD regulations, refiners on the West Coast could figure out, e.g., how to switch over to seasonal reformulations without a massive supply disruption that sends prices soaring for weeks. But oh no. That’s not possible for some reason.
I wonder why.
jonas
@Martin:
I forget where I saw it, (LA Times?) but a few years ago there was a story about a desperate tomato or strawberry farmer in (iirc) Ventura county or somewhere like that whose crop was rotting in the fields and so he offered some crazy wage, like $20/hr, to anyone willing to come harvest his crop. Hundreds of people — homeless guys, tattooed teens, surfers, you name it — showed up at the 5am dawn roll-call. By noon, everyone but like 5 Mexican migrant workers had quit.
Reverse tool order
Harvest comment
Almost 50 years ago, I drove trucks for a farmer growing processing tomatoes in Dixon, CA (west of Sacramento). He would have laughed and shook his head at that video, the minimal productivity and huge labor. Being handled that way, those have to be for processing, not fresh produce. Here, there isn’t time to waste like that.
Here, all the work is done by machinery, right from the planted ground and onto the truck. Don’t remember for sure, there may have been some hand sorting off the belt into the truck.
Now, a little on current production of wine grapes, a much higher priced crop. By tonnage and probably by acreage most of it is harvested by machine as well. However, the small amount of high end wine is still harvested by hand.
We pay workers the higher of $30/hr for more difficult/sparser vineyards or $170/ton for piece work in easier/more loaded vineyards. They are skilled and efficient, so it looks sort of easy. I’ll promise you they are at least four times more productive than you or I would be. Inexperienced newbies start at $18/hr for other work and quickly go to $20. Long term guys, tractor drivers, etc. are far higher. As for who they are, I’ll just say we ask no questions about education. Has little or nothing to do with intelligence or ability for this work.
In case you are wondering, we pay payroll taxes weekly, pay for Worker’s Comp and a modest HMO plan, paid sick leave, paid vacation, about 5 paid holidays, a bonus or two for the last several years. For 10+ months of the year. There isn’t much if anything to do for Nov. & Dec. Pruning normally starts second week of January.
jonas
@Reverse tool order: People often ask, scoffing, how these “hoity-toity” vineyards in CA can charge $50-100 for a bottle of Cab. Well, some of it is certainly the cache of Napa Valley and all that. But a lot of it is simply that’s it’s bloody expensive to produce good wine in CA and that the people who prune, harvest, and process those grapes come at a premium, just like you said. I don’t know how sustainable the CA wine industry is at this point, between drought, climate change, and labor shortages. Most producers are just scraping by at this point, even with the price points they’re able to charge.
Reverse tool order
@jonas:
Can’t disagree with anything you said. There are additional factors. There is a considerable range of both actual and perceived fruit and wine quality. The latter often associated with scarcity due to a small scale producer and being seen as “hot” at the time. In “good wine” regions there is a scattering of sites or portions of sites that prove to truly have “it” (great terroir in fancy talk) among sites that are a little to a lot lesser in how good what they produce is. Relative greatness is not at all apparent to the eye and it certainly isn’t made so by human effort. The best growers and winemakers can do is get reasonably close to bringing forth attributes and minimizing defects.
Putting it another way: successful and rich guy comes here from another field and buys a vineyard site. If he says ‘I want to grow world-class wine grapes’ I have nothing politic to say back. What I’m thinking is: “Unlikely, since you’re late to the party. 90% of how good it will be is already in place.”
Enough philosophy. The cost of land at least moderately well suited for wine grapes is very high in the North Coast and especially in Napa and Sonoma. Farming costs are tied fairly closely to unit area rather than unit yield and yields here are low compared to areas with more of a commodity crop going in to more mass market wines. We’re competing with other industries for the same labor, like construction, hospitality, and landscaping. I don’t have to tell you what other costs are doing or the effects of shortages and disruptions.
Lastly, small producers sell mostly into different markets than the large producers. Small wine shops, local groceries, small or individual restaurants, directly to individuals. Versus chain supermarkets and the various big box places for the big producers. Including those brands you’ve never heard of in the big boxes. Those are mostly just second labels from big producers trying to look like small producers.
Those smaller markets got hit harder than the bigger ones in the pandemic and that effect went upstream.
So, not all smooth sailing in this part of the luxury goods sector.
PS: climate change is mainly showing as extending drought conditions and consumer demographic trends are a worry too.
Reverse tool order
@Jacel: Missed your comment going thru earlier.
Those are known in the industry as “FYBs”. You can figure out the F word, Y is yellow, and B is boxes. In 30+ harvests on the grower side I’ve worked with them twice, maybe three times. For very small quantities. That’s 2-3 times more than I care to repeat. Total pain in the ass that you can stack in something else or film-wrap the hell out of. For the latter, how are you going to secure it on a truck and keep it conventionally forkliftable from the ground beside the truck.
Almost all small and medium sized growers delivering to small or medium sized wineries that want them use the Macrobin 24-S. It’s a good, stackable plastic bin almost 4 ft x 4 ft outside by 21 inches deep inside. For those wanting less fruit compression there is the 16-S which is 15+ inches deep. A legal load is two high for the first or three high for the second. Well and easily secured with 4 inch wide winch straps. Or cables and corner irons of you’re old school.
I’m just picturing an 80,000 lb max legal load in 44-48 Macros versus something like 1,500 FYBs and handling them at both ends. One of those doesn’t happen here.
GibberJack
@Chip Daniels: In two weeks of working at it, most people could do it. Unless a person has an underlying health issue or is old, the body will respond to the physical demands.
You will not be able to complete an 8 hour day the first day, or the second or third, and your body will be sore as hell during that ramp up period, but if you take it gradually your physical capacity will increase. You will get stronger and have more stamina.
In two weeks of that worker stumbling around in your job he will get no better. In two months or two years, same.
Not so the other way. That’s part of why you can get paid so much more.
GibberJack
@jonas: As I suspect you probably know due to your use of quotes around “rugged individualist”, rural life is indeed a lifestyle. It is heavily subsidized and has been since FDR’s Rural Electrification Administration, a lifestyle ironically made possible by the taxes of those people who they lash out at and who live in the urban areas they are so contemptuous of. It’s become macho self-important cosplay.