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Farms are closing without workers. US border policy threatens to empty shelves. | Opinion
(www.courier-journal.com)
this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2025
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250 bucks a day is twice what I make a day working at a grocery store stocking those apples to the shelves.
I am confident in saying that it isn't an issue of "not paying the employees enough". The job is physically gruelling in ways that most people can't do long term. And I'm also very confident that the supervisors/managers are not going to be the easiest people to get along with in this type of work environment.
The only real answer might be to put more people to work in the agricultural sector to do the same amount of work, letting everyone have shorter shifts (will never happen under capitalism, of course).
The real answer is you just get a machine to do it and so like 10 guys on shifts pick all the apples, with the machine.
picking fruit is very much a non-trivial automation problem
If I stick to example given here of apple picking that's a solved problem.
I couldn’t have said it better myself. All attempts so far at automating apple picking for the grocery market have failed. Probably the biggest recent advancement is having pickers stand on tiered platforms that get slowly pulled along by a small tractor. The hottest new tech is using a vacuum system and a rotary airlock valve to eliminate workers’ time spent dumping bags into bins. It’s still all about having people grab the fruit off the tree in even the very highest of high tech operations.
Revenue sharing paid out to the workers by the hours they work might be acceptible.
Paying a person by the number of bins they fill in a day creates a situation were every worker is in direct competition with each other seems... not great in the long term for the harvest workers in general.
A single person being able to fill 15 bins in a day might not want to lose pay by only filling 10/11/12 bins and leaving the other apples for other workers. Other workers are then cut out of being able to make as much as there are less apples for them to pick. Feedback loop kicks in where new apple pickers can't "get gud" fast enough to poach apples from that one asshole who can pick 15 bins worth in a day so fewer and fewer people can view this seasonal work as actually worth while.
Capitalism is a shit.
I think it's more about getting paid for more than the 1 month a year that this work is available. So we could solve it by just paying someone a whole year's salary in a month, then they'd get a lot of applicants. But the farmers want to only pay people for that month, hope they survive in some other way for 11 months, and that they happily come back at the end of that to work for a month again. It's capitalism running into a constraint built by weather and finding out that the only solution is slavery or socialism
Pretty sure the orchard operators don't get prepaid for their apples either so they're put into a situation of paying their workers from money saved from the previous year's harvest or through taking out loans. Somebody else besides the farm operator is going to have to foot the bill for paying each worker 20~25k a year US for a month's work.
It's worth noting that workdays are typically longer than 8 hours and don't include benefits, and (as other users have noted) are only seasonally available and may require extensive travel.