Quote:
Originally Posted by Oldglory
What utter BS! Who do you think were doing all those jobs for a fair wage before millions of cheap illegals flooded our border?
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"Fair wage" is a damned vague term.
When I was young, my father owned a dry farm. For most of the year, he did most of the work himself, and employed his younger brothers until they moved on to other work that paid better wages. As my bro and I grew up, we replaced his siblings.
My dad also employed a couple of local guys as hired workers, and they too, eventually left him for better wages elsewhere.
During harvest, he needed more workers for about 1 1/2 months than at any other part of the year. When I was young, there were always a small group of mostly white migrants who showed up to work for him then. Some came every year for several years, while others only worked 1 or 2 harvests and were never seen again.
By the time I graduated high school in 1962, my Dad was hiring our friends instead, as the migrants were no longer coming around. By the time I returned from the Navy in 1969, my bro and I did almost all the dry farming, and he hired only 2 of our friends for harvest.
In total, the crew during harvest, including my family, amounted to 6 people. When the farm was owned by my grandfather, he hired 12 for the same harvest. When my great-grandfather owned the same ground, he employed 40 for the same harvest.
Nowadays, while we still own some of the ground but haven't farmed it ourselves for decades, the big farmer who leases our land, and the properties that surround it, employs 12 hands, mostly all Hispanic, and harvests over 3 times what we harvested. He hires whites as readily, but very few want or know the work, so they're a small part of his operation.
That's how both technology and human labor are progressing. Those old white farm workers who migrated from harvest to harvest either died doing the work or moved up the ladder to better jobs with better wages.
In the future, a robotic tractor could do the same work tilling the ground, seeding, and weeding, and a robotic combine could cut the harvest, but humans would still be needed to keep the robots going at their best, and doing all the grain handling that will require humans for a long time to come to do it with the most efficiency and least waste.
It doesn't take speaking English to do that. it takes a farmer who knows and is willing to do the work for the money it pays.
Right now, Mexicans do the work because they know how to dry farm. Tomorrow, it may be Ukranians, as they're good dry farmers, or Argentines, or Ethiopians, Egyptians, Turks, or any of the other nationalities who all understand what it takes to grow and harvest a grain crop.
Since grain can grow in places where other crops cannot, there will always be a lot of human employment involved. Technology will allow grain to be grown in places where it's not profitable right now, and humans may be more efficient harvesting in difficult places than machines for some time to come.
And in the future, depending on just how hot Earth may become, alternative grains to wheat and rice may become our staple foods. Such alternatives now exist in Africa, and farmers there are growing them every year. It's very possible America will need Nigerian dry farmers in our future, as they already know how to grow those grains, along with other African nationalities.
It won't ever be a high-paying job, but it will always be one that is vital. We all will continue to eat in the future, and grain is an essential staple in all human diets.
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