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this post was submitted on 28 Mar 2024
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Not recent, but I was privy to the latest advancements at the time. Perhaps there were a half-dozen overseers who lived near the fields and did labor management and crop observation, but there was always an army of latinx workers share-cropping less profitable crops during rotation seasons, driving pesticide sprayers, doing firewatch during dry days, maintaining the cesspool, and a number of other tasks that were either too person-intensive or beneath the white owners and their middle-class wage managers. 90% of the people on the industrial farm were people of color, and all the jobs they did were dangerous, underpaid, and essential. That percentage includes the white people working in the machine shop, and the contracted crop-dusting pilots.
Ironically, the automation in development was targeted at reducing the number of middle-class white people needed to run the farm, and would have little effect on the army of cheap labor that was ever-present.
I've seen a small portion of the beast that is large agribusiness, and I'll admit there may be other sides I haven't seen that may contradict my experience. But it is wise to doubt the rosy self-congratulatory picture taught in textbooks when confronted with the experiences of real life. Most of the people who bring you food for the prices you enjoy are invisible, and your education system is complicit in keeping things that way.
What were they actually growing, how often did they do thouse crops, and most importantly, where actually was this? I ask because things like maintaining a firewatch or cesspool don’t sound liek tasks you’d find on a mechanized breadbasket planes or irrigated valley wheat or corn farm that make up the majority of north american food production.
I mean obviously my experience is going to be tailored to the farmland I actually live on, but statistically the US national average somewhere about six to eight farm workers per square mile, and that’s doing things like assuming that companies have multiple times as many completely undocumented workers than they do H-2A visa’s, report on taxes, or who show up in studies on undocumented workers.
Given that’s an average that includes orchards and hand crops which take about an order of magnitude more labor-hours than the heavily mechanized crops we are taking about that’s going to be a significant overestimate.
All of this though is pretty irrelevant to the original question though, which had to do with moving to systems that outside of the rosey picture presented by tech startups looking to make investors horny by promising that all their labor costs can be replaced by stepper motors invariably involve vast increases to the amount of low wage manual labor actually needed to produce a ton of food. Or that such a change to a far more carbon intensive way of producing food is a really bad thing when climate change exists.
I agree that it is worth looking at this in a more distinguished way, but carbon budgets for large farms rarely take into account the carbon emissions produced by organic soil loss, besides the vast negative effects that has otherwise. Indoor farms on the other hand can be pretty carbon neutral after their initial construction, assuming that the electricity they use comes from renewable energy sources.