Farm owner: Without immigrants 'this town would die'

[yuiyoshida]

[ck4829]

1. Worthington is in Nobles County, that county went 61.7% for Trump in the 2016 election

It's what that farm owner's town voted for.

[Nay]

12. The farmers didn't think Trump would remove THEIR slaves -- only the worthless migrants

who suck up Medicare/SS/welfare money.

As far as I'm concerned, 'their' town can dry up and blow away. They will deserve it.

[MyOwnPeace]

2. I was talking

to an upstate New York dairy farmer - has over 1000 cows - and he has most of his farm staffed with Mexican workers (says he can't get locals to work there).
I asked him what he was going to do when IQ45 gets his wall.
He said that he hopes they're all on this side of it when it goes up!

[customerserviceguy]

15. Maybe if milk

was ten dollars a gallon, this farmer could pay enough to get locals to work there. Illegal immigration is soft slavery, and the people who benefit from it, like farmers, ranchers, and consumers of their goods are just perpetuating this immigration crisis.

The dairy farmer is also being subsidized by his fellow taxpayers in the area who have to pick up the bills for hospitalization and ER treatments, and for court and law enforcement costs necessitated by having undocumented immigrants in the area. I know, I used to live in a small town on the Olympic Peninsula of Washington State, which was where migrants stayed for the winter after harvesting Christmas trees.

[Historic NY]

17. Its not just about the pay, its about finding the workers...ask Alabama

Americans have become soft they don't want the work our fore-bearers did if so the family farms would still be here. In the old day many farms had large family's, multiple children and other family members. As more and more of them go belly up the big companies buy them for pennys. Dairy farming is a 24/7 operation even with automation. The largest producers of pork sold out to the Chinese.
If milk was $10 a gallon it would go bad, people complain about gas when its $3.00. I'm in NY and they have offered incentives to new farmers, helping young people take over aging farms. In upstate areas the Amish have taken over old farms. They hire out some of the mechanized work. Then again NY has the 5th largest population of Amish in the US. Its interesting considering.


[link:https://www.huffpost.com/entry/alabama-immigration-law-farms_n_58c1d07fe4b0ed71826b55e0|]

[customerserviceguy]

20. Which leads me to my next point

A hundred years from now, will human beings get their food from stoop labor? No, there will be machines to do all of the grunt work. If farmers and ranchers cannot find workers for livable wages, somebody will develop robots to plant the crops, tend to them, and harvest them. We've made significant advances in robotics, and with a larger market for agricultural robots, they'd be efficient, reliable, and affordable. Best of all, they'd probably be mostly solar powered.

Sub-minimum pay for a docile workforce that cannot complain to government authorities is pushing that date somewhat further into the future than it would normally occur. And, just like everybody adjusted to rising gasoline prices, they'll do the same with the prices of food items that need to rise to pay for agri-bots.

[paleotn]

23. In defense of dairy farmers....

.. Not sure about NY, but dairy farmers on this side of Lake Champlain are getting about as much per cwt of milk recently as they received in the 80's. And that's in real terms, not adjusted for inflation. I've seen the milk receipts. It's a hoot. Prices rise and fall, but never seem to rise much. Someone's making money, but it's not the actual producers. At the same time their costs of inputs rise every year. Diesel costs more. Equipment costs more. Help costs more. The only way to survive is to get big and hope to make a living on economies of scale. But that usually means taking on levels of debt that would scare the shit out of us. I cannot fathom a family operation being millions in debt, but some are. None are getting rich around here. That's for sure. Milk prices have been in the crapper for 5 to 6 years now. That's killed numerous dairy farms in New England in the last several years. As for help, it's a brutal job. Mainly because it doesn't stop. It's 24/7 - 365. The cows have to be moved, fed, watered and milked 1 to 4 times per day depending on lactation cycle, every single day, no exceptions. And the shit keeps coming, no matter what. Manure management is a huge part of their everyday lives. Dairy cows take no holidays and no vacations, so rarely do dairy farmers. And the hours per day are brutal, from extreme am to late at night, it doesn't let up. They're happy for the help, wherever it comes from and for the most part are fair and honest with their workers. There's such a need for workers here that a bad apple will soon find him or herself moving cow shit by themselves. Short answer is we need them. Ag has to have them. We've built an agricultural system that feeds the world, but must have immigrants to make it run since natives are far, far too soft for that kind of work. Without them, milk may cost $10 per gallon or more...if you can find it at all. Most do it because it's in their blood. They've dairy farmed for generations and love it. I think they're nuts. Someone would have to be out of their fucking minds to even considered becoming a dairy farmer.

[customerserviceguy]

27. My heart does go out to the dairy farmers

who try to make an honest living. When i go by the milk fridges at the supermarket, about half of it is for fake milk, such as soy or almond. That's probably having a considerable impact on the farmers.

[onecaliberal]

3. Everyone should watch a day without Mexicans.

[DBoon]

6. or The City Without Jews

https://slate.com/culture/2019/04/the-city-without-jews-restoration.html

In the movie, the city of Utopia is in economic disarray. Its people are poor and angry. Some blame the Jews. (So far, none of this is fiction except for the name of the city; the novel was explicitly set in Vienna and featured characters who were clear stand-ins for politicians of the day.) Some politicians think kicking the Jews out of town will solve all their problems. There are three councilors, one of whom is virulently anti-Semitic, even though his daughter is married to Jew. Another is more lenient. (His daughter is dating a Jew, too.) A third has anti-Semitism perpetually on the brain. At the end of the movie, he falls into a delusional haze and sees Jewish stars floating around his head. The doctors declare him a Zionist. (This is intended as comedy.)

My bolding - I wonder who would fit that description in the current administration?

[Major Nikon]

4. CATO is in no way any sort of legitimate source, but it's interesting what they wrote...

The overriding impact of immigrants is to strengthen and enrich American culture, increase the total output of the economy, and raise the standard of living of American citizens. Immigrants are advantageous to the United States for several reasons: (1) Since they are willing to take a chance in a new land, they are self-selected on the basis on motivation, risk taking, work ethic, and other attributes beneficial to a nation. (2) They tend to come to the United States during their prime working years (the average age is 28), and they contribute to the workforce and make huge net contributions to old-age entitlement programs, primarily Social Security. (3) Immigrants tend to fill niches in the labor market where demand is highest relative to supply, complementing rather than directly competing with American workers. (4) Many immigrants arrive with extremely high skill levels, and virtually all, regardless of skill level, bring a strong desire to work. (5) Their children tend to reach high levels of achievement in American schools and in society at large.

https://www.cato.org/research/immigration

The reality is that citizens of the US are better off with immigration, regardless of how they are documented. The only purpose anti-immigration rhetoric serves is demagoguery.

[paleotn]

24. Exactly....

remove any moral or ethical arguments and the need for immigrants still stands. Hell, it's even more convincing from a purely economic standpoint.

Sometimes I like to use the SS and medicare argument. Without documented and undocumented immigrants, both programs will have to be cut significantly, since they're the ones footing a big chunk of the bill right now. That usually elicits...well, I paid into it for years and that's my money. No, Al Gore's "lock box" doesn't exist. It never existed. You paid for the generation before you. The generation ahead of us will pay for ours. It's like insurance only from a generational standpoint and beats the hell out of old folks living is utter poverty and squalor. Many times they still don't get it, and I'm left beating my head on a table somewhere. Sometimes grandma having to move in with them since she can't afford to live on her own anymore gets through. Sometimes not.

[Honeycombe8]

5. So...who did it before the undoc. immigrants came?

There was a time before many undoc. workers came here, so who did the work then? And why did it change?

I was born & raised in a farming community in the deep south. Sugar cane, rice, soybeans. My grandpa still participated in his family's working rice/soybean farm (although he was a civil engineer by trade). They did not use undoc. workers. There weren't any in the area back then. They used their families and local farm hands, like they had for many years. The farm was sold some years ago, so I don't know if they use undoc. workers now, but I would guess that they do. If they do, I don't see a reason that they would except to save cost in wages and benefits. Maybe there came to be a shortage of available farmhands who were citizens. It would be interesting to know the story about the transition. But let's face it: they use undoc. workers mainly because they can get away with paying slave wages and no or few benefits. I'm not sure the workers even get workers' comp (farming is very dangerous work).

So for that dairy farm, I wonder if there was a time that they didn't have the number of undoc. workers in the area they do now, and if so, who they got to do the work.

I've heard this argument repeatedly over the years, but it doesn't seem to be a good argument to me, because of this thing that they did not always use them, so who did they hire back then?

[DBoon]

7. Farms in California have always relied on immigrants

Who worked long hours under miserable conditions for low pay.



Farms in the former confederacy relied on sharecroppers descended from former slaves, who constituted an underclass oppressed by law.

Large scale agriculture has always relied on chattel slavery or on an underclass without the protection of law

[Honeycombe8]

8. Americans would have commanded higher wages....

and had the protection of some laws. Using undocumented workers is illegal in and of itself, so not covered by all the laws.

My farming community was tiny. There were AAs in the area, but not that many. So the workers had to come from the AA community there, poor white citizens, and/or from neighboring small towns. There was literally no one in the area with a hint of an accent or was anything other than white or AA...possibly some Native American.

I don't recall there being any sharecroppers in the area. But the sharecroppers worked their own small farms, and would have used their family members and hired their own workers.

We had tenant farms in the area, but they are not what you'd think they are. Decent looking, somewhat sizeable farms, run by families who don't own the land. They are hired by landowners to run the farm. It's what you might think of as sharecroppers 20th century style. They earned pretty good money running the farm and were middle class. They hired workers...American citizens, as far as I know. There were strict laws protecting tenant farmers. Almost impossible to kick them off the land.

They liked to have large families so they could use the kids to work the farms, at least for a while.

Anyway, all that changed. Farming is very hard, very dangerous work. Farmers aren't usually rich, either. It's a way of life, as well as a means of making a living. Farmhands are worked very hard....the farmers themselves work very hard. Modern farms use machines more than in the old days, but I think in CA they have lettuce fields which still must be hand picked? Rice/soybean farmers rely heavily on machinery.

[DBoon]

10. Your example is an exception

Large scale farms have always relied on classes of people who could be forced to work long hours with little pay, had almost no legal protection, and were "people of color"

What farms are doing with illegal immigrants is an extension of what they have been doing for hundreds of years.

These farms were politically powerful enough to get exception written into federal labor protection laws to allow their slavery like conditions to continue. The NLRA and federal minimum wage laws always exempted agricultural labor for a reason.

Farmers in the California Central Valley enforced their rule over labor using fear and violence under condition resembling a police state, as Carey McWilliams had documented back in the 1930s

Your idyllic farm community (if it existed) was the exception.

[Honeycombe8]

13. Size of farms

There's one difference. Most farms WERE smaller. The large scale farms these days are "corporate" farms, more than likely, and have put many small farms out of business. (Think WalMart.)

The smaller farms were family farms, and used family members extensively, and hired locally.

The big non-family farms are more about cheap labor, and less about the lifestyle and the community.

The dairy farm in the video seems more like a mid-sized family farm. How many workers does he need for a dairy farm, I wonder? Machines do the milking. So they would need workers to feed the cows, move 'em about, clean warehouses and barns, stock inventory. But no picking in the fields or anything we think of as typical farmhanding.

Anyway, I think many of the farms choose to hire the cheapest workers, who now happen to be undoc. immigrants. If they disappeared, Americans would appear to do the work....at increased wages. Just like they always did, and have been available all along. It will always be the case that you can hire an undoc. worker for a fraction of what you would have to pay a citizen (no matter the race or ethnicity of the citizen). I find it hard to feel sorry for businesses doing this.

[paleotn]

25. Not really.

Most of what we would call family farms are set up as corporations. Tax law etc. is set up in such a way that most are forced to form corporations of various flavors...LLCs, etc. There are true corporately run farms, as the meme goes, but they're few in number. Also, due to prices of farm output actually received by the producers, particularly commodity grains and the like, farmers are forced to get big or leave the business. They can only survive on economies of scale or find some niche like organics, but even that niche is closing fast. That's a big reason why food as a % of disposable income in America is at an all time low. Pardon the pun, but there's a price we pay for relatively inexpensive food. Part of that price is farmers having to find cheaper labor simply to survive. Farm families don't produce 10 or 12 kids anymore. Here's an interesting article from NPR on that subject...

https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/03/02/389578089/your-grandparents-spent-more-of-their-money-on-food-than-you-do

[Major Nikon]

9. They hired the people on the lowest rung of society, just like today

It's always been hard, dangerous work that pays as close to nothing as they can get away with. As society moved away from an agrarian society, citizens moved to easier and higher paying jobs leaving this kind of work to immigrants.

The fact that we can obtain food relatively cheap compared to the rest of the world is a testament to the hard work of the people doing it and underscores what society owes them.

[Honeycombe8]

11. Machinery happened, too.

Where I grew up, there is probably way more machinery used than for some different kinds of crops that may still require hand picking. Rice farms rely heavily on machinery, now. So do sugar cane and soybean farms.

So these types of farms used more manual labor back in the older days than now. But even now, they would need help during harvesting and maybe planting season.

In any case, they switched from citizens to undoc. immigrants...common sense says it's because of the wages and benefits (or lack thereof). I can understand that, since family farms operate on a shoestring budget.

As for the citizen farm hands leaving for the big cities, that gets to wages again. The farmers would have to pay citizens more, to get them to do the hard work of farmhanding. So they went with undoc. immigrants, who were in no position to demand decent wages or accident protection.

The farms need less manual labor now, in my area, because of machines. So they COULD pay locals to be farmhands. If they use undoc. immigrants, it's their choice. I'll have to ask....I don't know if the local farms now use undoc. immigrants. I'm guessing they do.

[Major Nikon]

16. Depending on what is being farmed, yes

Some types of farming still require a high level of manual labor, especially for harvesting and in some cases planting.

[pazzyanne]

21. I worked in Luverne, MN for a number of years.

Luverne is 30 miles from Worthington. I worked in Luverne from 1965 until 1984. Undocumented workers were being used at that time. Raids were common place back then, but were looked upon as horrible events by the locals. In my state, undocumented, seasonal workers have been around as long as I have (75 years). They work in sugar beet fields, corn fields, orchards, dairy barns, pork production, turkey production, and the list goes on. My brothers and their friends, when they were in high school, worked summer farming jobs. It is hard, sunrise to sunset work. Most of their friends did not last the first summer. They did not have to hunt for summer work as the local farmers knew they were reliable, and they had more work offers than they could do. High school kids today are not interested in those type of outdoor jobs now. I hired a 14 year old neighbor kid to help me with yard work that I can no longer do because of mobility issues. He lasted 4 days where he worked for an hour a day. He chose to sweep the driveway because he couldn't tolerate ants, hated to get his hands dirty, got too tired carrying hand equipment from the garage to where it was needed to do work, couldn't help prune bushes because it was causing blisters on his hands, etc. He took 3 hours to sweep my driveway, which isn't that long. He was given a water break after 30 minutes of work, and spent a lot of time standing and watching me work. This illustrates the reason migrant workers are needed more today than ever before.

[Wellstone ruled]

14. Good old Worthington.

Remember when Campbell Soup Company opened their Chicken Noodle Soup Manufacturing plant in Worthington. The Food and Commercial Workers Union organized that plant with in week. And,the workers were mostly female and were the wives of the local farmers. You guessed it,all White labor force . Once the Unions were kicked out of the Packing Plants and food plants of Southern Minnesota,well the all White Labor force,mostly female,were gone either by harsh working conditions or by age.

Was in Worthington a year ago this week,talk about a small town choosing up sides. Most of the Hispanic Labor force has since moved on to better paying Hand Labor Jobs in the Twin Cities area. The Somali Immigrants have replaced the Hispanic workers and the Locals are more than bitter about that. And that was front and center when we stopped to say howdy to a friend that runs a C Store on the West side of town. You did not need to wait long before that hatred showed up. Couple of Punks in a Pickup were hassling a Somali Lady filling her gas tank. The Clerk called them out by name on the PA and they took off. Our C Store friend said this was becoming a real threat to the
City.

My guess is,all those Towns along HWY 60 in Minny are experiencing very similiar racial issues.

[matt819]

18. Look up articles about Mt. Olive, NC

Interesting article last year - Thanksgiving time - about Butterball Turkey in Mt. Olive, NC, also home to Mt. Olive pickles. Amazing outreach to immigrants, without which Butterball would be up the proverbial creek.

I don't know if the situation has changed, but it was, at least as depicted in the article I read, the salvation of Mt. Olive the town and Butterball the turkey processor. Say what you will about commercial turkey, these immigrant workers are doing well and sending money home. Win-win.

[Mr.Bill]

19. If you live in the USA,

you probably ate food today that was harvested by immigrant labor. And probably from California.

[Dem Dean]

22. Funny how no pol is shrieking about illegal Canadian immigrants

Golly gee, white is that???

[tymorial]

26. History repeats.

The crops are all in and the peaches are rott'ning,
The oranges piled in their creosote dumps;
They're flying 'em back to the Mexican border
To pay all their money to wade back again

Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye, Rosalita,
Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maria;
You won't have your names when you ride the big airplane,
All they will call you will be "deportees"

My father's own father, he waded that river,
They took all the money he made in his life;
My brothers and sisters they working the old church,
They rode the big truck still laydown and died

The sky plane caught fire over Los Gatos Canyon,
A fireball of lightning, and shook all our hills,
Who are all these friends, all scattered like dry leaves?
The radio says, "They are just deportees"

"Deportees" (The Plane Wreck at Los Gatos) - Woodie Gutheie 1948

My favorite version.