Now Dems think weed is food
(twitter.com)
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In many cases, the machine already exist. The owners of these farms are usually just too cheap to actually spend money on a machine even though doing so would make them more money in the long run.
Meanwhile, in the states where they are a lot more hostile to illegal farm workers (like Florida), their farming is already mostly mechanized. I am sure it is a coincidence.
I'm going to take issue with one word you used: cheap. A lot of the non-corporate farmers I know have been squeezed by their suppliers and purchasers to the point that if they make $30 an acre after supplies per year, they consider that a decent year. That means the family has to farm a damn lot of land to make a decent living.
It's like a lot of industries in the U.S., illegals are a symptom, not the illness itself. The corporate farms and meat packers use illegals to keep more of the money for themselves, and then turn around and run smaller farms out of business. The corporate home builders pick up Jose and Jorge and Gustavo outside Home Depot every morning to go work on a million-dollar home not because they can't afford to hire Americans, but to squeeze more profit from the buyer.
While that is a fair contention, there are absolutely people who do it just because they want to squeeze profit, not because they are scraping to make ends meet. Like I remember back during his first term, they tried to run with a story of some asparagus farmer in Idaho who had some of his crop rot in the field because he didnt have any "migrant workers" to do it, and he couldnt find any locals willing to do the job. That got reported all across the news.
What got less reported was farmers from his same area saying "Hey, we already mechanized our harvest years ago while he didnt because he didnt want to pay for machines. And the reason no one took his job openings is because he was paying less than you would make working at the local McDonalds." And we saw a similar thing with the owner of some metal fab in Ohio during the 2024 election who was hiring Haitians instead of Americans for the same reasons, only for it to turn out that he was getting kickbacks for hiring the Haitians and once again was being a cheapskate.
So there are absolutely small timers who are doing it just because they are greedy, but I do agree it is mostly the major corporate farms (I distinguish "major corporate" because at least here in KS, most farms are corporate, but they are "Billy Bob and Sons, LLC" because it gives better tax advantages and makes it easier to have side businesses).
Yeah, I've seen a lot of the small operations mechanize. There's actually a local place that imports a German computerized weeder. First time I saw it, the sales guy called it "The Mexican Killer."