The Crops! My God, The Crops!

Source: wapo

You could set your watch by these, they're so predictable, and wrong...

CLOVIS, Calif. -- Bins of Granny Smith apples towered over two conveyor belts at P-R Farms' packing plant. But only one belt moved. P-R Farms, like farms up and down California and across the nation, does not have enough workers to process its fruit.

"We're short by 50 to 75 people," said Pat Ricchiuti, 59, the third-generation owner of P-R Farms. "For the last three weeks, we're running at 50 percent capacity. We saw this coming a couple years ago, but last year and this year has really been terrible."

Farmers of all types of specialty crops, from almonds to roses, have seen the immigrant labor supply they depend on dry up over the past year. Increased border security and competition from other industries are driving migrant laborers out of the fields, farmers say.

And blah, blah, blah! I believe I defenestrated this tripe...here!

Captain Ed has a good takedown on this...(congrats on the 3rd anniversary!)

The farmers in this article don't want comprehensive immigration reform, or normalization of any kind. That doesn't solve their labor problems. They want a free flow of dirt-cheap labor, which means they want open borders and no enforcement. Agriculture wants the federal government to rescind the economics of an open labor market in order to keep them from making the necessary changes to secure their work force. For the moment, at least, Congress has made the correct decision to ignore them.

Blue Crab Boulevard chimes in as well...

Get that one? Cleaning hotels pays better than the farm work. I realize some people in this country want that permanent underclass that will work for less money than someone who cleans hotels, but I was raised to believe slavery was wrong.

Now let's check in with those crazy liberals, shhh, be vewy, vewy qwiet...

RBC chimes in with this steaming nugget...(reality based indeed)

We won't really be without food, just paying a lot more than we're used to: of course Americans will do those jobs, and when we're ready to pay enough for produce that the growers can offer, say, $14/hr and daily transportation to the fields from where people live, this problem will be resolved. This work is very hard and hot, and not in the shade, and not just up the street from a 7-11.

There is no evidence, by the way, that eating California or any other commercial apples carried any risk of catching hispanicness, despite the ample opportunities the pickers had to infect the crop all those years...to have our precious but fragile anglo culture wrecked, necesitamos frecuentar la escuela with them, or live down the block, like we do aqui in California Alta. I sure hope $5 apples will bring us our purity back.

Nice use of the race card y'all, skillfully played. If enforcing the law is racist I don't want to be right!

Democratic veteran opines...

The immigrant/migrant worker population in the Western US has long been one of the things that, IMHO, has kept some prices for produce at pretty low levels, relatively speaking. It's going to be interesting to see how long-term price increases, and the potential failure of agricultural industries are going to affect a desire for the "immigration reform" in the US. It's always been a republican virtue to pick on the weak and defenseless, instead of standing up for everyone. I wonder how it will ultimately play out when tomatoes are $9 a pound?

Hmmm, it's almost as if they don't read this blog? Nah, now that's really crazy talk! Ironical that they used tomatoes as their example, ain't it?

The crops! My god, the crops!

Lonewacko has mucho mas, aqui!

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