Ex-farm worker here.
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Ex-farm worker here.
We need to talk about this whole "But a living wage for farm workers would spike the cost of food!" thing.
Not true AT ALL.
Y'all don't understand how fast experienced farm workers are.
The average tomato picker pulls 650lbs per hour.
At $20/hr, that's $0.03/lb for labor.
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Ex-farm worker here.
We need to talk about this whole "But a living wage for farm workers would spike the cost of food!" thing.
Not true AT ALL.
Y'all don't understand how fast experienced farm workers are.
The average tomato picker pulls 650lbs per hour.
At $20/hr, that's $0.03/lb for labor.
I know "650 lbs an hour" sounds crazy, because it kinda is.
But that also just means filling one of these buckets every ~3 minutes. That's doable for the average healthy adult.
(Doing it 10hrs/day for weeks in a row is the hard part.)
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I know "650 lbs an hour" sounds crazy, because it kinda is.
But that also just means filling one of these buckets every ~3 minutes. That's doable for the average healthy adult.
(Doing it 10hrs/day for weeks in a row is the hard part.)
The average orange picker pulls 876 lbs/hour.
At $20/hr, that would cost 2 cents per pound for labor.
Here's the source I'm using for lbs/hr btw:
https://swfrec.ifas.ufl.edu/docs/pdf/economics/extension/econ_labor_pr.pdf
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The average orange picker pulls 876 lbs/hour.
At $20/hr, that would cost 2 cents per pound for labor.
Here's the source I'm using for lbs/hr btw:
https://swfrec.ifas.ufl.edu/docs/pdf/economics/extension/econ_labor_pr.pdf
A *slow* strawberry picker can get 20lbs/hr. If they make $20/hr, that's only $0.75 for a pint basket.
Sure, that's a noticeable price difference. And it's still nowhere near "doubling or tripling" the cost of food, as I've seen people claim repeatedly.
Breaking From Custom, One Small Oregon Farm Pays Strawberry Pickers by the Hour
Unlike a lot of fruits and even other berries, strawberries must be handpicked, which makes labor one of the biggest costs of doing business for farmers. Javier Lara, 43, is throwing a wrench into the uneasy accord between growers and labor. His experiment? Paying strawberry pickers by the hour.
Willamette Week (www.wweek.com)
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A *slow* strawberry picker can get 20lbs/hr. If they make $20/hr, that's only $0.75 for a pint basket.
Sure, that's a noticeable price difference. And it's still nowhere near "doubling or tripling" the cost of food, as I've seen people claim repeatedly.
Breaking From Custom, One Small Oregon Farm Pays Strawberry Pickers by the Hour
Unlike a lot of fruits and even other berries, strawberries must be handpicked, which makes labor one of the biggest costs of doing business for farmers. Javier Lara, 43, is throwing a wrench into the uneasy accord between growers and labor. His experiment? Paying strawberry pickers by the hour.
Willamette Week (www.wweek.com)
This helps explain why it's so hard to automate farm labor!
It's not that it's too hard to make a robot pick crops.
It's that humans are really, REALLY good at it. It's hard to make a robot that's BETTER at it than people.
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This helps explain why it's so hard to automate farm labor!
It's not that it's too hard to make a robot pick crops.
It's that humans are really, REALLY good at it. It's hard to make a robot that's BETTER at it than people.
Not to be flippant but evolution did see to it that we're really good at getting food off of trees & bushes. We have a rather meaningful several-million-year head start over the robots here.
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Not to be flippant but evolution did see to it that we're really good at getting food off of trees & bushes. We have a rather meaningful several-million-year head start over the robots here.
We even have a real-life experiment that proves paying farm workers a fair wage can be done. And prices went up so little, PEOPLE DIDN'T EVEN NOTICE.
In 2005, tomato pickers in FL struck a deal with Yum! Brands (Taco Bell, KFC, & others) to guarantee higher wages.
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We even have a real-life experiment that proves paying farm workers a fair wage can be done. And prices went up so little, PEOPLE DIDN'T EVEN NOTICE.
In 2005, tomato pickers in FL struck a deal with Yum! Brands (Taco Bell, KFC, & others) to guarantee higher wages.
The deal?
Yum! Brands would only by from farms that had signed on to a fair food program with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. They'd pay extra for those tomatoes, and the extra $ would be passed through directly to tomato pickers as a raise.
This deal nearly doubled tomato pickers' wages.
And guess how much this big, ground-shaking deal raised the price of tomatoes?
ONE PENNY PER POUND.
That's it.
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