Timothy Birdnow

So, how does America find farm labor without brining illegal aliens in to do "the work Americans just won't do"?

Here's how:

John Deere Addresses Farm Labor Shortages with Autonomous Tractors

Innovation has always been the key to American success and mechanized farming was a big part of it. Amerian farmers make up just 2% of the population, way, way down from a hundred years ago, yet these same individuals feeed not only America but the whole world. Why? Because they worked out new ways of doing things, utilizing machines to turn a long, slow, laborious process into a relatively light and speedy one. Tractos made ploughing easy. Machines plant the grain. Machines harvest the grain, by and large. Yes, there are some crops that still require hand cultivation and harvesting, but there are fewer and fewer of them, and the only reason machines weren't invented to handle them is because we began letting in so much cheap labor that there was no pressure to do so. But now, with the alien labor drying up, Americans are going to find new ways of doing things. It's how we traditionally succeeded.

Take wineries. There are grape harvesting machines, but most winemakers don't want to use them. Why? These machines harvest grapes by smacking the grapevines, knocking the fruit off the vine and then sucking them up. This bruises and damages the fruit and the resultant wine tastes like it too. You can make cheap jug wine with that but not quality wine. So winemakers have to rely on hand harvesting, and in California that means illegal laborers. (In other states too.) But there is no reason why, with modern technology, a true robot grape picker cannot be produced, one that doesn't beat the grapes to pulp first. We have technology that would allow such a machine to recognize grape bunches and then send up a small saw to cut the bunches loose and then just move the bunches into a bucket. Just like a laborer only they don't have to be fed or watered or given rest breaks or paid. Sure; the machines would probably cost a lot, especially at first, but they would pay for themselves several times over. Nobody has built one because the need just didn't seem there as long as Mexicans and Central Americans were coming to do the job.

You know, slavery in the antebellum South had been dying out until Eli Whitney invented the cotton Gin. Cotton was a semi-precious material because it was full of seeds that had to be laboriously removed by hand. Whitney found a way to make cotton affordable, but he didn't find a way to harvest it by machine. The end result was cotton plantations had a terrible labor shortage, and so owning slaves became lucrative. It was well-recognized back then that slave labor was inefficient and immoral, but anyone who paid laborers to pick cotton was going to go broke; he couldn't compete with FREE labor. Slavery hollowed out the entire Southern economy. It disincentivized innovation, and it sucked away all decent jobs that poor whites could have taken. That is why the South was almost feudal in nature; vast plantations controlled much of the wealth and political power. All of this was on the backs of the slave economy, and that economy was only profitable because nobody had every invented a cotton-picking machine.

This mechanized tractor by John Deere is just the next step in the American agricultural revolution. And it is a welcome development indeed. It means we can end the wage slavery and feudal orderthat was being established in America to "do the work Americans just won't do".

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 09:44 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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