A quick follow up to yesterday's thread on farm labor and immigration. Two points I glossed over for the sake of simplicity.
https://twitter.com/eatcookwrite/status/1246173952625401858
1. Another strategy in ag for dealing with labor shortages is automation. Historically that has been driven by the rural to urban migration. More recently in specialty crops, it has been driven by immigrant labor shortages.
So a carrot harvest looks like this.
And picking tomatoes for sauce looks like this.
About a decade ago picking lettuce started to look like this.
With machine learning, it might soon look like this.
On dairy farms, robots are milking, delivering feed, and even managing grazing.
2. I pointed out that labor-intensive crops compete with imports which puts an upper boundary on how high labor costs can rise. But they also compete with domestic non-labor-intensive foods.
That is, if prices on say ... fresh strawberries goes up too much, people will eat something else. Maybe cheaper fresh fruit, or frozen strawberries, or strawberry Twizzlers.
That's not something that is as particular to the fresh produce market as the pressures of global markets, it's a very basic channel of substitution that any consumer good is subject to, but worth pointing out.
It's another upper bound on how much labor cost producers can pass on to consumers.
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