Interesting argument. If something magical occurred and it happened all at once, there would be problems. So what? Nothing magical is going to occur anyway, so the premise of the argument is void. And we have natural disasters that we overcome without much comment, which was my original point. Somebody else on the page posted a news item where the place that had many illegals taken away had a personnel office full of people filling out job applications. You may be imagining a problem that won't exist.
You overrate automation. Lots of farming is accomplished through mechanization and there is a profession of farm mechanic to keep the harvesting machinery in operation. Adding automation on top of that just increases the complexity of the maintenance problem. Easier to hire people with brains who can drive a machine from road to field and back without slipping into the ditch. (A real problem. I worked three summers driving haulage truck from pea fields to the canning plant. Harrowers, viners, big trucks, and you had to be careful.)
I'm just going to stop arguing since you've obviously made up your mind on what's what and no amount of logic or facts will change it.
But you're just so wrong on everything at this point. The article you're talking about was a food processing plant, not a farm. Two separate things and food processing is much easier to replace illegals in than actual farms.
Second of all, I don't overrate automation. The overwhelming majority of farms are automated at this point. Any large farm has a single driver that controls entire fleets of machinery from the "lead machine" which drive themselves in patterns set by the lead machine. Likewise even that is being phased out to the point that some farms don't even have drivers and instead use what amounts to converted "tractor drones" that all drive themselves while a single person oversees it from an office on the farm. The only areas of plant agriculture (because livestock is an entirely separate conversation) that aren't fully automated or near fully automated on any decent sized farm at this point are tree fruit and specific berries that can bruise easily and need to be handled delicately.
And even that is currently being automated increasingly as technology advances and prices come down for the tech. This isn't some weird "AI runs everything for the humans" fantasy. This is just like every other industry that's been automated. You're going from dozens of employees, to 3 or 4 good well trained and well paid employees that oversee a fleet of automated machines to make sure they correct any machine errors and oversee and conduct maintenance, repair, etc.
For all intents and purposes, it's not that different than how vehicle assembly lines were automated and went from 50 people assembling a car piece by piece, to 5 people overseeing the assembly arms and correcting mistakes/doing maintenance and repair.
Like I said, within the next decade, most farms with any kind of scale (basically everything but the small players with sub 100 acres) are going to be fully or near fully automated. If they don't then they won't be able to keep up with everyone else and they'll go bankrupt.
Food processing...farms. I don't see the problem, as my experience with both is that the food processing is inherently more technical than fieldwork. They used to make the same kind of argument for slavery in the south, but the data in the 1850 census showed that the cotton and tobacco farms in the non-slavery north were more economically productive. How would that be? Easy. The farms in the south had extremely low labor costs, and even though they made less money per ton, the profit margin for the owner was munificent.
I defer to your more up-to-date understanding of agricultural methods, but I don't understand how putting illegals in charge of such systems makes sense when they clearly would not have the training or certification. It seems to me that automated agriculture is even less sensitive to the impact of removing illegal labor.
Interesting argument. If something magical occurred and it happened all at once, there would be problems. So what? Nothing magical is going to occur anyway, so the premise of the argument is void. And we have natural disasters that we overcome without much comment, which was my original point. Somebody else on the page posted a news item where the place that had many illegals taken away had a personnel office full of people filling out job applications. You may be imagining a problem that won't exist.
You overrate automation. Lots of farming is accomplished through mechanization and there is a profession of farm mechanic to keep the harvesting machinery in operation. Adding automation on top of that just increases the complexity of the maintenance problem. Easier to hire people with brains who can drive a machine from road to field and back without slipping into the ditch. (A real problem. I worked three summers driving haulage truck from pea fields to the canning plant. Harrowers, viners, big trucks, and you had to be careful.)
I'm just going to stop arguing since you've obviously made up your mind on what's what and no amount of logic or facts will change it.
But you're just so wrong on everything at this point. The article you're talking about was a food processing plant, not a farm. Two separate things and food processing is much easier to replace illegals in than actual farms.
Second of all, I don't overrate automation. The overwhelming majority of farms are automated at this point. Any large farm has a single driver that controls entire fleets of machinery from the "lead machine" which drive themselves in patterns set by the lead machine. Likewise even that is being phased out to the point that some farms don't even have drivers and instead use what amounts to converted "tractor drones" that all drive themselves while a single person oversees it from an office on the farm. The only areas of plant agriculture (because livestock is an entirely separate conversation) that aren't fully automated or near fully automated on any decent sized farm at this point are tree fruit and specific berries that can bruise easily and need to be handled delicately.
And even that is currently being automated increasingly as technology advances and prices come down for the tech. This isn't some weird "AI runs everything for the humans" fantasy. This is just like every other industry that's been automated. You're going from dozens of employees, to 3 or 4 good well trained and well paid employees that oversee a fleet of automated machines to make sure they correct any machine errors and oversee and conduct maintenance, repair, etc.
For all intents and purposes, it's not that different than how vehicle assembly lines were automated and went from 50 people assembling a car piece by piece, to 5 people overseeing the assembly arms and correcting mistakes/doing maintenance and repair.
Like I said, within the next decade, most farms with any kind of scale (basically everything but the small players with sub 100 acres) are going to be fully or near fully automated. If they don't then they won't be able to keep up with everyone else and they'll go bankrupt.
Food processing...farms. I don't see the problem, as my experience with both is that the food processing is inherently more technical than fieldwork. They used to make the same kind of argument for slavery in the south, but the data in the 1850 census showed that the cotton and tobacco farms in the non-slavery north were more economically productive. How would that be? Easy. The farms in the south had extremely low labor costs, and even though they made less money per ton, the profit margin for the owner was munificent.
I defer to your more up-to-date understanding of agricultural methods, but I don't understand how putting illegals in charge of such systems makes sense when they clearly would not have the training or certification. It seems to me that automated agriculture is even less sensitive to the impact of removing illegal labor.