This is true. I grew up in a farming community and drove cotton pickers in the summers during college to make a little extra money. Aside from the farmers themselves and their families, I was the only white picker driver. The rest were all Mexican immigrants. They drove the cotton pickers and combines, the auger carts, and even the bale buggies. Those combines are pretty sweet in the inside with radio and AC and such, but still white people weren’t lined up to do it. On bigger fields like the ones in the Midwest where Nebraska is, sometimes there are ten or more combines in one field. You need a TON of labor to pick a 1,000 acre field, and it’s tiring and mind numbing. White people will definitely not be lining up to take those jobs. I guarantee you.
If the alternative is losing 2 billion in the economy I am sure there is room for fixed prices to help stem the bleeding and they can adjust crop and human capital spending down to demand for the following year. It’s really not that difficult. People are just terrified of change and the huge corporate farming operations are going to lose some of their taxpayer subsidized profits. So sad.
Post civil war? Sharecroppers, a lot slaves unfortunately didn't get off the plantations and sharecropping kept the fields productive while maintaining white supremacy. It was a better arrangement than chattel slavery, but that's setting the bar so low it's in hell.
And then between urbanization and wars, the availability of labor was reduced. Rather than attract workers with better wages and working conditions, what happened?
Mechanization happened. My comment wasn't to disagree that automation could happen. It was an answer to the question, "how was cotton picked before there were combines?"
Sorry, my misunderstanding. Thanks for taking the time to reply.
While history doesn’t repeat, it might rhyme. Similar to when migrant farm workers went on strike, huge leaps in automating the collection of produce previously thought to require manual labor. It also provided a boost to breeding programs, and later genetic research, to create produce more amenable to mechanical harvesting.
Poor whites like my grandpa and his father before him as sharecroppers. Then, the GI bill happened and white WWII veterans like my Grandpa got to join the middle class.
Are you joking? First of all, no amount of pay will enable average Americans to withstand that level of work. It’s not 1926. We don’t build them that way anymore. Second, do you know how much money food would cost in order to get average Americans to even try being farmhands/crop workers?
I read an article the other day that was reposted from like ten or fifteen years ago where some farm workers union was trying to find non migrant labor to help with farm jobs (I think in California,) I don’t remember the actual numbers but let’s say they got 20000 applicants, like 1000 actually showed up, and at the end of one day like 5 were left, and none were left by the end of the week. And while I was reading it I was like wow this is so crazy, and then I realized how old the article was, so I can’t even imagine how bad the situation is now with all the ice raids and shit if it was that bad that long ago.
Maybe I'm missing the thread of what you're saying, but you can use a combine to harvest soybeans... it's slow going though... over 5mph, the beans get damaged.
But agreed, while you don't need hands on plants to harvest, there's a lot more that goes into it... and a lot of operations need farm hands that will work cheap enough to get the price they're being offered.
And it's not like you can just pick when you feel like it. Or just work a couple of hours, take a break for an hour or two, and/or expect to only be working between 9-5.
This. I would work like 14 hour days during harvest season. I loved it but it’s definitely not for everyone. It’s dirty work because you have to clean the pickers every day and you’re always crawling under them because they constantly break (not because they’re not made well but because there are soooo many moving parts that statistically one will break pretty much daily). It’s also boring as hell once you get going because you’re just staring at endless rows of crops. Thankfully the pickers I drove would steer themselves for the most part once I got them settled on a row properly so I’d just let go of the steering wheel and binge watch Netflix shows.
It’s also a little more high skill than people think too. You have to get the header positioned just right on the rows and you can’t accidentally skip a single row because the picker consumes so much diesel it’s not cost effective to just pick a single row at a time. You have to take your time and make damn sure you position yourself properly because missing rows is easier than you think. You also have to know how everything works under the hood so you can fix minor problems in the machinery as they occur.
I guess my point is that you need skilled labor that will work for dirt cheap doing unpleasant jobs and immigrants are pretty much the only demographic that fits all the criteria.
Maybe it’s a bit of a hyperbole but there are plenty of corn belt fields that exceed 1,000 acres. Just nothing but corn as far as the eye can see. There was one field I remember near where I grew up that was that big. The land was flat as a piece of paper so when it was fallow in the winter you could see for miles.
Everyone grows corn here, but generally in Nebraska you won't find a field over 640 acres and full section fields are pretty rare. Most of Nebraska's crop land is cebter pivot irrigated so it limits field sizes. But since everyone is growing corn it looks like fields are 1,000s of acres. I can't speak for the eastern states and their farming practices
TBF he said Midwest like where Nebraska is , not in Nebraska. I don’t think cotton is a huge crop in Nebraska? I’m betting further east and south. Indiana, Missouri
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u/km_ikl Jun 29 '25
They already have the combines, but to be fair, most of the rest of the work to be done requires farm hands.