[Cardhu]

Read it and weep - :)

[cripplecreek]

Two things need to happen. The farmers need to pay a bit more and America’s lazy ass youth need to get out there.

[Grunthor]

It’s summertime. Hire high school kids. Hire from the ranks of the unemployed. Let them earn some money for once.

[HiTech RedNeck]

All welfare recipients near that place should get a medical exam for being able-bodied and if they are then should be put on workfare at that farm. The more typical story would be that they’d be mobbed with so many hopefuls they’d have to turn them away in droves.

[ebshumidors]

Get rid of welfare.

[TaMoDee]

100,000’s of the “original field workers” sitting idle in GA. Why can’t they be hired? —— Oh, I forgot that work would be beneath their dignity.

[winodog]

For crying out loud, these people are hurting. Get them some mexicans before they starve to death.

[Oshkalaboomboom]

If they can’t get by without illegals to do the work then they have to modify their business plan. Pay a decent wage and people will work, simple enough.

[Brandonmark]

It was a Tuesday afternoon at the height of blackberry season, and the Paulk family farm was short 100 pickers.

Might make a difference the type of blackberry they were picking!

or

[pallis]

A sudden cut in the food stamp program might encourage some people to get out there and pick some berries, or whatever. Pay a little more, and stop counting on taxpayers to subsidize the help. I don’t know how it is in Georgia, but come black berry season in Washington, there is no shortage of people picking them and making pies. Maybe pay indigenous pickers in money and some of the goods. There has to be a way to do it without horribly expensive, subsidized Democrats flooding into the country. Get out of the rut.

[count-your-change]

The prisons are full of people who can pick berries. People that have nothing else to do and could defray some of the cost of their imprisonment.

[Calusa]

Pedro Guerrero, 54, the smiling, soft-spoken man in black cowboy boots whom everyone calls Don Pedro, was barreling down two-lane roads in a compact Chevy on a hunt for his own people.

These LAT MSM have honed this Don Pedro 'narrative' to absolute perfection. There is a Pulitzer in the offing here. I thought real liberals hated scape-goats and slave labor.!!

[eyedigress]

I started with maters and graduated to 2 pennies a bale. What is their bitch again........

[Brandonmark]

The large boxes hold 96 ounces of berries, and the fastest pickers fill five boxes an hour, earning $22.50 an hour before taxes.

I don't know, that seems like a decent "living wage" to me ($900 for a 40 hour week).

[Will88]

The Paulks have been talking about moving to less labor-intensive crops, or using a federal guest-worker program, a move they say will cut into their profits. For now, they need pickers.

We find that buried pretty far down in the article. There is a lot of garbage in this article. One major point is that no one with a lick of common sense has ever said that the seasonal, migrant work could always be done by US citizens. It does make sense to have a guest worker program for migrant, seasonal agricultural work.

But I've read many times that US farm employers avoid using the programs for various reasons. These programs should be improved and made less cumbersome, but they should also implement reasonable means of keeping track of guest workers to ensure that they leave after a period of time.

I'd bet that, like most aspects of immigration law, that there are mountains of BS erected by those who don't want to follow the law because it's easier just to hire a bunch of illegal aliens. The government should develop workable programs and costly punishments for those who refuse to use them.

[theBuckwheat]

A labor shortage will spur adoption of ATM machines to tend the fields and pick the crops.

Seriously, we are just a few years away from the first generation of farmerhand microbots that use DARPA-level swarming technology in hunter-killer missions against crop-destroying insects. This would be as major an advance in agriculture as the invention of the tractor or insecticides.

Rational economics (as opposed to Keynesian “economics”) will quickly tell us there is no such thing as a labor shortage. There is only a shortage of people willing to work for the wages being offered. There is a wage level that will bring enough workers into the field, but the farmer may not find it acceptable. He soon may find it costs less over time to buy a few hundred farmhand-microbots instead.

[HiJinx]

Ping!

[glorgau]

Don Pedro, was barreling down two-lane roads in a compact Chevy on a hunt for his own people slaves.

There, fixed it.

[bannie]

oooooh!!! JOBS FOR THE TEENAGERS!!!!

[ncalburt]

So Mikey from the LA Slimes is sad over the lack of slave labor ?
What a sick twisted lot the radical left at the Slimes are !

[VeniVidiVici]

The Paulks have been talking about moving to less labor-intensive crops, or using a federal guest-worker program, a move they say will cut into their profits. For now, they need pickers.

The landowners aren't even talking about going out-of-business should they need to pay decent wages to attract pickers, only that doing so will "cut into their profits". Well, that's just too damn bad.

If they can't obey the law and pay what the job is worth to attract pickers, then perhaps they should just shut down and sell.