Brilliant essay. These thoughts on migrant labour are profound and very helpful. I hadn't thought about the fact that all the interesting/humane parts of farm work are inaccessible to the migrant worker and that he or she is pretty much relegated to the status of a sentient tool.
I wonder how the farmhand (and even seasonal labourer) of, say, the British 1940s had it different to the modern day migrant labourer? In a sense, their jobs were similar but perhaps there were differing degrees of autonomy, a closeness to the farmer in the 1940s situation, and more varying avenues for skill and intellectual stimulus with the farmhands. How much of this is predicated on the relationship of the farmer to his farmhands I do not know (probably as well the size of the farms also plays a part in the difference).
I think you're right to ask that question, Hadden. The reliance on mechanization and digital technology has increased apace, such that most farmers in the West rarely get their hands dirty in the soil anymore. Part of this has to do with farm size. In the US, average farm size continues to rise steadily as more and more farmland gets bought up from small farming families. The US average right now is 465 acres per farm, up 20 acres from the previous year. A hundred years ago, that number was 180 acres per farm, give or take. (And all this is happening while we're losing massive swathes of farm and range land; since our last census, for instance, we lost 20 million acres of farmland--roughly the size of the state of Maine.) All this to say: when farms aren't human sized, farmers must rely on industrial-scale tools owned by large multi-national corporations. With larger farms and larger tools, we lose practical skills and wisdom. One small example: there's been a massive pushback by farmers against John Deere, which now has all these fancy computers in their tractors. Well, when a farmer buys a new tractor, JD retains ownership of the software inside the tractor. If a new tractor needs fixing, the farmer couldn't fix it without tampering with the private property of John Deere. It pissed off quite a few farmers. You can find lots of YouTube videos by farmers about how to hack into these software systems (mercifully, my tractor is from the 1980's, so not so complicated.)
Hey folks: just a quick note to say that I provided a link to the GoFundMe page that Juan Jose Ceballos's set up. You can also access it here: https://www.gofundme.com/f/bring-juan-jose-home-funeral-fund
Brilliant and timely! Thank you.
Brilliant essay. These thoughts on migrant labour are profound and very helpful. I hadn't thought about the fact that all the interesting/humane parts of farm work are inaccessible to the migrant worker and that he or she is pretty much relegated to the status of a sentient tool.
I wonder how the farmhand (and even seasonal labourer) of, say, the British 1940s had it different to the modern day migrant labourer? In a sense, their jobs were similar but perhaps there were differing degrees of autonomy, a closeness to the farmer in the 1940s situation, and more varying avenues for skill and intellectual stimulus with the farmhands. How much of this is predicated on the relationship of the farmer to his farmhands I do not know (probably as well the size of the farms also plays a part in the difference).
I think you're right to ask that question, Hadden. The reliance on mechanization and digital technology has increased apace, such that most farmers in the West rarely get their hands dirty in the soil anymore. Part of this has to do with farm size. In the US, average farm size continues to rise steadily as more and more farmland gets bought up from small farming families. The US average right now is 465 acres per farm, up 20 acres from the previous year. A hundred years ago, that number was 180 acres per farm, give or take. (And all this is happening while we're losing massive swathes of farm and range land; since our last census, for instance, we lost 20 million acres of farmland--roughly the size of the state of Maine.) All this to say: when farms aren't human sized, farmers must rely on industrial-scale tools owned by large multi-national corporations. With larger farms and larger tools, we lose practical skills and wisdom. One small example: there's been a massive pushback by farmers against John Deere, which now has all these fancy computers in their tractors. Well, when a farmer buys a new tractor, JD retains ownership of the software inside the tractor. If a new tractor needs fixing, the farmer couldn't fix it without tampering with the private property of John Deere. It pissed off quite a few farmers. You can find lots of YouTube videos by farmers about how to hack into these software systems (mercifully, my tractor is from the 1980's, so not so complicated.)