Trump impact in my rural area. Local meat producer loses key staff ahead of Trump reign.

[Farmer-Rick]

37. There is a serious problem with US capitalism

If it must have cheap foreign labor to produce food.

Why can't we just pay normal wages to average Americans to work on farms?

As the system is set up now it is impossible. I have tried it. I have a small farm and tried to hire people at a decent rate. But my farm couldn't produce enough to pay good salaries.

Honestly, I don't think it was the higher wages so much as the low, low prices I got for my produce. All the lucrative markets are taken up by corporations. I can't sell to grocery stores because they got contracts with cheaper out of state distributors and wholesellers. I can't sell to school's because they are required to buy the factory farm produce from the USDA. The USDA won't buy my produce because they want tons not pounds, they always cater to the rich large corporate farms.

Doing specialty sales for customers willing to pay a premium price for organic cruelty free produce wasn't enough money to hire people at decent wages. It may be my location that really doesn't have a lot of sophisticated and decerning customers. It's like there are 100 farms trying to compete for the same 200 customers.

Anyway, I found less labor intensive produce and products and hired a few locals seasonally. It was just enough to make ends meet. But it's very difficult to compete with corporations who hire 100s of cheap migrant workers and sell the vast amounts of produce for pennies.

There is something wrong with this picture. Why must we have cheap labor to operate? Why can't we offer decent wages while farming? It's a systemic thing.

I really think Trump is not going to deport the migrants. He's just going to put them in concentration camps and send them out in vast chain gangs to work at corporate farms and warehouses. So, it will actually be a boon to Bezos and Tyson.