Thread: AgJobs Bill: Return to the Machines!!

Research into mechanizing agricultural harvest began to fall rapidly in the 1970's and has plummeted to a small percentage of what it once was.
Check out this article:
http://www.cis.org/articles/2000/back1200.html#authors
It even specifically attributes this decline to lobbying by farmworker groups,

1979 saw a big turning point:
[b]Harvest labor productivity must be greatly increased so that production costs can decrease and worker income can increase. This is a key factor that the U.S. Government has been neglecting since 1979, when the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture of that time, Bob Bergland, stated, “I will not put federal money into any project that reduces the need for farm labor.â€

I will be sending this to mine as well. I believe mechanization and other means will help spring agriculture forward, out of the cheap farm labor mentality, and into the reality of today. This method of farming and agriculture practice has brought hordes of illegal aliens and the problems that come with them and from them.

Jeremiah 29:11

Thanks for the post CapitanRon.I have heard that some (not a lot) of other countries have mechanized harvesting,I truly can't imagine why our farmers wouldn't want it,I would think it would be faster,cleaner and cheaper than illegal labor.Less workers to hurt themselves while working in the field and later sue the farmer.

I think most farmers don't want it because it is cheaper to just hire their illegals for a few weeks, then they are through with them. If one of them gets sick, the taxpayers will care for them. If one of them dies, someone will send the body home - not the farmer, and no questions asked.

With machinery, it is a big investment. If one actually purchases their own, they have to maintain it, house it in off season, maybe insure it, etc.

It also might be more expensive to hire someone with the machinery to harvest rather than illegals - to the farmer, I mean. It would be much less expensive to the taxpayers and nation as a whole.

With illegals - no upkeep - here for the work and then gone.

Why don't we use the model set for us by Arizona's Sheriff Joe Arpaio and use inmates to do the crop planting and picking?!

I will be sending this article to my Senators, too!

Originally Posted by CostaMesaMan

Why don't we use the model set for us by Arizona's Sheriff Joe Arpaio and use inmates to do the crop planting and picking?!

I will be sending this article to my Senators, too!

There was an article posted today about prisoners working the farms in Colorado.

http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_6344387

Farms get help from inmates
Prison's farm team: Inmate work program benefiting low-risk convicts and labor-strapped farmers

By Kirk Mitchell , Denver Post Staff Writer
Article Last Updated: 07/11/2007 11:31:42 AM MDT


Pulling at band-aids wrapped around her blistered fingers, Linda Buckham remembered how elated she had felt seeing a peacock and hearing cattle.

"'All we're missing is a rooster crowing,"' she recalled telling a fellow prison inmate at the time. "And then a rooster started crowing."

Buckham, incarcerated for embezzlement, is one of 15 prisoners at Pueblo's minimum-security La Vista Correctional Facility who plant crops and pull weeds as part of a new prison farm-labor program.

Buckham, who spoke with reporters Tuesday on an onion farm outside Avondale, is so happy to leave prison each day that she doesn't mind rising at 3:30 a.m. and working in 100-degree heat.

The farmers are equally pleased

"In the beginning, (farmers) were all very skeptical," said Butcher, D-Pueblo. "That's not their opinion today."

Katherine Sanguinetti, spokeswoman for the Colorado Department of Corrections, said the inmates stay occupied, making it easier to manage them. Also, letting farmers pay for inmate labor helps prevent farms from going under. "It's a win-win situation," she said.

The traditional farm laborers, who planted and picked vegetables on southern Colorado farms, are staying out of the state after legislators last year passed one of the country's toughest laws against illegal immigrants, Butcher said. She said the farmers see Colorado inmates as their possible salvation - the most viable replacements for the gaps once filled by illegal immigrants.

Five farmers recently vouched for the program in a letter distributed to reporters Tuesday. The farmers, who declined to identify themselves, wrote that after illegal immigrants stopped coming to Colorado, they called a local unemployment office and advertised for help in the newspapers. But they received no responses.

"We have been pleasantly surprised at the serious motivation the inmates have shown to learn different skills and also their ability to hang in," the letter says.

La Vista prisoners were the first to start cultivating crops on southern Colorado farms in May under the DOC program. A second farm team begins work today.

As many as 4,500 Colorado inmates qualify because their security levels make them a low-enough escape and violence risk to allow them to work on farms, Sanguinetti said. A DOC employee watches the inmates, but the arrangement is far more casual than that found in the chain gangs of old.

Although Colorado has other inmate-labor programs, this new one is the first to attempt to solve such a broad problem as the state's farm-labor shortage.

The inmates who volunteered to work on the farm said it isn't easy work, but it offers many solutions to their own problems at prison.

"I'm not sitting in the facility and being depressed and sleeping all the time," Buckham said. "It's been a great opportunity."

Kaedra Peterson, 32, in prison for drug possession, said her pay increased from 60 cents a day for prison work to $4 a day at the farm. She used to rely on money from her grandmother to buy basic necessities such as toothpaste and soap. Now, she can pick up that tab as well as pay more toward restitution.

Butcher said farmers pay $9.60 an hour per inmate for the labor. The money covers all the program's expenses, including the supervisor's salary and transportation to and from work.

Staff writer Kirk Mitchell can be reached at 303-954-1206 or kmitchell@denverpost.com.

Another important benefit of using convict labor is that it will break the cycle that keeps sending poeple back to prison--the "repeat offender" tragedy. Once someone has been in prison it is extremely difficult to reintegrate them back into society--and they have no money when they leave prison. So unless they have an outside stash or friends with cash--they are going to end up right back in prison and for an even longer sentence. If they do get out they may get involved in financial crimes because there is no other way to live.

It is tragic that much of our Native American population has succumbed to this cycle. And also that the presriptive way out for them is to foster more vice--such as through the casino industry. After all many of the crimes that Indians end up in the slammer for didn't even exist before the White Man came. Whoever heard of a vagrant Indian, for pete's sake?--and they didn't have alcohol either.

I knew a guy who was a talented engineer but got into some things he shouldn't have. After a few years in prison he was out--but never could reintegrate into society and ended back on the street. A total waste. This agriculture program gives people a way to stabilize their lives and save the taxpayers money, too. We can win, together. Actually farm work is very low stress and enjoyable much of the year. A good way to get back on your feet.