Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins held a press conference today to talk about how all those "lazy" people getting Medicaid should become farm laborers to make up for all the people being deported. She said,
There will be no amnesty. The mass deportations continue, but in a strategic way. And we move the workforce toward automation and 100% American participation, which with 34 million able-bodied on Medicaid we should be able to do fairly quickly.
Author Charles C. Mann had this to say about it:
All I can get out of this is that the US Secretary of Agriculture has no idea that ag has been furiously automating everything it can for 30-40 years and all the human jobs left now are ones we have no idea how to automate. I know it is probably a violation of Godwin's Law to mention this, but as far as I know the last program that tried to get millions of people to leave their homes to work on farms was the Cultural Revolution.
Sarah Taber, agricultural consultant and recent candidate for North Carolina commissioner of agriculture, went into a lot more detail. As always, she was enlightening:
So. I've been on field manual labor crews where most of my coworkers were convicts. I've also worked with a lot of tech companies on automating farms. And [Rollins'] press conference is incredible. Rollins hasn't the foggiest clue what she's on about.
Every farm job that CAN be automated, already is. Let's start there. She thinks... nobody's ever tried to automate picking fruit? Really? And then we'll talk about the "tehe we'll just make the Medicaid people work the farms" part.
Produce that's hard, OR destined for processing, can be picked by machine. So carrots, nuts, sour cherries for pie filling, berries and grapes that will be dried, tomatoes for sauce - those are picked by machine already. But berries, fruit, tomatoes, etc that are eaten fresh can't be automated w current technology.
I know because I worked for a lot of the startups that tried!
There's no way to pick fast enough by machine to be commercially viable, without bruising so they rot before they get to the store. Having a USDA Secretary who doesn't know any of this is wild!
Now let's talk this whole "We'll just have the Medicaid people pick the crops!" thing. And let's just ignore the whole "forced labor is morally bad" issue. Let's focus strictly on logistics.
A thing that kept happening to me, as a white American who worked manual labor field jobs (we are in fact out here, sorry) is finding out I was the only fool on the crew who was there voluntarily and getting paid. Everyone else was convicts with a sentence.
So they were completely new to farm labor and didn't really want to be there. Part of the job is I was supposed to "mentor" them. News flash: inexperienced people who don't want to be there DON'T DO GOOD WORK. Even if they want to, they don't know how.
Farmers would hire these crews because they "didn't want to hire migrants" but also "didn't want to pay real wages." And they were ALWAYS disappointed with the results. Slow. Sloppy. Kept breaking stuff because they were clumsy. No real cost savings compared to just hiring real workers.
This one Florida crew I was on had a rotating cast of 19-year-old weed and Xbox kids who'd been caught on minor drug charges. They were harmless. And also, clumsy AF. Big kids who had no idea where their feet were. They kept stepping on the blueberry transplants we'd just planted.
Another crew was a bunch of minors who were working as "community service" for juvie. They all smoked... Tobacco is packed with plant viruses that are super contagious; can be spread just by touch. So "don't smoke in the fields" is a key farm rule.
Not only did the juvie crew not know or care. The FOREMEN didn't know or care. That's how janky this outfit was. Hope those fields turned out ok
Ag is a real job. It takes real skills, knowledge, and people who GAF about what they're doing. Stop treating agriculture like society's dumping ground.
Jamelle Bouie also had a thread that was about a slightly different topic – pundits pontificating that "other people" should go work in factories — but it ended up in an allied place:
i think that if you are an upper income writer living in a major urban area complaining about “the laptop class” — really, if you are a knowledge worker of any kind complaining about the “laptop class" — you have an obligation to quit your job and go work in a factory for a year
you’ll never hear me complaining about that shit. my grandparents did factory work and labored as domestics — and my parents joined the military — so that my brother and i could provide for our families without destroying our bodies
the other thing is that no one who fetishizes manual labor actually cares to improve life for people who are in those circumstances! no support for unionization or a generous welfare state! no interest in policies that make life easier for people who work their hands or afford them more autonomy!
Brooke Rollins is another fine example of the incompetence of the Trump regime. Jesus. On the same day Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy once again defamed the New York subway system as dangerous, when cars kill more than 40,000 people a year. And more than 100 people died in flooding in Texas after DOGE has decimated FEMA and NOAA and the National Weather Service...
Here's what Tom Tomorrow had for this week. You can't top it:
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