I did a short video on this. For anyone who might need to hear, like, *logistical* reasons for why drafting people into farm work is bad.

https://youtu.be/jyVIqq4VBy4

Thread format to follow shortly.

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 & grapes that will be dried, tomatoes for sauce- those are picked by machine already.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/ojqPSMYWEvo

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.

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 & getting paid. Everyone else was convicts with a sentence.

So they were completely new to farm labor & 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 bc they "didn't want to hire migrants" but also "didn't want to pay real wages."

And they were ALWAYS disappointed w the results. Slow. Sloppy. Kept breaking stuff bc 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 19yo weed & 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, bc juvie. 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, & people who gaf about what they're doing.

Stop treating agriculture like society's dumping ground.

@sarahtaber

(Is this where we go watch some @ufwupdates videos of some skilled ag workers ripping through harvesting fields?)

@alienghic @sarahtaber @ufwupdates The part of this that you are missing is that there is no such thing as "able-bodied people on Medicaid" who aren't employed.

That's federal law, since the Clinton Administration, over 30 years ago. ABAWDs (able-bodied adults aged 18-64 without dependents) do *not* qualify for Medicaid, at all, unless they are employed, period.

Only children, disabled people, people with dependents who are full-time caregivers, and the elderly get a free pass.

@alienghic This doesn't even begin to address the fact that even if these putative 34 million people existed, most of them almost certainly do not exist in places where they can be employed as farm labor, because they are mostly not in locations that are suitable for modern agriculture.

We can dispense with the notion that this fascist regime is suddenly going to start providing public housing in farming communities for farm laborers.

Everything she's saying is an obviously blatant lie.

@DrPlanktonguy @gcvsa @alienghic

Oh, please call them health camps like RFK jr talks of, where people will work off their deficiencies of depression and other forms of mental illness or gender dysphoria.

Of course, this has nothing to do with eugenicist ideas