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Comment by a_bonobo | Hacker News Reader

Here in Australia, some food prizes are up because the farming industry relies on cheap backpacker labor.

Borders are shut so no backpackers come in, so a lot of fruit died on the field.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/02/world/australia/agricultu...

It should be noted that the entire industry is notorious for doing every dodgy thing they can get away with, wage theft, rent theft, extreme conditions, so local workers stay as far away from these jobs as they can.

Other industries have done OK though. Wheat grain, for example, is predicted to be pretty average: https://research.csiro.au/graincast/wheat-yield-forecasts/

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Most cereal, corn, and even some fruit harvest is highly mechanized, whereas many other types of produce require manual labor, so it's really not surprising.

In Europe, there are seasonal harvests that require surges of workers, who are sometimes legal and sometimes not. For example loads of foreign workers flock to the vineyards in France, Italy or Spain to collect the grapes for winemaking. It's around 3 weeks of work, obviously not worth a permanent contract.

There were very few restrictions in those countries by the time of harvest (September) so wine prices, to my knowledge, have remained largely unaffected, but if it happened otherwise, winemakers would have been, without doubt, lobbying against the restrictions.

It’s amazing to me that the EU behaves a lot like the US in this regard. Same with Australia. I had no idea.

Well, it is still somewhat tricky to pick strawberries etc. with robots. There is R&D going on, but humans still win.

You need to take into account that income differences within the EU are enormous. Badly paid job in Germany still translates into very paid job in Bulgaria or Romania. That is why a lot of the seasonal workers come from the Balkans. Within a month they make enough money to live off for several months back home. No qualification needed.

Modern capitalism usually moves the capital to labor. But you can’t move sunshine or soil, so modern agriculture moves the labor to the capital.

That's amazing. Australia's farm labor is primarily relatively-wealthy vacationers who need a boost while they are far from home?

Working Holiday visa. If you're under 30 it's a rubber stamp thing.

Pay the 400 bucks and you're good for a year.

You can work legally as long as it's no more than 6 months anywhere, and it's pretty easy to get around that.

You can extend your visa for another year if you do 88 days (~3 months) of "farm work" -- doesn't have to be on a farm per se, I know a guy who worked in a hyper-remote rural gas station ("road house").

I worked on a very remote cattle farm digging watering trenches and welding cattle pens. Then hitchhiked across the country.

I knew backpacking was a thing, but I thought it was quite confidential. I didn't know that the farmers heavily relied on them to harvest

Not sure that we're operating on the same definition of "backpacking" here, it's just low cost travel[1]. On certain visas in Australia you can extend the duration by working in a specified area[2], which is where that form of travel intersects with the food production issues.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backpacking_(travel) [2] https://immi.homeaffairs.gov.au/visas/getting-a-visa/visa-li...

I strongly suspect that it might be their flavor of our "traditional" migrant workers that involved some temporary work visa.

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