It’s a bit like those farmers I’ve met in western Nebraska who complain about “illegals” yet live among the whitest, least diverse and least mobile population I have ever seen in this country. I felt like asking, have you guys ever MET an immigrant, much less an illegal one?
I’m seeking to understand the comment that farmers can easily raise wages because it would cost $16/family. Is this per family across the US? Most business would raise selling prices if labor costs increased. Farmers cannot do that.
I believe most comments in this thread about farming are discussing fruits and vegetables that are harvested and use/need immigrant labor to do so. These represent 46.9 billion out of 185.7 billion cash crop receipts, or approximately 25%. Other row crop, hay, wheat and cotton account for the rest, with corn and beans making up 43+%…
Farmers are one of the very few businesses who cannot control either their input or their output prices. The farm economy has tumbled greatly since 2012 and is predicted to stay low. Cheap interest has allowed farmers to stay afloat. I’m afraid higher interest will put us in 1980’s era failures. This type of farming depends far less on cheap/immigrant labor. Most farmers are currently barely breaking even, or are losing money, depending on their debt service.
I don’t know farmers willing to stick unskilled people in a $300,000 tractor. Far too much technology and risk. Year-round full-time farmhands in my area make ~$35,000/yr. and sometimes get free housing with that.
I posted a link in #115. The article is about agribusiness, not family owned farms. The $16 per famy is nation wide.
My farming neighbors cannot raise wages it’s not economically feasible. They drive their own farm equipment and work dawn till dusk.
@OHMomof2 that’s because most Americans think SS and Medicare payments are merely a return of the pension/premium they paid into the system. Same with farm payments, they paid for that “insurance”.
i think my area is under 35,000 for the foremen but yes some of the year round ones also get houses. I think my son who went into propagation and growing after college said the field foremen pay a token rent each week for a 1000 sq ft ranch house on the property which is how they keep the good ones. A lot of time when growers pick up additional land they end up with these random homes so put them to good use. This is entirely different than seasonal migrant housing which the Feds inspect regularly at least in my state.
" Water comes from the well so you don’t have water and sewer costs. Solar or wind supplements and cuts down electrical and wood burning generates heat if you can’t afford propane."’
Wells, Solar, wood - all this stuff comes with costs as well. It’s not free. Happy to spell it out if needed for “city folk” ;).
Suffice it to say, between putting in a well and maintaining a pump, water tank, electricity for pumping water up, etc (fortunate we don’t need to have our water treated as that would add even more expenses), we’ve easily spent $12K over the past 2 decades for our water.
Don’t get me started on wells and septic tanks! We’ve spent thousands of dollars on those items this year. And lots of DH’s time working on them.
Oh, thanks for reminding me, @MaineLonghorn. That $$ doesn’t even account for the septic tank part of the equation - just getting water to the house. Septic is many thousands more!
And if you have a power outage and don’t have a generator, forget a working well and septic system…
What happened in our case was that our pump started working so we had a submersible pump installed in the well. The installer had to dig a trench for the power cable out to the well. DH forgot to tell him about the waste pipe running from the house to the septic tank. Oops. He severed the pipe. So DH had to get that fixed which turned out to be more complicated than expected. Then our well water has been cloudy recently and he spent a lot more time and money grading the soil around the well so that groundwater will run away from it instead of into it (it’s a dug well - water from drilled wells here tends to be salty since we’re close to the ocean). Ugh. The water is getting clearer but we can’t drink it yet.
Our well is so deep (800 feet), our water is crystal clear, but the depth adds to expenses, both initially and ongoing.
Maybe we need a new thread: “The Country Bumpkin Life”. 
I just love when the power goes out and our spring pump system isn’t working! Like camping without any of the fun…
Even better is when you leave for work and a huge tree has fallen across the only road in and out. Why everyone has a chainsaw handy 
I vote country bumpkin thread!
P.S. Do you have names for your chickens?..
Actually, we don’t have chickens. Too much hassle given the amount of wildlife. They’d just be someone’s supper I fear based on other’s experiences near me. But I do know chickens are great at helping control tick populations.
Our camp in the mountains is even more remote. No electricity. But DH hooked up a system where water is collected in a cistern in the basement, and we have a pump that we charge up by hooking it up to our car! We do have a propane stove, fridge, and on-demand water heater. We filter the water, but it’s very clear, anyway. We tested it and it’s fine to drink.
What “welfare and other assistance programs” are you talking about? Very few states have anything like meaningful general assistance for able-bodied adults anymore. The biggest public assistance programs are social security and Medicare, for people who are generally too old for farm labor, social security disability, for which people have to prove they are disabled and because of that cannot perform any work available in the general economy, SNAP/food stamps, which is both a poverty alleviation program and a massive indirect subsidy to the food distribution and food processing industries, as well as to the farmers who grow/produce the raw materials, and aid that goes to families with young children that does not remotely cover the cost of taking care of young children. So where’s the big gain?
Looking up statistics for my rural county:
Population is 39,000. 4 percent of population above age 25 has $a college degree. 20 percent live below poverty level. Unemployment is 5 percent. Since 2002 federal aid for programs for children has been cut 50 percent.
It looks to me like only 141 adults currently get “welfare” but those figures are really difficult to find. I see suggestions that is deliberate.
Texas used - and still does except for where one gets renamed for some grand purpose - the designation of FM for a whole lot of blacktop. Stands for farm-to-market and… if you think about it… is the answer to what appears to be the question of why such things are provided to the “whitest” and “least mobile population” among us.
Pity them… they typically make it through every day without anything close to broadband.
Some stats for my county: 48,000 country bumpkins; 14.7% below poverty level; 23.6% college or grad school grads, 2.6% work in agriculture or forestry (used to be over 50%), 4% unemployed, $49,500 median household income, 2,582 food stamps, 3,560 public assistance, 934 foreign born, 3,777 have no health insurance, avg home value $108,000, and 3,291 veterans. I pay only $1,700 a year for my property taxes and school taxes and I know that is well below the average in the US.
Most of our foreign born immigrated from Europe and Asia unlike in other rural areas. Around 40% of our male population age 65 or over (including me) are veterans. This reminds me of how much the Vietnam War affected my generation. I’m surprised by the high educational level many of my bumpkin neighbors have attained. One out of ten has a graduate degree. Who’d a thunk it.
@tonyk:
It also depends the ‘country bumpkin’ area you are talking about, there are rural areas, like some rural areas in Vermont or certain areas out west, where relatively educated have moved by choice, art communities, people doing organic agriculture and the like, and in those areas people tend to be fairly well educated…whereas if you went to rural Mississippi or Alabama the education levels would be a lot lower than the norm. From what i understand about large beef farming ranches in the midwest (nothing scientific about it), a lot of the people running those farm have degrees in things like agricultural management, and the same for some farm regions, so even there it will vary.
LOL, our well is 350 deep w/a 1/2 horse pump and into crystal clear water. Initially the drilling costs were there,
cost of pump is there but after that with the exception of a pump going out is relatively maintenance free. When the power goes out - the boys pee outside. Our septic is gigundo and maintenance free, dune sand is good for something. Now my dryer went out last week and finding someone to deliver new appliances to the middle of no where is a pain in the butt…but that is what my H and his truck are for and laundry hung outside is a wonderful treat. No chickens so that’s not an issue 
Chainsaws are a mandatory household appliance and gets far more use than a microwave.
@fractalmastr:
The answer to your question has been addressed in part by others, it is that that federal aid is not easily seen or understood by the people getting it, pure and simple. First of all, a lot of federal money doesn’t go directly to local places, it goes to the states who allocate the money to local area. So for example, if you look at your local school budget (it is supposed to be published), you may see very little federal aid (where I live, for example, direct federal aid is less than 1% of the budget), but does your district get state aid? And if so, that money may be coming from the federal government and you don’t know it., federal block grants generally go to the states, who then allocate it to local areas,but it is hidden. As someone else pointed out, other places pay into FCC fees and such that help subsidize more rural areas of the country, rural areas have phone service and now increasingly things like cable tv and broadband internet service because it was paid to be wired by the federal government, it was much the same way with electric power. In 1930 something like 10% of farms and rural areas had electric service, by the time of the second world war it was around 40% if I remember the numbers correctly, and by 1950 something like 90% of the farms in this country had electric power, same with phone service. When people talk about ‘let the market decide’, rural areas would get the shaft because economically wiring rural areas is a money loser, the company has to lay in many miles of expensive wiring to serve very few people, and likewise with maintainance federal money helps make sure that wiring is working.
The roads in your state, including your area, likely get state money, and even for state and local roads it flows down…but it is hidden among the budget items. Farmers get direct subsidies from the government for price supports or indirectly (for example, the government money that funds the idiotic use of ethanol, which in turn benefits corn farms, or the price supports on corn that keeps it cheap, and the subsidies to companies like ADM and Cargill that have made high fructose corn syrup so cheap it is used in a lot of processed food, or in the cheap subsidized corn used for feed that in turn helps create cheap meat (that is subsidized itself). Farmers can buy drought insurance through the federal government at rates they otherwise wouldn’t be able to get, because the government backs it and helps pay out when farmers hit a drought or other loss of crops, no private insurer would do that.
Federal spending on education is around 9% on average, but for example in South Carolina something like 40% of their education budget comes from federal money (I think South Caroline does school spending as a state and allocates the money to the local districts), I remember when they had the budge sequestration with automatic cuts that the reps and senators from South Carolina were really worried with their schools.
Rural areas depend on medicaid (for example, the GOP senator from West Virginia has said he won’t vote for the GOP health care proposal that slashes medicaid spending, because his state depends heavily on it, and West Virginia is heavily rural), and in those places a large majority of the medicaid costs are from the federal government, more urban states pay a lot more of their costs.
And I have heard the same thing coming out of rural areas, that they don’t get anything but end up paying for all those people on welfare in X (Detroit, NYC, St. Louis, etc, etc), they really believe that…but the reality is that federal welfare payments have been slashed, and in most of those places most of the welfare benefits are paid for locally, programs like federal WIC and such make up a small part of it (there also is federal section 8 housing vouchers, but they have been slashed, and a lot of the housing cost for the poor has been taken up by local governments).
Rural areas, too, often don’t recognize other federal benefits. For example, the auto transplants down in Tennessee and Kentucky are part of the TVA region, where federally run hydro dams produce power, and by law they can only charge the cost of production, so much of the industry that has moved into that region (that is still relatively rural, was once dirt farms), is doing so because the power is cheap, like 10c kwh, which is a third what a private company would likely charge, it is a subsidy (and anyone wonder why conservatives, who say the government should not be in such businesses, especially McConnel, never clamor to see off the TVA?). Likewise, in Washington State a lot of people get cheap power, including the rural areas, not to mention companies like Boeing, and that is a subsidy, too, since the government is running those power facilities at rates well below market rates would be.
You may not see it on the ground, @fractalmastr, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t there. This is true within states as well, a lot of the tax revenue NYC gives to NY State subsidizes the upstate regions, NY City gets back only a fraction of what it sends upstate. Not surprising, that is the nature of things, but it gets pretty irritating when I hear people living in areas that are in effect subsidized how they subsidize everyone else, it simply isn’t true…and with federal taxes out/in, the more populated/urban/suburban states pay in a lot more than they get out, and the more rural states to varying degrees get a lot more back from the feds then they pay in…it varies of course, some more rural states pretty much break even, but others get a lot back.