Is it the immigrants harvesting corn you are thinking about: https://www.crushpixel.com/stock-photo/harvesting-machine-fi...

Maybe corn is the wrong example. But most harvesting in still done manually, by immigrants.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/02/us/coronavirus-undocument...

> "Farmworkers, Mostly Undocumented, Become ‘Essential’ During Pandemic"

> "Immigrant field workers have been told to keep working despite stay-at-home directives, and given letters attesting to their “critical” role in feeding the country."

That’s still a lot to unpack.

Seasonal workers coming in for harvest have a tough job, but it has nothing to do with kids occupation.

For a comparison point, french wineyards use a flock of workers coming from everywhere around europe (including french students and unemployed) to harvest grapes for a few weeks and go back to whatever they were doing.

It doesn’t need to be some tangled mess of undocumented immigrants with no rights, no contracts etc., that part is more to me a reflection of US politics than anything.

US politics, and probably the history of farming in the country. Megascale farms with labour being a commodity have been the standard since before the country was founded.

Average farm size, in America, is around 450 acres. Not even a square mile. Maybe 'megafarm' is an exaggeration.

Average farms in low and middle income countries are under 5 acres, in other rich countries they're around 75 [1].

Plantations are like nation-states - inefficient, but powerful enough to bankrupt smaller competitors in the same market.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X1...

Have you ever heard of the industrialization of agriculture? We dont use humans to pick up everything anymore. If that were the case your food would cost 100 times more.

You could take a bigger perspective and in this bigger perspective we outsource a lot of dangerous and dirty work to countries where human rights hardly exists, or can be bought.

Ever heard about sweat-shops and children in mines? This goes for parts of the food industry as well - bananas springs to mind as an example.

We do use human labour, just not as much in the west, and most of us live in convenient ignorance.

And just 70 years ago we had similar circumstances in the western world. There is no reason to believe that sweat shops and child labour won't go away in developing countries as well.

That's the thing about progress, you can be better off than yesterday, and still have a shit load of problems to solve.

I hear you.

Still, from what I gather we’ve peaked the heck out of this industrialization and not enough of the gains have reached enough people. As people we know better, but as industrialized conglomerates all that is out the window.

Seeing how the world is ruled at present I’m weary of the outlook.