> But AFAIK the main market distortion in the farming industry is the opposite: subsidies that make farming more attractive than it would be, which would tend to increase farm workers' equilibrium wages.

That might be true for markets in the abstract but the market for farm labor is distorted in several ways. One is due to historical reasons farm labor is treated differently from other labor categories and the end result is many of those workers have fewer protections. The second is, as others mentioned, many cannot seek other work due to lack of documentation. In effect becoming a captive labor force with limited ability to advocate for itself.

As an aside, whenever markets display aberrant behavior in the real world, it pays to look for the distortions. They're usually not hard to spot.

These are interesting points.

Regarding farm labor having fewer protections. In general, labour protections can be distortion-creating (e.g. a minimum wage) or distortion-busting (e.g. rules that ensure people are paid on time).

Regarding the captive labor force: this might be bad for non citizens (and humanity overall), but it seems like it's good for US citizens, who benefit from increased (unlimited?) supply of farm labor, reducing upward pressure on food prices.

If I've understood the above correctly, it seems that 'we need farm workers' isn't an actual problem that needs a solution (from the perspective of US citizens or, by extension, the US government).

What have I missed?

>> If a job pays poorly, doesn't that suggest there are many people willing and able to do those jobs, relative to the need for the job to be done?

No. This notion of relentless competition is insane. One school district was paying a janitor barely a living wage. The standard response was "he could improve himself / get a degree, and find a better job. That shifts all blame on him an ignored the fact that the district expects to pay a non living wage for that position, they'll just find someone else if he left.

That's not a rebuttal.

No it's not. I was going to write one but then decided I'm not qualified to speak for farmers.

I will say this. Both my grandfathers were farmers. One worked his whole life and died broke. The other invested what he could, and never worked the land a day in my life (that I can remember). He once said that he didnt make his money farming, meaning it was from saving and investing. He rented his land, barn, and equipment to others.

IMHO investing is really close to renting (yes, I have some investments). SaaS is rent. Loaning money is rent. We increasingly live in a world where or renters and owners and people who do the most actual work are the least valued. It's still not a rebuttal, just a general observation that things aren't "fair" for some definitions of "fair". This situation is a societal choice and doesnt have to be that way. I'm not sure what a better way looks like though.

Thats doesn't mean we need more farmers.

Yes, feel free to say that farmers are payed low. But it remains the same that if they are paid this low, then we don't really need more farmers entering the industry.

Instead hopefully less people will join that industry.

As a farmer myself, I agree that there are too many people in the industry, if you want economic efficiency. Frankly, it provides really great money per hour, making software look poorly paid in comparison, but you quickly run out of work to do because there are so many other farmers trying to do the same. Thus, incomes tend to be low when observed on a yearly basis. I don't know many farmers who wouldn't love to take on more work.

It would be wise to ensure that we have some redundancy in the farming sector. Even if it needs go be subsidized. It is arguably a national security concern.

Half of agriculture workers are immigrants. I'd guess that the harder and less lucrative jobs are going disproportionately towards immigrants and especially undocumented immigrants (about a quarter of the agriculture workforce). I think, rather than pay higher wages and give benefits to American labor, our society imports people from poorer countries to do demanding jobs for low pay.

https://research.newamericaneconomy.org/report/immigration-a...

> How are both of these true? If a job pays poorly, doesn't that suggest there are many people willing and able to do those jobs, relative to the need for the job to be done?

Or it suggests that labor doesn't flow through the system as easily as the theory assumes it does, or that the theory assumes incorrect things about the world, or that it's just wrong on the face of it in a whole lot of actual real world cases. As the biologists say, it's usually not the lab mouse who's wrong.

Yes, definitely, there might be an alternate explanation that's closer to reality, than what I proposed.

Any ideas?

Well, at a first pass: Labor market negotiating power is unbalanced; owners of capital are loathe to give it away under any circumstances; workers, especially poor workers, don't have a lot of flexibility to shop around for jobs when they need one; and by and large modern business thinking & planning is incredibly short-term and liable to walk itself into stupid and avoidable situations like not being able to stock shelves with toilet paper for six months or sell $30k cars for lack of $5 worth of old computer chips.

Basically, you've got a pile of short-sighted, emotional apes, often operating under conditions of stress or duress, with imperfect information and a planning system that's effectively hijacking stress responses designed to respond to actual flesh & blood predators to evaluate interest rates. All that indicates to me that the cohabitation of "we can't find workers" and "no, we're not raising wages" is maybe less surprising than theory would suggest.

Specific to what's happening in the farm labor market, I'd suspect there's a lot of interplay between the immigration system being pretty broken and farm owners being on the whole kind of crappy businessmen that leads to this particular market distortion.

It seems like the explanation you're putting forward is: farm owners are suffering from too few farm workers but, because they are bad businesspeople, they don't realize that raising offered wages would allow them to hire enough people.

Have I understood correctly?