Farm owners or workers mother fucker?
OWNERS OR WORKERS MOTHER FUCKER?!
Oh great, another hexbear post on farmers where we all get to pretend that anyone who owns a tractor in 2023 is exactly the same as a Russian kulak in 1923.
you don’t need to go that far or call anyone a kulak to realize that the small farmer working his land and the farmer hiring dozens of migrant laborers to do it for him aren’t equivalent, nor is the guy who owns 5 farms and works none of them a farmer at all in any meaningful way.
Much like any sector, agriculture has lots of different class arrangements that are possible within it, and the bourgeois media purposely muddies the waters by calling everyone from the owners of agricultural conglomerates down to the individual yeoman farmer, simply “farmers”
it’s the same with “family owned” businesses, it’s meant to imply a certain wholesomeness, but it could be an immediate family actually making the product, or it could be a megacorporation like johnson and johnson, the label is meaningless because it refers to who owns the capital not who’s doing the labor
hiring dozens of migrant laborers to do it for him
Or “adopting” dozens of orphans and putting them up in a dorm building and “homeschooling” them, but really they’re slave labor for your $40 million ranch.
Great example are the farms in GB that are hyper exploiting migrants right now. TrashFuture have done two excellent episodes on the abuse and cover-ups recently, featuring the journalist of this piece:
purposely muddies the waters by calling everyone from the owners of agricultural conglomerates down to the individual yeoman farmer, simply “farmers”
It’s one of a few industries in the imperial core where the class exploitation of the workers should be just as apparent to the workers as it was to those working inside a factory. The system of words built around it blinds people to it.
I’m just saying it smells like feel-good nonsense in a system that’s been built to rely on hyperprecarious non-citizen labor. I can juice it up some if you’d like to fight though
Oh great,
we all get to pretend that
reminder that smarmy Chapotraphouse fans are literally the same class as /r/neoliberal. “I’m so tired and exhausted for having to pretend to care about my undocumented child slave workers, by the way I’m not a settler like those evil Jews!”
exactly the same
zero historical materialism mf
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Huh, now that you mention it I guess Ocean Spray is a cooperative. I’m not sure whether it’s a coop of farm owners or it actually enfranchises the workers, though. Wikipedia just refers to some 700 “growers”
Knew a guy who’s family farm was part of the Welch’s cooperative, they mainly employed migrant workers from Mexico.
Every farm I’ve looked into that’s what happens, and that’s been the status quo from the beginning of agriculture in the US. The owner operator farm is largely a myth and the ones that do exist are subsidized into life by growing specific crops and they are highly technology dependent even still.
The few owner operator farms that exist in the US and Canada never sell to produce companies, as the scale simply isn’t there. The only place you’ll ever find them is at farmers markets or your local equivalent. They’re always going to be family farms which usually means multiple generations working there including “homeschooled” kids and multiple adult siblings living on the farm.
They almost always sell only one or two crops: potatoes, corn, or heirloom apples are common, they’ll rarely show up outside of peak seasons for those. Free range organic eggs and local honey are also common owner-operator items.
In my experience the stand will usually be operated by someone elderly, supported by their adult child or grandchild who’s doing most of the heavy lifting from the van, not a truck. Truck might be more common in the states tho
I still consider the giant grain farms to be owner operator even if that ground is muddied a bit, that’s what I was referring to with the Subsidized highly technology dependent crops.
Absolutely my experience with small owner op farms too, in my area it’s all apples and honey sold by somebody much too young or old to be working a market stall all day. Didn’t really think about them when I wrote this since their impact is so small compared to the large soy/corn/wheat owner op farms.
Oh, for sure. Highly mechanized farms can be owner operated, they’re just harder for people to support directly as they don’t really have a public facing presence. I think there are a few brands you might find in stores that try to only deal with owner-op. Bob’s Red Mill might be one of them, but I can’t actually find anything on their site to back it up.
Excuse me for being ignorant, but do farmers have workers? I thought it was usually just the farmer with whatever exploitation is happening behind the scenes like everything in capitalism ya know
big farms have a lot of workers, mostly migrant workers who are heavily exploited
fruit picking is the main one that comes to mindDepends on the crop your growing, but yes, at lot of farms employ workers, often seasonal migrant workers for the harvest. Also dairies and meat production farms also function more like a factory than a traditional farm and employ dozens of not hundreds of people.
Cereals though can mostly be planted and harvested using large machinery and so often are just run by one family.
i was gonna say that a proportion are mechanized and don’t need much labor, but looking at some job listings it seems like farms of every size and type still try to employ seasonal labor.
fuck that’s grim we need to return to villages i thought the whole point of isolated farms was they didn’t need the labor as much, no they just make laborers drive ridiculous distances for shit pay and conditions
Done
