Make Groceries Affordable Again

Economy
1

Nearly all whole nutritious food is dependent on hand labor to harvest. This is why it is so much cheaper to make a diet out of machine harvested corn, wheat and soybeans. Because of the seasonal nature of the work it is nearly impossible to hire a large enough volume of domestic labor for the short harvest window that these crops have. The only legal option farmers have is to rely on the H2A visa program which is extremely expensive. These costs have ballooned to the point that it costs about 21$ per hour. The same workers get paid 10-15$ per day in Mexico to do the same exact jobs. It is very hard to compete in this kind of environment when the costs are so imbalanced. As a farmer I would love to be able to sell our produce cheaper and expand production but with labor being 50-75% of our cost of production we are already hanging on by a thread at current prices. If we could just lower the cost of H2A labor we could actually make American grown nutritious food cheaper and more affordable. And before this gets into a discussion on business models and looking for niche markets we need to be able to mass produce this kind of food cheap enough to sell in Walmart to every single American instead of just those fortunate enough to be able to afford Whole Foods, the local co-op or farmers markets.