Price of food doesn’t go up if you don’t have anybody to harvest the crops. Automation is a joke. Many of the crops cannot be harvested by machine and most farmers couldn’t ever recover the cost of the machine. Who you going to have run the machines even if they could afford them.
So bankrupt the farmers and lose the crops. Not an answer.
Pray for W and Our Troops
If you pay people enough, they will harvest the crops. If people aren't available, farmers will automate the way it has been done in other countries.
Farmers tried this argument before about being unable to harvest tomatoes without illegal labor. Lo and behold, they figured out how to automate.