“The farmers will have to raise salaries”
This article is not about farmers. It says, “For that, a worker bunks with crewmates in a mobile trailer for free while seeing the U.S. heartland.” Many wheat farmers do not own a combine since they cost $300,000 or more and they would use it for about a week per year. Thus they contract to have their harvest done. The worker is discussed here is hired by that contractor. Some of these contractors work their way from Texas to Montana following the harvest, probably about 3 months at the maximum. Most of the “workers” are typically members of the contractor’s family. However, it used to be a good summer job for college kids with some mechanical smarts.
It takes some serious mechanical smarts to service today’s combines.Look under the shields on the new John Deere machines,looks like a job for an aircraft mechanic.Add a GPS system,motion sensors on all drive shafts and a computer to monitor everything-it’s quite a complex machine.
Some of my fondest memories are riding the combine, and milling the corn. I would pay money to go back to that time, in that place. This job will get done. And someone very smart will sell tickets to it like a Dude Ranch.
You can purchase on Ebay a grain presser which obtains oil from soybeans, and yields a high protein cattle feed, and fuel for the combine.
I get the feeling they guy who wrote the article doesn’t have the faintest clue about wheat harvesting. Unfortunately, some of the people commenting here don’t seem to either. Being on a harvest crew is a good summer adventure for a hard-working farm kid, not a magnet for unskilled illegal aliens.
This is the way it was done, with a profit, in my day (circa 1960’s & 1970’s) We also seeded watermelons like this (1950’s) when I was in my teens - the $0.75 per hour (sun up to sun down) and board was GOOD money that lasted me through the school year. Those were the days.