Quote:There are owner operators such as people in my family who farm a small farm such as 160 acres...My Grandfather had just that and worked it until he was 86 years old...He milked cows twice a day every day, grew corn,alfalfa, and wheat, and raised beef and hogs for sale...I don't consider that to be a "hobby farm" and I'm not really sure what a "hobby farm" is...Not every farm is thousands of acres...There are thousands of farms with full time farmers making a good living with small acreages...

Are we throwing out farming credentials here? I can assure you mine are pretty top notch.


  

Quote:sub minimum wage is common in all farms...a lot of the pay is similiar to piece work...for so many bushels of potatoes you get $X for so many hay bales bucked, you get $X for so many beets thinned/dug/harvested you get $X...An hourly wage isn't allways what workers work for...Cutting hay will net you $X, per acre, picking peaches will net you $X per bushel...Now if you were to work for say Del Monte, or some HUGE international company which there are darn few of, you may get an hourly wage for every aspect, but it's doubtful...Most farm workers are considered to be independant contractors and get paid by the job at hand...The farmer will pay you $X to plow 100 acres...etc...

I know how it works but what your describing is not a "sub-minimum wage." I pay my crew $.28 a vine to prune. Is that sub minimum wage?


The workers can do roughly 2 acres a day @454 vines per acre. 2 X 454 X .28 = $254.24 a day. That's hardly what I'd consider sub minimum wage.


Workers are rarely paid cash under the table. If you hire you're own workers you have to provide them proper safety training, which isn't very effective if you're employing seasonally or for a specific task. For something like that, it's much much more common to hire a licensed labor contractor, who keeps trained and licensed workers for a 33% surcharge. These guys are definitely NOT getting paid under the table.


Lastly, the farmer has a very limited amount of control over the price of his individual crop. I belong to two different co-ops that I trust to get me the best price, but it's not as if I can go in there and say I had to hire x amount of extra work this year, so I need $100 more per ton of grapes. It just doesn't work like that.


If you go it alone, the vast majority of the time you sign a pricing contract well before your crop is ready and you costs are fixed. If you have some unexpected cost arise, you sales contract was most likely signed months prior and it's not changing.

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