Yeah but you still need people to do it and paying a bit better is not going to get an immediate response of many tens of thousands of workers to quit their jobs to do seasonal and migratory work across multiple states living out of vans and campers with no insurance and increased workload and injury rate. Many crops are just going to rot, output will be lower, and prices will still rise. At some point years down the line sure things might improve and settle out and more US people can fill a larger number of those roles, but it will not happen quickly, especially not for token wage increases, and will likely never gain the workforce numbers that migratory farm workers offer who travel not just across the US but also throughout Central and South America. A US citizen is never going to work in Mexico or Brazil during off seasons for US crops because it basically represents a net-zero or negative wage converting it back into US currency to come live back here.
Ive done farm and trade work my whole life, physical work is not a problem, but even if you doubled the pay for picking tomatoes and other fruits and lettuces, I would not consider for a second joining that workforce even if I was otherwise homeless. Im not even sure being a row crop farmer that doesn't even need extra labor is worth the effort. Farms are getting the least and smallest margins by far for food production out of anybody in the food logistics supply line and there is no potential windfall for workers and no career path to work up from picking fruits.
Would I like people picking fruit to earn more money and have stables lives and not have to migrate across the country living in vans? Of course, 100%. But without a huge overhaul of our economic priorities and policies towards worker rights and wages, which is the exact opposite direction from where we have been heading the last 60+ years, none of that is going to change regardless of what prices people are willing to pay for food. The base of the agricultural market of farms and the workers directly harvesting food is and has been running on thinner margins than pretty much any other industry in existence. A 2% return on a farmer's seed and fuel and fertilizer inputs is considered a great success.
We can quadruple the farm worker day rate and it would not significantly impact consumer prices. The floor price of unskilled labor is mostly a function of its market value. Increasing the labor pool via immigration decreases the value of the labor.
I too would like to see farm laborers have more comfortable lives
I believe it will effect prices far more than you think it would, or likely should, because all the middlemen between farm and the person actually eating it are not going to just accept lower margins themselves if prices rise, and they some might even demand higher margins on food because they know it is in short supply and there won't be enough available for new competitors to jump in and try to undercut them. The redistributor, the processor, the packager, and the retailer side are not going to accept flat profits with lower margin percentages when they have a supply during an overall shortage of those same goods.
If farm laborer wages just went up and nothing else changed, it would probably be fine. If wages could stay the same but there was a small decrease in productivity from less experienced workers filling in, it would probably be fine too. But if the lack of workers is what is causing both production shortages and sharp labor cost increases at the same time, the only people with any power to wield in this situation are the large corporate middlemen who hold tons of supply contracts with legally binding guarantees for product and an entire logistical network developed over decades to transport and sell these goods that can't just be spun up in a few weeks by other people.
Directly yes but there are knock on effects. What you say is true only when labor is not scarce.
The consequences of having insufficient labor is a large price factor. If you can only harvest 30% of your crop and the rest rots in the field because there's no one to pick it, that is outsized.
