A contracting IT job trekking between a few farms and monitoring them remotely sounds pretty great to me! And right up my alley in terms of skillsets and interests.

Has anyone thought to put these on human beings (who are not in assisted living situations) ?

I also appreciate your point about the reality of agriculture, I think too often people miss just how narrow the margins there are and why farm life has always been so financially unstable. It used to be the weather that could make or break you, and it still is, but not world commodity markets, the price of fuel and fertilizer, and trends in a number of areas can all do it as well. Add in the top-down pressure to keep prices low and bottom-up pressure to target migrants and... what a rough mix.

I suppose destroying society for profit is top of the barrel for people like you.

There is no labour shortage, there is a salary shortage. And we, as the collective global community of serfs and plebes must realize this, and call it for what it is.

There is currently a massive teacher shortage in Ireland, with something like >1800 unfilled posts and we're approaching the new school term. There is no teacher shortage, there is however an abundance of catholic-church-controlled schools with overly restrictive hiring policy, with many newly qualified teachers not really interested in becoming involved in religious things. Teachers are paid well here, but clearly not well enough for many of them to be willing to subject themselves to draconic requirements such as needing to provide catholic teachings to kids taking fucking math.

Your statement matches nothing listed in those linked articles. [3] Talks about how the dairy industry is concerned as it relies on immigrant labor. [4] only quotes an "official of the plant" who says they are against illegal immigration, a personal opinion.

[4] also amusingly paints the immigrants as tech savvy identity thieves which is laughable. Likely, it is whatever shady entity the employer uses to hire illegals allowing them to deny involvement.

Lots of websites recruiting people with RVs to come by and work the 2-3 week season. Others stay in motels or live close enough to drive.

https://www.google.com/search?q=beet+harvest+working

https://www.theunbeetableexperience.com/sugar-beet-harvest-f...

Some places have/had the schools close for the harvest season (and in others, for the start of hunting season).

Grad students will work on the problem for the ecological benefits. Then big ag will scoop it up for the profit motive.

- Because you're pulling multiple crops off a field instead of one, the value of those crops is significantly higher.

- The crop is much more resilient. The different crops will have different tolerances to drought, disease, insects, wind and other disasters that commonly affect farming.

When farmland was cheap you could increase your profits per employee by buying more land and bigger machinery. But these days farmland is expensive and farmers are concentrating more on increasing yields per acre. In my area farmers spend > 10x as much per acre on inputs like fertilizers and pesticides than they used to in the 90's.

Polyculture will be hard and expensive, but if it lets you double profit per acre, farmers will do it.

Already pretty much the case. They may have a driver as a monitor/troubleshooter but for planting and harvesting it's all optimized down to the inch with GPS guidance steering the machinery.

I mean it does, until it doesn't and you loose all your crops/soil/water.

Monocultures degrade the soil, and you need to put more and more input in to make sure grow. Because there is no ground cover between crops, wind takes away your soil. If you mess up/mistime your pesticide/herbicide input, you'll loose all your crop. The more you grow, the more the soil turns to sand, requiring more fertiliser input, which mean more costs.

If you take the yield per m2 of an allotment, and compare it to a really high quality agricultural field (ie Lincolnshire fens, or some prime land in the USA.) the allotment will have a much higher yield with less input. I don't have the figures on hand, but you'll need to turn to the bearded hippies at the henry doubleday to get precise numbers.

If, through automation, you could have three or four crops in the same field, providing cover all year round. you could then start to keep your soil, because the wind cant get at it (crop dependant). you can grow sacrificial crops for pest control, meaning less pesticide input. This means more worm, which will stop flash flooding (more water permeability without ploughing)

But all that requires high speed "pick and place" weeding/harvesting machines. Those are going to be complex and expensive until scale kicks in (think how complex tractors were, or threshing machines)