[PaulHoule]

The story is not too different for dairy (and other) farms in Upstate New York.

Most agricultural jobs pay a few more dollars an hour than the minimum wage, but they are much harder jobs than minimum wage jobs. It is one thing to wake up early morning to milk the cows if you own the farm, it is another thing to do it for other people's cows.

I don't know about Alaska and Hawaii, but illegal aliens are a big part of the agricultural workforce throughout the lower 48.

[ABCLAW]

Has anyone here even worked a minimum wage job??

A few dollars an hour above the baseline isn't enough to compensate for the long term health and career advancement penalties you'll be taking. These are terminal career positions; they don't get better. Hauling apples and hay isn't going to get you a spot at a tractor design firm.

Pay people enough to make a decent, comfortable life and you'll have workers. The CoL/wage arbitrage between foreign and american workers is what makes these jobs work.

[AlexandrB]

> Hauling apples and hay isn't going to get you a spot at a tractor design firm.

Of course not. This is a change in required qualifications and education, not just a move up the ladder.

I don't know about agriculture jobs, but in food service your career prospects were to go from flipping burgers to managing/supervising/leading others who are flipping burgers (at increasing scale - store, regional, national, etc). While it's not as nice as any kind of engineering there is a way forward there. Of course moving up like this gets competitive because of the sheer volume of people "at the bottom" hoping to move up.

[ABCLAW]

Sure it is. You move from the person moving the hay to the person designing the hay moving systems. This would be a perfectly cogent career story for any engineer working in agriculture, and I know plenty of people who have worked in higher-margin areas of agriculture who have made the jump. (Beekeepers learning biochemistry and getting jobs working as Honey Q/A scientists, chefs jumping into food research and development positions, farm owners pivoting to seed banking/specific organism sales, etc.)

The fact that you can't generate enough economic surplus to fund studies to acquire the additional mechanical engineering study in a manner competitive with other mechanical engineering students is why you view the path as untenable. Hence why these positions are desperation tier end-of-the-line jobs and why the CoL/Wage arbitrage is required to keep them staffed.

Similarly, people engaged in agricultural studies generally don't come out of the 'harvest labour' workforce.

Working on a farm is a transaction with a specific expected ROI. If the ROI sucks in comparison to other mutually exclusive exchanges, why would you do it?

[PaulHoule]

Funny enough, many Mexicans who come to work in the U.S. plan to earn enough money to start their own farm back home.

There are quite a few young people who would like to own a farm, often not farmer's kids. It would be almost impossible to "make it" as a farmer without getting experience in the biz in one form or another.

[Animats]

Milking is becoming automated.[1] Milking robots are production, not experimental technology, with at least four manufacturers. This video is amusing, showing the cow's view of meeting robotic milking for the first time.

Milk cows want to be milked, to relieve the pressure. So, given the freedom to use the robotic milkers any time they want, they get milked about three times a day. Milk production increases a bit. The cows are tagged and monitored, so any cow with a problem is quickly flagged.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_Q1LoxK5mE

[eric_the_read]

Those are very expensive, and really only suitable for massive dairy operations. My wife worked her way through college at a small (~300 head) dairy, and there's no way they could have afforded one of those setups.