[entee]

I'm wondering if higher wages would end up happening in practice. It's entirely possible that if labor costs go up here, it will make produce farmed elsewhere (Mexico, Central America, even overseas) more price competitive. I think trade is more likely to occur before automation. Harvesting many things is quite difficult from a robotics standpoint, every fruit/vegetable is slightly different and requires rather fine grained feedback systems to ensure you don't bruise the thing. Not impossible, but not easy/cheap.

It's also hard to recruit workers to a gig that's temporary and seasonal. That can maybe be made up for in wages though.

I'm also curious about where the labor is required. Corn/wheat is mostly a machine based harvest, I assume there are few migrant workers there but I don't know. Is there analysis on where migrants end up on the value chain of farm products?

Also, while there's some talk of undocumented immigrants, I think there's also a legal seasonal-labor system in the US. Trump famously uses it to staff Mar-a-lago. How many migrant farm workers are under that system?