[throwaway292893]

Looking at you California farms.

[nradov]

Strawberry picking robots are coming.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/rob.21889

[throwaway292893]

Those exploited immigrants won't hold their breath.

I'm sure those farms unwilling to pay a fair wage will start investing in those expensive machines' R&D. Then do it for all other crops.

[dehrmann]

> farms unwilling to pay a fair wage

Half the blame has to go to consumers and a lack of desire for fair-wage strawberries that cost 2x as much.

[danaris]

That would only be true if, when I went to the supermarket, there was a display of strawberries that said over it "Low Low Prices Enabled By Virtual Slavery And Other Worker Abuses!", and another display of strawberries next to it that said "Slightly Higher Prices, But Their Workers Live Well!"

You can't claim the market will resolve things when there is no meaningful opportunity for customers to "vote with their wallets". It requires not only equal access to the two products, but also full information about what the differences are.

[dehrmann]

> Slightly Higher Prices

I think it's more than slightly higher. Cherries and peaches are both stone fruit. They're grown in similar regions, and the trees are so closely related you see hybrids commonly marketed. Cherries are regularly 2x-3x the price by weight because the smaller fruit means they're more labor intensive. Raspberries are also noticeably more expensive than strawberries, and I assume it's because they're harder to pick.

These are labor-intensive produce, so labor drives the price. Staples like wheat aren't, so an extra $5 per hour for someone driving a tractor really would be "slightly higher prices."

[danaris]

That's very informative, thanks! I do not pretend to know much about the details of the economics of these things.

That said, even 2x the price for strawberries (at least around here) would only be another $3-5, depending on what size container you bought. That would still fall in the range of "slightly higher" in my book, at least in an absolute sense.

[throwaway292893]

No, the full blame goes to the near slave farms exploiting these people.

Raise the prices if you have to and tell the consumers to shove it. Chipotle just did this, farms can do it.

If you can't survive without slave labor don't survive at all.

[dehrmann]

Chipotle is big; they can do this. Most of their costs are also in store labor and rent, not food. If you're a small farmer, the distributor will pay you $x regardless of how you produce it. There's no market for strawberries picked by well-paid workers, so they don't care.

What you're saying only works if you're Driscoll's and tell farmers to pay workers more or enough consumers demand it, but I just don't see much demand for this. The most we've seen is Fairtrade chocolate, coffee, etc., but there's only limited demand for it.