[lettergram]

Having been all over the country it’s amazing to me how different Wyoming and say Tennessee are.

The people in Tennessee already had to deal with the federal government implementing policies destroying the domestic tobacco industry. Btw this just means foreign farmers reap the profits. The federal government made the input costs to tobacco prohibitively expensive through taxes and regulations.

They then converted mostly to grass fed cattle farms. Now there are multiple aspects that make it difficult to be profitable.

It’s really painful to watch.

2008 also had a pretty large impact for farmers losing their farms, followed bu drugs, increased taxes, etc make it pretty difficult. All the farmers complain around me about “getting good help”.

[JoeAltmaier]

Destroying tobacco? Wasn't $2B subsidies over the last decade, enough to keep it going?

[AnthonyMouse]

The government is fully capable of doing two dumb things at the same time.

[lotsofpulp]

> All the farmers complain around me about “getting good help”.

I assume this is due to the low pay to quality of life ratio offered by farming jobs.

[lettergram]

Getting people drug addicted removes potential help and illegal immigration drives down prices

[dodobirdlord]

If illegal immigration was driving the cost of help down, would they be complaining of a lack of laborers to hire? Someone must be hiring all of these illegal immigrants if their presence is suppressing wages in an industry…

[aksss]

There's no minimum wage for illegal immigrants. The higher minimum wage gets, the more incentive there is to draw upon illegal labor markets, particularly the more plentiful the illegal labor units become.

[User23]

Rural birth rates plummeted so there are fewer potential workers. Add to that the methamphetamine and opioid epidemics and the pool of potential domestic farm workers is tiny. The ones that do the work are the ones that love the lifestyle.

That means that even small farmers lean hard on H-2B to pick up the slack. Interestingly those wages are actually pretty competitive: around $12 an hour plus room and board.