Going Hungry By Choice

The mass deportation plan is going to wreck table food.

I am from the Midwest, where the average farm size has crept up from roughly 275 acres the year I began working as a farm hand to 464 today. That’s row crop country - my next door neighbors, who lived a mile down the road, farmed 1,200 acres as a husband and wife team.

The table food production in California’s Central Valley is basically industrial scale gardening. The light blue and dark green acreage all requires a lot of hands. I had never looked for this information previously, but I guess I have seen a lot of corn fields in the Sacramento valley.

If the arguably insane plan to deport the roughly twenty million undocumented workers even partly succeeds, there are roughly 6,300 square miles of trees and vines that are not going to get harvested in a timely fashion. Removing immigrants from the economy has been tried before in Alabama and Georgia. The political backlash after farmers lose their crops is intense - that is a mistake made at most once per generation.

But my sneaking suspicion is the deportation is a ploy - we won’t be able to transport them, so they’ll be held … in America’s 21st century version of slavery. I laid out my suspicions in Prognostication: Anduril Drones, Ag Slavery. If the U.S. actually does this, we absolutely deserve a grinding imperial crash and the subsequent civil war as punishment for attempting to revive the same sickness that led to our first civil war.