$25 an hour is what minimum wage should be, and they need a college degree to make that. The example 2020 farmer doesn’t even own the corporate farm, they are just employed labor.
Completely ignoring most farmers have been forced at one point or another to sell their land to giant corpo farmers and if they’re lucky they can get a poorly paid job working on their family’s old land.
Not often tho, because most is automozed these days…
OP, I’m just curious, do you know a so glen person who’s lived or worked on a farm before?
It seems we have different parameters for what is better. You seem focused on who technically owns the land regardless of what value can be had, while I’m focused on quality of life and how much of the value is enjoyed by the worker. The average salary of farmer employees in today’s America is in line with the average incomes for all households including college educated professionals. https://www.salary.com/research/salary/recruiting/farmer-salary
In the US, the average farmer salary is $47,390. The average farmer yearly salary in Russia is 31k /m rub or $4k USD /yr.
I know one of our US national pastimes is complaining about everything online, but if I had to be farmer, I know where in the world I’d rather apply for a job. And yes, that job would probably be at a mega corp, and that’s fine to me as long as I’m getting paid $47k this year with benefits and a 401k, instead of $4k with no benefits and no rights as a person.
That was about money, but I also honestly don’t understand the argument about “owning the farm”. For instance, there are tens of thousand of US employees working at Google making $200k+ /year. They don’t own Google, and I know they are fine with that arrangement. I haven’t seen one of them lament that the Alphabet corporation owns the land where their office building is located. They are all going to retire millionaires without ever owning “the means of production” or having eating a single oligarch.
In fact, our US farmer friend in the picture making $25 /hr is likely stashing away $5k+/ year in her 401k plan. The lady in the picture is slightly on the upper end of farmer income, and she will retire a millionaire too, having never owned the land.
The guy from the 1800s picture did not retire a millionaire, in case it needs to be said. He never retired, he likely never had $1000 in his bank account, which is also true for a Russian farmer today.
while I’m focused on quality of life and how much of the value is enjoyed by the worker
I grew up on a tobacco farm, which is pure manual labor.
But I’ve helped on all sorts of crops because that was the way to make money as a kid.
It still sucks, and you pulled that $25/hr out of your ass along with the ease of work.
You just have no idea what you’re talking about. Talking averages like a thousand acre and a ten acre ain’t a huge difference.
At least look at mean instead
you pulled that $25/hr out of your ass
I guess there’s no point in discussing any further if providing sources and real numbers is not enough for you. Have a nice day, comrade.
It’s the average for “farmer” and you’re saying it’s what the average person who works on a farm they don’t own…
There are so many fucking thing wrong with that, it’s just crazy you can’t think of one even after I literally just told you:
At least look at mean instead
For what you’re talking about (a farmhand) the average is $17.25
https://www.fbn.com/community/blog/how-much-to-pay-your-farmhand
But that varies wildly
In 2024, pay rates for farm employees range from $7.72 an hour as the low hourly estimate in Florida to $32.05 an hour as the high estimate in North Dakota, according to research conducted through Indeed, ZipRecruiter, and NormSM.
Another way to look at salary data is by the overall average across the United States. The average pay for a farm hand in the United States is currently $17.25 an hour, according to Indeed. This is up from 2023’s average of $16.69 an hour. The annual salary for farm hands in 2024 range from $45,862 to $81,812, according to Indeed. The average salary is $61,254, up from last year’s $59,254.
Like I said. You have no idea what you’re talking about.
Even if you think that 17.25 is high, that’s for year round farm hands, most work is seasonal and paid way less.
You foam at the mouth about how my numbers are wrong, and then you post a link that validates the numbers and even suggests they are higher:
The annual salary for farm hands in 2024 range from $45,862 to $81,812, according to Indeed. The average salary is $61,254
Perhaps you need to slow down a bit to understand averages. Some people make less than $61k, some people make more than $61k, and for the average to work that means that for some that makes less there’s got to be others that make more. According to Indeed, that range is between $46k and $82k for FARM HANDS. Not part owners or some other capitalist arrangement, farm hands according to the stats.
By your own admission, there are a good deal of farm workers out there earning a salary of $82k /year, which BTW is higher than lots of people with master’s degrees in the city.
Since you are not contributing anything to the conversation, there’s no point in me replying further.
By your own admission, there are a good deal of farm workers out there earning a salary of $82k /year
I’d ask how you got to that conclusion, but obviously there was no logic involved…
…well then i’ll contribute as a child of farmers: your data is grossly misrepresentative largely due to differing definitions of ‘farmer’…
…if we define farmers as the folks doing actual farm work - both physical labor and small-farm management, AKA family farms - you’ll find an economy governed by word-of-mouth entrepreneurship and hardscrabble side-gigs which scarcely shows up on human-resource databases like salary.com…if we define farmers as corporate-governed field-managers and operators segregated from the business management and manual labor pools, then HR databases are reasonably representative of that select class of personnel, not too different from most small-town managerial work…
…in the end, the former class is endangered and the latter a diminished and readily-exploited class, so does the distinction matter to folks struggling to survive either way?..i will say this: farms wait for no man’s schedule, government subsides come with commensurate capital debt, $25/hour comes with commensurate student debt, and secure retirement, health care, or social safety nets are far from reality for either class…
I believe this person has swallowed the YouTube garbage of trust fund babies and trad wives.
Farmers actually vote. So do the elderly. Consequently, they mould the government to better serve their needs.
Most small farms have had to sell to larger farms too. It’s like comparing a small town general store to Walmart, and saying they’re better off working at Walmart than owning their own stores.
Back in the 1800s you’d have 10 people raising 10 acres each. Now we have farms with thousands of acres where the person who owns it has never set foot on the property.
Those are the people exploiting our legislative and tax system.
I think you’re both wrong, the average American farm is $1.7 million in debt and are being pushed out by farming conglomerates.
https://time.com/5736789/small-american-farmers-debt-crisis-extinction/
Yep.
The corpo farms actually don’t want things to always be great for farming, because ariable land is a finite resource, and what small farms that are left won’t sell willingly.
So they also use their resources to fuck shit up every decade or so, hoping to kill off and canabalize a little more land that they’ll never have to sell.
There’s not enough attention being paid to this shit. Another century and they’ll have all the land and can charge whatever they want for food.
We need to start charging exponentially more tax the size of an organization, it’s the only way to give small businesses (including farms) a shot
Things fought and died for by American laborers in spite of the capital system, which would prefer to chew us alive
On one hand, it’s absolutely true that living standards have increased dramatically, and we should always fight attempts to falsely romanticize the past.
On the other hand, these improvements have very fucking little to do with capitalism except insofar as capitalism creates the conditions for labor organization to fight capitalist elites.
American capitalism is also slowly eroding these luxuries and funneling the surplus value to elites at an ever-increasing rate.
