I was in Georgia when they enacted the Live scan law. Let me tell you how it went down. Farmers, as in individual/family farms that weren’t owned by large corps, didn’t have the liquidity to pay more for labor. Those small/medium farms went on the news and begged for people to come and work, talking about how they had stuff rotting on the vine and how most folks wouldn’t even finish out their first day. Mid size farmers aren’t exactly poor, but most businesses don’t survive just not having labor and not turning revenue, and by the end of that first growing season, a whole lot of small and mid-size farms ended up selling the farm to large corps or else just outright shutting down.

There is practically zero chance that the farm industry will start paying living wages overnight. They might could do it, given time, oversight, direction, and aid (there’s A LOT of downward pressure on the prices farms sell at), but it’s just not going to happen in one growing season. Realistically, this could be real, real, real bad. The central valley has a huge ag industry, and we grow a LOT of non-grain crops (except corn) for the rest of the country and the world. There’s some crops, like Pistachios, where the central valley is one of two places in the whole world where there’s meaningful agricultural operations for them. We also produce a lot of the good eating oranges (have you ever eaten a Florida Valencia Orange? They taste like eating pure sour armpit, there’s a reason they make them into juice) and other citrus. So, not only are we going to see food shortages (and some pretty specific food supply shortages for the rest of the world), but probably a lot of the farms around here are going to end up being corporate owned, leaving everyone here poorer and worse off than they were before.