Farm Labor Flying To Uk For Harvesting

Not sure this is a good idea, (1) There are plenty of unemployed in the U.K. that could be employed to harvest the food. (2) I don't think bringing in foreign labor is a good idea due to health concerns, what are the medical screening procedure? (3) The U.K. needs to fix their harvesting problem, without relying on foreign works, same as the U.S.A. needs to solve this problem.

 

there has been a huge amount of British people volunteering to help on farms following being laid off from their normal employment during the crisis, quite surprising as most people don't want to get their hands dirty, but we live in strange times.

 

Governments can train the people to harvest food or it can build the machines needed to harvest food. What they cannot or at least should not do is rely on foreign people to come harvest the food. Governments can subsidize the local manufacture of food harvesting machines, so that even small family farms can form co-0ps groups and not need to depend on farm hands.When the majority of the people move away from farming, then the machines need to come and fill the labor gap.

 

that's the problem with modern farming especially here it depends on large machines and imported fertilisers and pesticides, farm wages are very low for a manual worker but some crops cannot be harvested by machine but need humans to cut and process the harvest by hand, usually fruit and vegetables.

 

there are 30,000 British people who have signed up to the new "land army", trouble is they reckon we need more like 80,000 to do it properly.

 

Land can be terraced. Mountains can be made into mole hills, if that is what it takes to make a countries population self sustaining. Importing labor is like our current global economy, weak. Machine can solve the agricultural harvesting problem. Can it be done, absolutely. Will if be done, not until the food runs short and the labor can't be imported. If a human can harvest it, a machine can be built to perform the same task. Look at auto assembly lines. If the need is great enough or the desire is great enough, man can design and build the equipment needed to harvest just about any crop.

 

I think a lot of vegetables and even some fruit can be harvested by machine, I don't think that is the problem, its the selection of the crop and the packing-sometimes out in the field- that needs human hands, supermarkets are very picky and everything has to be of uniform size, anything over or under sized is discarded, silly I know but supermarkets have the upper hand as regards to buying power.