ol__salty

Thank you! I'm actually in support of the sustainable groundwater management act. I know a lot of farmers around the state are very nervous about how this legislation could impact their operations, but the fact of the matter is that there are a lot of people in this state and we have been overdrawing our aquifers. And while the water is easy to take out, it's not so easy to put back in. So from my perspective, we either manage it with legislation like this or we risk using it up entirely and messing up large chunks of the industry, their surrounding communities, and our environment. There are parts of the legislation which don't make a lot of sense to me, like the fact that it blankets the whole state uniformly despite the fact that groundwater is not relied upon across the whole state. Where I live in the delta for example, the water table is often as close as five feet from the surface, and virtually all of our water is drawn from the Sacramento River, not from wells. It just seems like a waste to have to do all the reporting to manage a problem we don't have.

As far as motivation goes, it's easy. Farming really gets in your blood and it's hard to stop working some days. I love solving problems, and there's almost always a problem to solve, whether it's a broken down tractor, a need to design a new piece of equipment, having to calibrate fertilizer for a field, or trying to figure out what's eating your plants. I also love that I have a job that lets me hone so many different skills, like driving a tractor as straight as I can without using gps, working on my welds, or practicing my Spanish.

The best part of the job can also be the hardest part of the job sometimes: working outside. I love it most of the time, but there are some days when it's like 105F and you need to go clean out the combine, and it's in the sun, and it's hot and dusty and itchy and it just sucks. But even then it's still worth it.

I actually don't know any Avocado growers, but based on what I've read it has to do with typical supply and demand stuff. Everyone is in love with avocados, but it takes years to establish orchards into full production so it's hard to balance the supply with the demand. Apparently it was a bad growing season this year too, so supply is down even further.

I really wanted to become a crop duster pilot as a kid, but I started to think more and more about coming back to the farm once I was in high school. No one ever pressured me into it, and my parents both cautioned me multiple times that I could make more money doing something else, and that coming back to the farm without truly wanting to be there would be worse for the business and myself than not coming back at all. But I had gone to work all the time with my dad as a kid so I knew what I was getting into, and I had also seen all the time and resources he sacrificed from his personal life into growing our farm. In a lot of ways farming truly is more of a lifestyle than just a job, and since I grew up in that environment and enjoyed it, it just felt right to continue along the same path.

We haven't really been directly impacted yet. We did have one employee who had a green card, but who had had a DUI and it turned out never went to court for it, and I guess all the anti-immigrant rhetoric made him so nervous he chose to go back to Mexico on his own.

Your question is implying that our employees are all illegal though, and I want to stress how untrue that is. I can't deny that there are large numbers of illegal immigrants within the agricultural community, but there are also a lot of immigrants here legally, or who came illegally but have since gained citizenship.

I'm torn on this because on the one hand, one of my favorite aspects of my job is the machinery I get to use and interact with. It still blows my mind that a satellite thousands of miles above the earth can drive a tractor pulling a chisel in a perfectly straight line and not disturb the drip tape buried in the field because it has sub-inch accuracy. On the other hand, I really like my coworkers and the path towards further automation is slowly closing the door on their jobs. Just like how self-checkouts are starting to make cashiers obsolete, pretty soon the role of the tractor driver will be largely obsolete. It's both fascinating and saddening.

There are a lot of raw manual labor jobs that stand to be eliminated by what I predict will be a new robotized labor force. Whether it's moving irrigation pipe or pruning grapevines, it is becoming increasingly apparent that jobs previously reserved out of a need for human dexterity are no longer safe from mechanization. It will be awesome that people don't have to do such repetitive, brain-numbing, back straining tasks anymore, but we need to be prepared to retrain a lot of people for new jobs when that time comes, and I say that regarding automation across all industries.