As if farmers didn’t have enough to worry about, between floods and droughts and rising prices for fertilizer and fuel, now many farmers are reporting having severe difficulties in finding enough workers to bring in the crops. One small operator in upstate New York is trying to get twenty pickers in for his strawberry crop; to date, he hasn’t been able to recruit any.

It’s not a local problem. The state of California is estimating that it will lose 30 percent of its total crop yield this year because of a lack of farm labor, and reports from other agricultural states aren’t any more optimistic. What’s going on?

There are a few complicating factors, but the basic cause appears to be pretty clear: farm workers from Mexico are not coming across the border in the numbers that have been seen in previous years. Anti-illegal immigration sentiment is one cause; tightened border control is another. And unfortunately, native born labor is not stepping in to fill the gap. Farm work, especially picking, is hard, dirty labor – and most Americans just don’t seem to be willing to do it at the market wage rates. Part of that problem is, paradoxically enough, the result of a uniquely American success: back in the 1950s, about one American in ten graduated from college. Now about six in ten do – and college-educated people are generally not in the agricultural labor marketplace. On the tractor, yes – bent over picking vegetables, no.

Most advocates of strong border policies have also urged that seasonal laborers from our southern neighbor be permitted to make their traditional yearly journeys in a legal and controlled fashion. Unfortunately Congress has been slow to make the necessary changes. One analyst estimates that the demand for “unskilled” labor visas is around 485,000 per year, but Congress allocates only 5,000. In addition, the legal immigration process is Byzantine in its complexity – it’s difficult enough for a physician or an engineer to jump through all the hoops. Fruit pickers with a sixth-grade education? Forget about it.

Nobody wants uncontrolled immigration across our southern border, not even farmers in desperate straits for manual laborers. At the same time, most people want to see farmers able to get their crops in and do not want to food prices rise due to shortages. Until the government can get its act together and provide for the ability of labor to move across the border to where the jobs are, farmers are having to seek out alternatives. One major alternative on the horizon: increased use of robotics.

Robotic harvesting is different from mechanized harvesting. Mechanized harvesting is simply the use of machines to augment the labor of the workers. For example, a strawberry field might have a wheeled conveyor belt that fits between rows, so that workers can just place their filled box of fruit on the belt rather than having to walk it all the way back to the edge of the field or to a central collection point. But a robotic fruit harvester would do all of the work – leaving no role for unskilled labor at all. That would increase the reliability factor and allow farmers to know they had their “labor” in place for harvest, but would also require major changes in the way horticulture is practiced. It would also devastate many farming communities, where seasonal labor is a way of life for people. The sad fact is there are no easy answers here.