A reader writes in response to my farm-worker post:

I run a family owned agribusiness that is in Indiana from my home in Texas. It’s not huge, just 750+ acres of land inherited by my mom from my grandfather. Two brothers farm the land, and we have a 50/50 split crop share lease. Ours is not the only land those brothers farm though, as the total they work is about 2K acres… just the two of them with some computer bookkeeping help from one of their sons.
Back in my grandfather’s youth, he could only work his eighty acres because he started out with a small Ford tractor. He also hired several men seasonally to help him bring the crops in and get them to market. As the technology improved, grandfather switched to John Deere tractors and combines &c. and bought more and more farms to work. He also needed less and less men to help him as time went on.
Granted, we grow corn and soy – crops that lend themselves to mechanized harvesting easily – but where there is an economic incentive, technology exists that can be applied to just about any crop, but with cheap and often illegal labor available, there is no incentive. It amazes me that people actually want to maintain this status quo of having illegals do backbreaking and often dangerous labor, but that’s why it’s called shortsightedness I guess.
If our borders were secured and laborers were checked for legality, those machines in your post would be everywhere they were needed lickety split.
Perhaps they don’t teach anything about Eli Whitney and the cotton gin in schools anymore.

And this from a reader whose father invented a cotton-harvesting machine:

My late father used to joke that if he had a dollar for everyone who had told him it wasn’t possible to produce a fully mechanized bale of cotton, he’d have been rich. My father managed the feat half a century ago.
So long as there is cheap labor, farmers aren’t going to fork over $60K for a machine….

If all the farmhands, black and white, who left the cotton fields and moved to Detroit and Pittsburgh had been replaced by foreign labor, they’d still be picking cotton by hand.