Go ahead and add picking asparagus to the list.

For some, it’s the fourth straight season of labor shortages and, growers say, a crisis for the state’s second largest industry (auto manufacturing is the largest)….As the first crop that needs picking, asparagus is a bellwether. If labor is lacking, it likely will be short for every other crop through October. Too few pickers will mean farmers must transfer workers who would otherwise be planting and fertilizing, or let the harvest rot.

These jobs pay $10-14 an hour – which is more money than I ever made until I graduated college. But, it’s an awful job: long and uncertain hours. Teenagers don’t want the jobs, people on UI won’t take them because UI generally pays almost that much, for doing nothing at all. So who does the jobs that nobody wants?

Nobody. The farmers are forced to plow under the crops. Don’t complain about the poor or the unemployed, when jobs are left on the table, and don’t bring up the needy or the hungry, when government policy forces people to destroy food. And if you have a single shred of human decency, and you’re honestly concerned about the plight of those worse-off, you’d show some compassion for the people who live on two cups of dirt a day, tilling soil with grandpa’s femur – when they want to come here and provide you with affordable food.