Produce will have trouble being picked because farms frequently rely on temporary immigrant workers, and the necessary immigration is banned. This is already happening in Europe, and seems likely to affect the US shortly. Even if it were not, migrant worker conditions seem pretty rife for disease transfer, so I’d expect a big hit to productivity even if they did show up.
Long term I expect this to shift consumption to things that require less human touch in harvesting, like grains and legumes.
ETA: Apparently Canada thought to exempt migrant farmworkers from the travel ban, but with air travel shut down is having much the same problem.
ETA 4/2: This paper words things in a confusing way, but: in 1997, 75-80% of vegetable-acres and 55-60% of fruits-acres grew a type of produce that has at least a 50% chance of being harvested mechanically. That’s helpful for knowing what could be mechanically harvested in a labor shortage, but I assume it’s too late for farmers to change plans this year. So the actual range (in 1997) was somewhere between 37.5-80% and 37.5-60% of vegetables and fruits, respectively, and has presumably gone up since.
Reasons this number could be wrong:
Mechanization likely to have increased in the last 20 years
Mechanical harvesting doesn’t actually mean zero labor, someone has to run the machine.
It’s likely that some amount of labor will be found, one way or another
My conclusion is that in the US, if labor shortage is the only problem this year variety will fall, prices will rise, and there will be more emphasis on processed produce, but it’s not likely to be a crisis.
Produce will have trouble being picked because farms frequently rely on temporary immigrant workers, and the necessary immigration is banned. This is already happening in Europe, and seems likely to affect the US shortly. Even if it were not, migrant worker conditions seem pretty rife for disease transfer, so I’d expect a big hit to productivity even if they did show up.
Long term I expect this to shift consumption to things that require less human touch in harvesting, like grains and legumes.
ETA: Apparently Canada thought to exempt migrant farmworkers from the travel ban, but with air travel shut down is having much the same problem.
ETA 4/2: This paper words things in a confusing way, but: in 1997, 75-80% of vegetable-acres and 55-60% of fruits-acres grew a type of produce that has at least a 50% chance of being harvested mechanically. That’s helpful for knowing what could be mechanically harvested in a labor shortage, but I assume it’s too late for farmers to change plans this year. So the actual range (in 1997) was somewhere between 37.5-80% and 37.5-60% of vegetables and fruits, respectively, and has presumably gone up since.
Reasons this number could be wrong:
Mechanization likely to have increased in the last 20 years
Mechanical harvesting doesn’t actually mean zero labor, someone has to run the machine.
It’s likely that some amount of labor will be found, one way or another
My conclusion is that in the US, if labor shortage is the only problem this year variety will fall, prices will rise, and there will be more emphasis on processed produce, but it’s not likely to be a crisis.