The fields didn’t used to be quiet

In California, dawn once came with headlights rolling down dirt roads, boots crunching gravel, hands wrapping around thermoses before wrapping around tools. The work was never easy, never glamorous but it was honest, and it fed a nation. Strawberries, lettuce, grapes, cattle feed entire communities were built on the rhythm of showing up.

Now the fields wait.

The problem everyone argues about immigration, borders, enforcement is only part of the truth. The deeper problem sits closer to home, and most people don’t want to say it out loud: once immigrant workers gain citizenship or stability, they often leave farm labor behind. And almost no American-born workers are stepping in to replace them.

Not because the work disappeared.
Not because food stopped mattering.
But because the willingness to do the work did.

Farm labor has become the job everyone depends on and almost no one wants.

Business owners try. They post listings. They raise wages. They offer training. They give chances. And still, too often, workers don’t show up or don’t show up sober, or healthy enough, or ready to work safely. The cost of mistakes isn’t theoretical on a farm. One bad decision can injure someone, kill livestock, ruin a harvest, or shut down a small operation entirely.

Margins are already thin. Regulations grow thicker every year. Insurance climbs. Compliance piles on. And then comes the expectation that farms should absorb endless labor instability while feeding everyone else at prices consumers demand stay low.

That math doesn’t work.

Yes, America has an immigration problem. There are people here illegally, and the system cannot ignore that forever. But there is another truth running alongside it: the legal immigration system is so broken, so slow, so expensive, and so driven by money and bureaucracy that people who genuinely want to work are locked out or trapped in years of limbo.

If someone wants to come to this country to work, to contribute, to feed families including their own why is it this hard? Why is enforcement loud, but reform quiet? Why do we argue in the streets about ICE while immigration offices drown under backlogs and understaffing?

If we don’t have farm labor, how exactly are we supposed to continue?

Food doesn’t grow in grocery stores.
It doesn’t harvest itself.
And it doesn’t care about political slogans.

Meanwhile, entire generations are growing up without ever holding a job. Fifteen-, sixteen-, seventeen-year-olds with everything paid for, but no work experience. Twenty-year-olds who have never read a paycheck, never filed taxes, never learned what it means to be accountable to something bigger than themselves.

This isn’t just a labor problem.
It’s a cultural one.

We subsidize comfort but neglect responsibility. We fund systems that soften the consequences of not working while small businesses are told to “just figure it out.” Communities protest symptoms instead of demanding solutions. Schools graduate students who can analyze systems but can’t participate in them.

The dirt has become something to avoid instead of something to respect.

Farming has always been hard. It was never meant to be easy. But it was once understood that work real work builds people, communities, and countries. Somewhere along the way, we stopped asking citizens to contribute and started arguing endlessly over who should.

The fields are still here.
The work is still here.
The need is still here.

The question is whether we are willing to fix a broken immigration system and a broken relationship with work itself or whether we’ll keep pretending food appears by magic, until one day it doesn’t.