agriculture definition

The New York Times   reported today about the consequences of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) for the cost of farm labor and, in turn, the cost of food.  Sarah Varney's story is set in California, where farm laborers are typically employed year round rather than seasonally, as the case in many other places.  (Another post about year-round ag workers is here ).  This means farm labor contractors cannot easily put the "workers on a 28-hour workweek like Starbucks, Denny's and Walmart are considering" doing to avoid the ACA mandate.  It also means that the contractors, who operate on very small margins--around 2%--will have to raise the prices they charge farms, which will in turn push up food prices. Varney writes:   Insurance brokers and health providers familiar with California's $43.5 billion agricultural industry estimate that meeting the law's minimum health plan requirement will cost about $1 per hour employee worked in the field.    ...

This Mark Bittman story  in the annual  NYT Magazine  food and drink issue appeared last month under several headlines: Heavenly Food California's Central Valley:  Land of a Million Vegetables Everyone Eats There It is this last headline that has stuck with me--and continued to agitate me.  This is because I find the headline misleading or--perhaps more precisely--because it tells only part of the story.  Bittman's piece is an homage, of sorts, to California's Central Valley, which produces more than a third of the produce grown in the United States.  Bittman writes: The valley became widely known in the 1920s and 1930s, when farmers arrived from Virginia or Armenia or Italy or (like Tom Joad) Oklahoma and wrote home about the clean air, plentiful water and cheap land. ... Unlike the Midwest, which concentrates (devastatingly) on corn and soybeans, more than 230 crops are grown in the valley, including those indigenous to South Asia, Southeast Asia and...