By Gene Hall

Agriculture’s shortage of labor is two things: a potentially devastating crisis for our home-grown food supply, and an opportunity to compromise post-election.

There I go again with that ugly “C word.” I can hear now all the spines snapping into rigidity as folks prepare to enforce their own version of ideological purity. 

Agricultural labor is all tangled up in the issue of immigration. Seldom has there been a more important issue that people absolutely refuse to be reasonable about. I ran in this space last week an excellent description of the agricultural labor crisis from American Farm Bureau Federation President Bob Stallman. If we don’t find a way to get agricultural workers into the fields, dairy barns and livestock operations, crops and livestock will be grown in countries where there are workers.