Income and Wealth
In the photograph shown here, taken during the 1960s or ‘70s, its subject matter looks self-explanatory: we’re in a fruit orchard at harvest time; a farmworker is climbing a ladder to pick apples, which are being collected in a wooden bin in the foreground. From a New York farmer’s perspective, however, there are many other complicated questions: What’s the market price for apples, and specifically this variety of apple? How much will it cost to hire apple-pickers, pay for farm machinery, pesticides, and taxes—does the income from apples amount to more? Is it “worth” holding on to ownership of the land and orchard, even if the income is less than the costs?
The economic distinction between income and wealth is important for understanding these questions, and by extension a farmer’s relationship with hired farmworkers. Income is the amount of money a person receives over a given period of time; wealth is the amount of accumulated money at any given point in time. Hired laborers like the apple-picker shown here receive virtually all of their income as wages, which historically have been so low that they cannot save any to accumulate as wealth. Farmers, by contrast, receive most of their income from the sale of agricultural commodities, which have been produced by their own labor and that of hired farmworkers. Because of their wealth—land, water rights, machinery, apple trees—they are able to hire labor. As a chart from the US Dept. of Agriculture shows, whether farm households are above or even below the median income, they possess more wealth than most Americans.
The Genesee Farmer was written for (relatively) wealthy men, but sometimes the issue of farmworker income erupted. In 1845, a Quaker farmer and abolitionist named Samuel Myers wrote a letter to the editor hoping that the newspaper would “continue to discuss the rights of labor. They are not sufficiently understood. Well-directed labor creates all that is called wealth; consequently, if wealth is desirable, labor ought to have its share.” The farm laborer “in fact supports society—he pays the taxes for the support of the government.” Myers was therefore outraged that laborer taxes should fund schools that were “not free for all—the poor as well as the rich,” and access to which would “maintain that equality among his fellow-men which is the birthright of his being (115). Significantly, the newspaper’s editor generalized “keeping the products of our daily labor” to also include farmers, who likewise were being victimized by brokers skilled in “getting a good deal, and giving little or nothing for it, at somebody’s expense” (“Remarks” 115-116). What this analogy willfully overlooked was the dimension of wealth. If, as the newspaper asserted later that year, “the merchant sometimes makes more money in one year than [the farmer] can in a lifetime,” it was primarily a difference between the rapid and slow “accumulation of wealth” (“Sketch” 150). By contrast, laborers lived on their income alone.
Rain falls on the heads of both farmworkers and farmers, but because the latter own apple trees it becomes a source of wealth. How does that impact the negotiations for wages, the two groups’ daily interactions even when working alongside each other?
Works Consulted
-- Myers, Samuel. Letter to the Editor. The Genesee Farmer 6.8 (Aug. 1845): 115. Courtesy of Internet Archive
-- “Remarks.” The Genesee Farmer 6.8 (Aug. 1845): 115-116. Courtesy of Internet Archive
-- “Sketch of Josiah Quincy’s Address.” The Genesee Farmer 6.10 (Oct. 1845): 150-151 Courtesy of Internet Archive
-- U.S. Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service. Farm Household Well-being: Income and Wealth in Context, December 1, 2022. Link to Article