Rural morality and the left

Western Norway

Source: Wikimedia Commons (2016)

Internationalism, the idea that people and states should organize across borders, is a popular organizing principle on the political left. It takes two related forms. Liberal internationalism promotes democracy and free trade as a path to peace through multilateral governance. Socialist internationalism emphasizes solidarity among workers across nations, rather than competition between them. Both tend to replace an emphasis on local community with an abstract political identity that isn’t rooted anywhere in particular.

International governance creates a layer of authority that communities cannot meaningfully influence. The resulting cosmopolitan governing class (sometimes pejoratively referred to as “globalists”) are socially and geographically distant from communities affected by their policy. Meanwhile, international economic integration guts local economic prospects so that multinational firms can thrive.

This process spreads similar models of education and culture, eroding distinct regional identities and traditions. In the name of internationalism, many have advocated for cultivating cosmopolitan “citizens of the world.” Within this frame, local or regional culture is something to be overcome, not preserved. Is rural culture something that needs to be overcome in pursuit of a more equal society? 

French philosopher Jean-Claude Michèa offers a critique of liberalism that bears directly on this question. Until recently his work was unavailable in English. Michael Behrent, a History Professor at Appalachian State University, recently published a collection of his works titled Toward a Conservative Left. Don’t let the title put you off. What the title evokes is the way in which Michèa combines a critique of capitalism with a suspicion of progress. Michèa says little about American politics in his work, but his analysis maps uncomfortably well onto the contemporary Democratic Party, which has become a party of urban educated professionals. 

Michèa’s personal background is relevant too. He was born in 1950 in Paris, France, to parents who were members of the French communist Party, and grew up in public housing. The Party was central to his childhood. His parents were employed by the Party, with his dad working as sports reporter for the Party newspaper. It was a community of working-class people who looked out for one another. 

At the center of Michèa’s work is Orwell’s concept of “common decency,” developed in The Road to Wigan Pier.  For Orwell, common decency is the moral intuition observable in tight-knit communities built around face-to-face interaction. It is the instinct “that makes a jury award excessive damages when a rich man’s car runs over a poor man.” Michèa takes this concept further,  giving it anthropological character. Working people, because of their way of earning a living and social status, tend to exhibit a form of solidarity and spontaneous ethics. Working people rely on one another out of necessity. It is a set of habits that arise through family life, neighborhood association, and shared work. Common decency requires social relations through which people experience themselves as dependent on and responsible for one another. This social fabric, Michèa argues, is breaking down.

This maps directly with the concept of high density of acquaintanceship that is found in the rural American context. In a small agricultural community, a neighbor’s failed harvest is visible. Decency is not an abstract value, but a material reality that rural people navigate on a daily basis.  Michèa argues that modern society has removed people from the social relations that foster this common decency. 

Here is where Michèa’s argument becomes uncomfortable. He contends that economic liberalism, meaning the spreading of free markets, free trade, and global integration of markets, and cultural liberalism are not in tension at all. He believes these two liberalisms actually operate in concert. He writes, “a right-wing economy cannot function in a lasting way without a left-wing culture.” It is well documented that economic liberalism has devastated rural communities by financializing land, offshoring manufacturing, and consolidating agricultural markets. 

Cultural liberalism, for Michèa, works in parallel. It elevates individual autonomy and the right to choose one’s lifestyle over inherited social norms or traditions. Institutions that once anchored rural life: stable family, religious practice, the local community, have all been delegitimized over time in the name of individual emancipation. Rural communities are left with a social and moral vacuum at a time when economic liberalism has taken away their material foundations. For Michèa this is not a coincidence, capitalism prefers autonomous individuals without a sense of rootedness to a place and an inherited way of life. The tech worker who relocates for opportunity is a more compatible economic subject than the farmer who will not leave because his family has worked the same land for three generations. 

While Michèa’s argument is not without its blind spots, he invites the left to take working class culture seriously. To be clear, I don’t believe the left should abandon a commitment to individual freedom. However, a politics aimed toward a more just society cannot organize against rural morality. To me, this is what is intended by the provocative title. The social fabric that allows for the cultivation of common decency is worth conserving.

Senators call for investigation into the state of rural child care

Head Start offices in Toledo, WA.
Photo by Joe Mabel, distributed under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license.

On January 26, six senators led by Elizabeth Warren and Raphael Warnock announced an investigation into how the Trump administration's child care policies affect rural families. The letter, addressed to Todd Lindsey, Acting Under Secretary for Rural Development at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and Alex Adams, Assistant Secretary for the Administration for Children and Families, requests "information regarding ACF and USDA's current capacity to support child care, particularly in rural communities." The senators highlight the national child care crisis, emphasizing the high costs and lack of access many families face. 

Child Care Funding in Rural Areas

This letter follows a January 6, 2026, attempt to freeze federal funding for child care and family assistance in five states due to fraud allegations. Courts restored the funding by January 9th, allowing child care centers to continue receiving support. The freeze temporarily affected the Child Care Development Fund Block Grant, which helps make child care more affordable, as well as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families.

The letter also follows H.R. 1 (the "One Big Beautiful Bill"), which you can read more about here. The bill expanded the Child Tax Credit and increased the amount that employees can set aside pre-tax for child care. These changes mostly benefit middle- and upper-income families. On February 3, 2026, the House passed a new spending package, and President Trump signed it. That bill increased the Child Care Development Block Grant and Head Start by $85 million each. 

Head Start provides critical resources to children up to five years old. Its programs include providing breakfast and lunch, mental health care, and school readiness. Almost half of all Head Start slots are in rural districts. In a survey of 10 states, Head Start programs comprised about one-third of child care centers in rural communities. This program supports children and families. Expanding Head Start has drawn bipartisan support, and  78% of rural Americans support it. 

The Rural Child Care Gap 

The senators cited a September 2025 poll by the First Five Years Fund, which found that rural families experience child care challenges across the board. 

Overall, 4 out of 5 Rural Americans say the ability of working parents to find and afford quality child care is either in a “state of crisis” or “a major problem,” including 81% of Rural Parents and 80% of Rural Nonparents.

Further, one in five rural parents report having trouble finding or keeping a job because of the cost or access to child care.  

Data collected by the Buffett Early Childhood Institute at the University of Nebraska further illustrates the gap. 31.5 percent of children in rural areas who may need access to child care do not have access to a child care facility within 10 miles of their home. This data assumes that parents drive. However, approximately six percent of rural households do not have a car. Lack of access to transportation can make finding child care even more difficult in rural areas, especially when transporting multiple children. 

Kickapoo Community Childcare Center in Lincoln County, OK. Photo by Rebecca South, distributed under a CC-BY 4.0 license. 

Effect on Families

The lack of access and high costs of child care drive parents out of the workforce. A 2021 Bipartisan Policy Center survey found that 86 percent of parents in rural areas who do not work cited child care responsibilities as a reason they stay at home. Child care centers face significant economic difficulties, driven by high turnover rates and low wages. Closures have led to parents, often mothers, leaving the workforce at higher rates than ever over the last two years. 

These funds also provide child care to parents pursuing higher education. Congress did not reauthorize the Child Care Access Means Parents in Schools, pausing the program. Programs at rural colleges make child care affordable for student parents and provide other support to help them pursue higher education. 

One administrator at UW-Whitewater said she expects that this will make it more difficult for student parents to graduate. Cutting this program means parents will either need to work while pursuing their degree or leave their program to stay home with their child. 

The Future of Rural Child Care

Recent legislation surrounding rural children and families has proven to be a mixed bag. While bolstering Head Start programs might expand child care resources in rural areas, other funding cuts could undermine those gains. This administration has shown its willingness to use child care funding as a political football. ACF and the USDA, which work together on child care in rural communities, have had their funding withheld, field offices closed, and major workforce reductions. 

The senators concluded their letter with six questions about the future of rural child care, with a response requested by February 16, 2026. As of today, ACF and USDA have not issued a response. Their response will inform the future of the debate around child care funding in rural communities through the rest of the Trump Administration. 

Truancy laws: bad for rural students and their schools

Coleville, CA

(c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2024

All states have passed compulsory attendance laws requiring that students in a certain age range attend school, with varying exceptions by state. But, nearly one in four students are chronically absent.

Students and their parents can face penalties for truancy. Some states take a punitive approach to truancy, allowing referrals to juvenile court for truant students and imposition of criminal charges  parents that can result in hefty fines and even jail time. 

For example, a 2024 Kentucky law required that a school refer a student to the County Attorney for "formal court action" if a student accumulates 15 or more unexcused absences. Until Governor Newsom repealed the policy in October of 2025, California's truancy laws allowed parents to be fined up to $2,000 or up to a year in jail if their child was chronically truant (missed 10% of the school year). In Merced County in 2017, 10 parents were charged with a misdemeanor for their children's absences. 

Despite a recent shift away from punitive truancy policies, 20 states still require schools to alert courts if a student is truant.

Greenville, CA

(c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2012

Rural communities are especially susceptible to truancy. The National Rural Education Association found that "[n]early one in seven rural students experiences poverty, one in 15 lacks health insurance, and one in 10 has changed residence in the previous 12 months." Schools with greater populations of students in poverty are three times as likely to be chronically absent. Additionally, the spatial isolation of rural areas means that rural students travel farther to get to school and may have a more difficult time accessing transportation. The transportation issue, along with limited funding, also means that rural schools have less access extracurriculars, leading to students being less engaged in their school community. The lack of opportunities is not a new problem; this blog post from 2014 discusses the struggles related to school involvement in rural areas.

Truancy laws are ineffective

Truancy laws are ineffective at decreasing school absence because they do not address the underlying reasons why students are absent in the first place. 

For example, in an article by the New York Times on homelessness in rural areas, author Samantha Shapiro explained a crucial paradox: 

Students who do not have a stable place to live are unable to attend school regularly, and failing to graduate from high school is the single greatest risk factor for future homelessness.

This is just one example of how truancy laws fail to address the problem, and instead act punitively. As expressed by California Assembly Member Patrick Ahrens, the sponsor of California's bill repealing criminal fines and jail times, "[f]ining or imprisoning parents did nothing to get kids the education and support they need."

Truancy compounds on the issue of rural school funding in states where school funding is directly tied to attendance. While not the majority, six states use average daily attendance (ADA) to determine a student count for funding allocations, including California, Texas, Idaho, Kentucky, Mississippi, and Missouri. Using ADA results in districts with higher rates of chronic absences receiving less funding, making it even more difficult to address truancy issues. 

Better solutions to chronic absences

While punitive policies are ineffective, one study found that truancy decreased by 5% with the sending of simple, periodic, personalized messages to parents about their child's attendance. These messages used templates that automatically pulled information about a student, including their name, absences, and goals for decreasing absences which could be sent to parents to keep them better informed. 

Data systems, such as Iowa's, catch absentee patterns early and allow schools to intervene earlier are more effective. Instead of punishment, prevention should be the focus of school policies to decrease truancy.

Rural news, late notice: the mail lag that quietly taxes rural life

American Samoa Post Office (2021) - Pago Pago, AS; Credit: Talanei News 

Without a post office in one’s community, one must resort to traveling farther and farther away in order to have access to this necessary element.

That quote was from a 2011 blog post about post offices as community lifelines. It, along with many other posts on threatened post office closures in 2011 and 2012, highlights a rural baseline: when infrastructure is limited, distance becomes a cost paid in time, fuel, and coordination. In 2026, however, the issue seems less about whether a post office exists and more about the timeliness of mail delivery. The issue of slow mail delivery in rural America is partly caused by public policy.

In 2025, the Postal Regulatory Commission (“Commission”) outlined nationwide changes by the United States Postal Service (“U.S.P.S.”) under its “Delivering for America” plan. The plan was introduced shortly after the Trump Administration called for privatizing the U.S.P.S. While it claims the plan is essential for financial stability, critics argue that the Delivering for America plan more resembles a "march to privatize the U.S. mail." Particularly relevant to rural America under this plan is a concept called Regional Transportation Optimization (“RTO”). The Commission explained:

Under RTO, mail dropped off at Post Offices and collection boxes more than 50 miles from a regional hub is collected the next day instead of the same day.

The Commission warned that rural communities would face disproportionate negative impacts. That is, some mail originating in rural areas enters the U.S.P.S. system later than mail from locations closer to processing centers. Hence, rural areas are more likely to experience the additional day and any subsequent delays. Reports from journalists like Sophie Culpepper help illustrate what that extra day looks like in practice for rural communities.

In her 2026 Neiman Lab Report, Culpepper described community newspapers facing mail delays that arrive late, go missing, or show up in batches. She interviewed publishers in Maine, Michigan, South Dakota, and Virginia, all of whom reported a significant increase in complaints about U.S.P.S. delays last summer. 

In Maine, the Midcoast Villager – which serves Knox and Waldo counties – is the primary or only local news source for roughly 80,000 residents. Publishers told Culpepper that they have little visibility into, or control over, U.S.P.S.’s delivery timelines:

When we’re fighting against something that we really have no control over, that’s terribly frustrating…because I can’t afford to lose a subscriber, let alone many.

Rural Post Office (2024) - Salvo, NC
Credit: Wikimedia Commons Contributors

For a weekly newspaper, punctuality is essential. Culpepper directly linked mail delays to rural livelihoods because local advertising relies on timely delivery. From community announcements like auctions and open houses to business inquiries like invitations to local project bids, if the newspaper is late, rural residents not only miss the news; they lose the opportunity to act while it still matters. 

Newspaper delivery is just one issue where mail speed influences rural life. A similar issue arises in the business context. In a 2026 interview with the Federal News Network, Elena Patel described the U.S.P.S. more as a rural economic platform than as a news pipeline. 

Patel, a Brookings senior fellow and co-director of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, argued that judging the U.S.P.S. mainly by profitability misses the role the postal service plays in rural economies. Patel pointed out that private carriers can impose geography-based surcharges of up to $20 per package, costs that can wipe out small margins for rural businesses trying to reach distant customers. 

Patel also highlighted the practical functions of post offices in rural areas: shipping goods for e-commerce, maintaining a reliable business address (including P.O. boxes), and accessing counter services such as certified mail. She concluded:

We need to rethink the Postal Service as a public good and fund it appropriately so that it can support rural economies.

Taken together, these stories reveal why the mail delivery system is a rural livelihood issue. Rural areas suffer twice when mail slows down: once in time and once in opportunity. Time is spent on extra trips to town, more phone calls, and contingency plans just to complete basic tasks. Opportunities are missed: auctions and bids close, notices arrive too late, payments are delayed, and small businesses lose customers as shipping slows or becomes more expensive.

This is the quiet tax of a lagging mailbox: not a sudden shutdown, but a consistent decline in timely mail delivery in rural communities. When a national service like the U.S.P.S. is treated as a profit-and-loss problem, delay becomes an acceptable efficiency trade-off.

Waterlogged boundaries, the case for bioregionalism, and its unfortunate demise

Fording a river, Grouse mountain, British Columbia, Summer 2021

If you’ve ever been in the Pacific Northwest, you've seen the local “uniform.” Amongst the water-resistant (nothing is waterproof!) Carhartt pants, flat-billed trucker hats, and colourful spectrum of flannels, there is a waterproof jacket in the armoury. This jacket must have a hood so that you do not need an umbrella, a sin that only a tourist would make.

A bad idea, Squamish mountain, British Columbia, Spring 2022

The jacket is necessary because in the wet winter months, any person caught on the scenic trails of Squamish (known for the Chief, one of the largest granite domes in the world) would think that Noah’s flood was upon him, that the sun would never reappear, and that rain has so consumed reality that any imagination of the world can only find a cloudy mist covering a canopy of pine trees. In short, the water cycle of the PNW calls for the jacket.

In contrast, in a place like the Central Valley, deciding how to dress requires taking into account the overhead sun and the dust. Therein lies the non-ironic donning of cowboy hats and boots respectively (A recent blog post about western apparel is here). Continue further east on the Interstate 70 past the plains and the Mississippi river and you will find the habit of tucking long sleeve shirts into pants, which are then tucked into socks, a necessity in the tick laden bushes of Appalachia. (A study from Nebraska Medicine about the migration of tick populations west).

Each of these clothing outfits make sense in the place where they are adopted. Sartorial culture reflects the ecosystem hydrological and biological of the region where people live. This understanding is one key tenet of bioregionalism. Bioregionalism (defined by one non-profit here) is a philosophy which holds that political systems should reflect naturally definable, local regions rather than artificial political boundaries. (Read more about this philosophy as taught by a Bay Area theatre here). Bioregions are drawn by the natural lines drawn by watershed boundaries, topography, as well as the socio-cultural human histories of the area.

10% water capacity, Lake Hensley, California, 2025

Bioregionalists seek several core goals: including matching political boundaries with the aforementioned bioregions; prioritizing the usage of local resources and materials; and building regional sustainability and supply chains rather than global ones. This local focus benefits the making of policy that is suited to local ecological needs, rather than the difficulty of federal or state systems that cannot possibly take account of all local conditions and ecosystems. (Read more about federal funding to rural water systems here)

Current political divisions force rural and urban communities into statewide policy frameworks that, through competing interests and compromise, can poorly fit all. Agricultural water use in arid basins is legislated alongside, and often in, coastal zones where the flow of rivers can power 98% of electrical grids (read more about BC Hydro here). Or consider the current issue of the banning of or restriction of gasoline vehicles being impractical in rural regions that remain dependent on generators and gasoline vehicles (read more here).

Currently, the rural-urban divide is often framed within a structural power antagonism, where cosmopolitan elites- with vastly greater urban resources- intrude on traditional rural communities. The physical distance between these two groups sharpens these perceived differences. These urban elites live far from rural denizens, often in ecosystems that are vastly different. Consider the common epithet, “coastal elite.” (Read more about water disagreements between the rural and the urban here and here).

As the reasoning goes, how could someone in the Bay understand the water struggles of the Central Valley? A bioregionalist approach would instead link governance between metropolitan and rural communities wherever and whenever they are linked by watersheds and water cycles requiring literal downstream cooperation.

Of course, bioregionalism is not without flaws. Even from this brief inventory of bioregions, readers will see issues with assuming histories and shared interests in fluid boundaries that are anachronistic, ambiguous, and would be contentious and complex to draw. Land-based identity idealizes lives that are pre-urbanization, occasionally even pre-industrialization, and is often isolationist and exclusionary of any political change as a result.

In a globalized economy, high technology requires supply chains that cannot be localized efficiently, or at all. Anything that would require national coordination (national defense, macroeconomic policy, large scale infrastructure projects) would be difficult if not impossible under bioregional governance. Of course, there is also the potential of extreme inequality between natural resource-rich and natural resource-poor regions. Without national redistribution and the needs of national and global economy, spatial inequality would be all but guaranteed.

I finish with a point about Cascadia, the former bioregionalist movement stronghold within the PNW that spanned from Juneau, Alaska to San Francisco. Prior to the 47th American president, most money spent within Cascadia, (defined here, as in my heart, as Oregon, Washington, British Columbia), remained within Cascadia. Now with rising tensions between the United States and Canada, this seemingly unbreakable cross-border relationship is strained by the Canadians' general boycott of American goods (read more). Alas, the Cascadian identity, nascent if it ever truly existed, has yielded to national lines for now.

Superbloom, California, 2017

Sale of Loyalton Ranch and land return in California's historic gold country

Willows along the Creek at WélmeltiɁ Preserve.
Photo courtesy of Feather River Land Trust.

On February 10, the City of Santa Clara finalized the sale of Loyalton Ranch, a scenic 10,274-acre property located 35 miles north of Lake Tahoe, to the Washoe Tribe of Nevada and California. The property will now be known as the WélmeltiɁ Preserve and will be held by the Washoe Tribe's newly-created Wašíᐧšiw Land Trust.

The City of Santa Clara purchased the property in 1970 for $1.6 million, with hopes for potential geothermal energy development. The projects never materialized, and in 2024, much of the property was razed by a wildfire. A heretofore divided city council came together to look for a buyer.

The deal came together with the help of a $5.5 million dollar grant from the California Wildlife Conservation Board, a state agency, and support from private foundations and donors. The acquisition results from a successful collaboration between the Washoe Tribe of Nevada and California, the Feather River Land Trust, the Northern Sierra Partnership, and other conservation organizations and public partners. 

This sale is significant for its status as one of the largest land returns in California history, and the largest in the Sierra Nevada. The land area contains over 30 protected-status species, herds of pronghorn deer, golden eagles, and mountain lions. Twenty-seven miles of creeks and numerous springs on the land feed the headwaters of the Middle Fork of the Feather River. Beyond the boundaries of the Preserve, this project represents a step toward re-establishing tribal management of lands in the fragmented landscape characteristic of much land in the Sierra Nevada. 

Map of Project Area reveals checkerboard land ownership
in the region. Photo courtesy of Sierra Sun.

To understand the significance of land return in the Sierra Nevada, it is useful to examine the federal policies that contributed to the fracture of tribal landholdings. In 1862, Congress passed the Pacific Railway Act of 1862, granting millions of acres of public land to railroad companies to finance construction of the transcontinental railroad. The statute created a "checkerboard" pattern of alternating private and public sections along the rail corridors, permanently reshaping land ownership across the West. 

In California and throughout the Sierra Nevada, this pattern consolidated vast tracts in private hands, often without regard for existing tribal presence. The legacy of that policy remains visible today in the fragmented ownership patterns that complicate cohesive land management and habitat restoration efforts. 

This post examines the myriad potential benefits of land return efforts like the one here in the Sierra Nevada. First, returning land directly to ancestral stewards creates new opportunity for Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) practices to flourish. California wildlife agencies recognize TEK to some extent, and these practices are increasingly integrated alongside western conservation methods, but the ability of tribal land managers to direct conservation efforts means TEK and place-based management can take place more readily. Second, greater focus on opportunities for land return in the Northern Sierra Nevada presents a viable way out of the strange pattern of private inholdings and "checkerboard" arrangement of public and private lands. 

Map of checkerboard land surrounding Lake Tahoe.
Map courtesy of  Truckee-Donner Historical Society.

Returning land to tribal stewardship provides tribal community members with meaningful opportunities to reconnect with ancestral lands. In the case of the WélmeltiɁ Preserve, tribal leaders and conservation partners said the acquisition represents a major step toward addressing generations of displacement:

“The return of this land is deeply meaningful for our people,” said Chairman Serrell Smokey of the Washoe Tribe of Nevada and California. “These lands are part of who we are and have been stewarded by the Washoe people since time immemorial.” [. . .] "This return is about more than acreage," said Corey Pargee, executive director of the Feather River Land Trust. "It's about restoring stewardship to the people who have cared for this landscape for thousands of years." 

Access to culturally significant sites strengthens intergenerational knowledge transfer and traditional practices tied to specific landscapes. Land return thus supports not only environmental restoration, but also cultural continuity and community health. 

Land return also removes administrative barriers that often limit the used of TEK as a primary conservation framework. When tribes hold title to land through tribal governments or land trusts, they can design management regimes that respond to local ecological conditions and long-standing cultural priorities. These strategies may even go on to inform and strengthen regional conservation efforts.

Finally, increasing the number of tribally managed acres in the Northern Sierra boosts possibility of greater habitat connectivity, more cohesive management regimes, and increased climate resilience. Larger contiguous areas under aligned stewardship reduce the inefficiencies created by fragmented ownership. Coordinated management improves wildlife corridors, watershed health, and fire resilience.

Land return efforts like the creation of the WélmeltiɁ Preserve demonstrate how restorative justice and environmental stewardship can move forward together. These projects have the potential to repair both social and ecological systems in the Sierra Nevada. In the Northern Sierra, land return offers a path toward a more equitable and ecologically coherent future. 

The robots are coming to the Salad Bowl

Pro-immigrant demonstrators in Omaha, Nebraska. Photo Credit: NBC News

In June 2025, President Trump paused immigration raids on agricultural workplaces after Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins warned that farmers were growing uneasy about the crackdown. As this blog noted at the time, the pause was short-lived. By October, the Labor Department’s own filing in the Federal Register admitted the crackdown risked “supply shock-induced food shortages.”

Then the federal government made matters worse by lowering wages. A new H-2A  rule (the program sets a federal minimum pay rate for employers hiring foreign agricultural workers) cut the pay rate for guest farmworkers across the country. In California, the rate for unskilled workers dropped from $19.97 to $13.45 per hour, and the United Farm Workers sued. The Economic Policy Institute estimated that farmworkers stand to lose $4.4 to $5.4 billion annually.

This is the context in which agricultural automation is arriving in rural California. The question is who does it serve and who does it displace?

The Salad Bowl goes synthetic

Salinas Valley, California (the “Salad Bowl of the World”) produces the majority of the nation’s lettuce, broccoli, and strawberries. Located in Monterey County, Salinas Valley is over 60% Hispanic or Latino, and the local economy depends on agricultural labor.

In 2025, a nonprofit called the Reservoir opened Reservoir Farms, the first on-farm robotics incubator in California, on 40 acres in Salinas. Backed by companies like John Deere and Driscoll’s (the berry company), the incubator provides startups with fabrication shops, pre-planted test fields, and access to commercial growers. It has since expanded to Sonoma County for vineyard automation.

A “vineyard robot” at work. Photo credit: Cornell Agritech

The startups coming to Salinas Valley build machines designed to do what farm workers currently do by hand. Israeli startup DailyRobotics is deploying robotic strawberry harvesters in California starting April 2026, claiming it works at two to three times the speed of human pickers.

One analysis estimated that strawberry automation alone could eliminate nearly 30,000 farmworker positions in California. The machines, which cost around $300,000 each, are priced for large-scale operations and out of reach for small family growers.

Fast advances in robotics means automated strawberry picking. Photo Credit: DailyRobotics

A manufactured crisis

The labor shortage driving this transition is real, but it is not natural. Over 40% of U.S. farmworkers are undocumented, according to the USDA and the Kaiser Family Foundation. The Trump administration’s immigration enforcement has removed workers from the labor pool while cutting wages for the legal guest workers who remain. In Minnesota, for example, H-2A visa numbers dropped 12% in the first half of 2025.

A prior post on this blog documented this pattern through the 2008 Postville, Iowa raid: 389 arrests in a town of 2,500, the departure of another 1,000 immigrants, the loss of 7% of the county’s workforce, and the bankruptcy of the local factory. The void was eventually filled by a new immigrant workforce from Palau.

The pattern holds internationally. Another post on this blog examined Italy’s “Agro-Mafia,” where restrictive immigration policy has not reduced agricultural dependence on migrant labor but has driven it underground into exploitative networks where workers earn as little as 3 to 4 euros an hour. Punitive enforcement produces either exploitation or automation, depending on who has capital.

Who benefits?

Reservoir Farms says the right things about workforce transition. Its CEO has stated that “automation should augment the workforce, not replace it,” and the Reservoir has partnered with Hartnell College on retraining programs. But as one community organizer in Salinas noted: “We support training, but we also know not every displaced worker will become a robot mechanic.”

Farmworkers harvest strawberries at Lewis Taylor Farms in Georgia. Photo Credit: Lance Cheung

The farmworker communities that have sustained Salinas Valley for generations face a displacement that is social and cultural. Lisa R. Pruitt and Marta R. Vanegas have written about “urbanormativity,” which is the tendency for legal and policy frameworks to render rural populations invisible. Farmworkers in Salinas are doubly invisible: rural and immigrant, performing labor the nation depends on but does not want to see.

This echoes what I wrote about in a previous post on AI data centers in rural Arizona. In both cases, Silicon Valley capital arrives in rural spaces to solve what might be seen as urban problems. Data centers serve urban tech consumers, and harvesting robots serve urban grocery consumers. The costs (labor displacement and strained local resources) fall on the rural communities that host the infrastructure.

The choice ahead

Agricultural automation is probably inevitable. Some of these technologies could genuinely improve conditions for farmworkers. But the federal government that paused immigration raids in June, reversed course days later, cut guest worker wages in October, and admitted to “supply shock-induced food shortages” in a Federal Register filing has offered farmworker communities in places like Salinas no reason to believe help is on the way.

The robots are coming to the Salad Bowl. The question is whether anyone in Washington has thought about what happens to the people already there.

The disappearing place

British Columbia's Picturesque Highways, 1942

Photo Credit: Blizzy 63 Flickr 

Name: Helen Claire Frost

Identifying Characteristics: Caucasian female. Blue eyes and brown-blonde hair. About 5 feet 5 inches. 125 pounds. 

Occupations: Table busser, berry picker, painter, laborer. 

Status: Missing for 55 years, 4 months, and 7 days. 

In the fall of 1970, Helen Claire Frost slipped her arms into the sleeves of a navy nylon parka, wiped cold coffee from the corners of her mouth, and set out for a short walk from the Prince George apartment she shared with her sister Sandy. Authorities know she made it as far as the Husky gas station. They know she was four days shy of her eighteenth birthday. They know she had recently given birth to a daughter, Sandra Jeanette.

What they don’t know, is what happened next.

Theories flourished. Runaway. Suicide. Accident. Homicide. Answers, however, proved less abundant. In 2009, Sandy Frost disclosed that her father had told her, “I really hope I know what happened before I die.” Dennis Roy Frost died on July 20, 2014. Helen remains missing.

Highway of Tears Corridor

Photo Credit: OpenStreetMapContributors

The highway of tears

Chronologically, Helen is the first recorded disappearance along what Florence Naziel coined as “The Highway of Tears” in 1998. Described as a warm and eccentric Elvis-loving character with bleached blonde hair and a fondness for leopard print, the term came to the Wet’suwet’en mother and grandmother during a vigil walk in memory of the disappeared.

Specifically, it refers to a 720-kilometer-long span of Yellowhead Highway 16 that connects the towns of Prince George and Prince Rupert in British Columbia, Canada. Since 1970, this tract of land has been the site of eighteen documented disappearances, although local indigenous groups believe the number is closer to fifty. As of 2026, nearly every case remains unsolved.

Highway 16

Photo Credit: Kevin Dooley

“Another drunk Indian”

A series of explanations has been proposed to elucidate how this small stretch of pavement became a place of nightmares, how an entire country came to cultivate a years-long toleration of crime and stifled progress. Rampant poverty leads to low rates of vehicle ownership, making hitchhiking the only form of mobility for many rural British Columbians to access work, school, and medical treatment. Additionally, the region is plagued by drug abuse and domestic violence, scars of the now infamous Canadian Indian residential school system.

Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) Reserve Constable Wayne Clary, who has worked these cases for decades, believes racism has played the central role: 

“Racism? Absolutely. Along Highway 16, we have vulnerable women because of what the Canadian government did to Indigenous peoples and their history. How they tore out a generation, how they weakened a family structure [through residential schools] - that doesn’t get fixed overnight.”

In the words of Assembly of First Nations Regional Chief Terry Teegee, the stench of death in rural BC blossoms from the earliest roots of colonialism: “This goes along with 152 years of colonization. Our women are looked at as ‘another drunk Indian’."

TCH-Yellowhead 16

Ryan Craig

The finding place

There are still those who are trying to change the narrative surrounding Highway 16, from a place of loss to a place of resilience. In 2005, the RCMP founded the Project E-Pana Task Force to determine whether a serial killer, or killers, is responsible for murdering young women traveling along major highways in BC. In 2023, billboards sponsored by the families of the missing and murdered were erected along the highway to raise awareness and warn women not to hitchhike. In 2025, five cell towers were installed along the corridor to aid resource extraction efforts, which activists hope will have the unintended benefit of improving communication and safety for travelers.

Highway 16

Photo Credit: Gripso_Banana_Prune Flickr

The lost ones

More than fifty years after Helen Frost vanished into the chill night air, Chelsey Amanda Quaw’s body was discovered in a wooded area just north of Highway 16, one month after she disappeared while stepping outside for a cigarette. Her murderer has yet to be found.

To some, she will just be a name on a list. Another entry in the ‘quirk’ that is Highway 16. But she was also a beloved member of her Saik’uz First Nation community. A daughter and sister whose family will miss her dearly. Mary Teegee, a leader from the Highway of Tears Governing Body, laments that efforts to solve the case appear to be conforming to old patterns:

“Why were there not RCMP helicopters, why weren't there RCMP dogs, why wasn't there more RCMP boots on the ground?...I don't think that Pam [Heron] should have had to prove that Chelsey was not a drug addict...Imagine if this was a young white girl out of West Vancouver. Would the mother have to be [calling for] more RCMP involvement, for more of an investigation?"

Zoom court: Problems and solutions

A meeting celebrating Wikipedia's 20th birthday, conducted on Zoom due to the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Today you can do almost anything remotely. Want to tie the knot with that special someone in your life? You can do it through Zoom. Want to earn your degree? You can do that remotely now, even a law degree. Have you met your ultimate demise, and your relatives are saying goodbye one last time? Zoom has got you covered there, too.

Despite how much of our world has moved to myriad uses of optic fibers running underground, it seems like the legal system has been particularly resistant to opportunities associated with this new reality. This especially impacts rural communities, which often find themselves unable to hire and keep enough public defenders and prosecutors willing to live nearby and keep the criminal justice system running.

Background

Before getting to how the legal profession can step with both feet into the digital age, let’s zoom out a bit. Before the days of Zoom—and even before the days of the now defunct Skype—courts around the country toyed with the idea of remote assistance by counsel. Some efforts date to the 1990s. Back then, the technology was clearly nowhere near where it needed to be for it to be a reasonable alternative to in person attorney appearances. Most efforts were thus limited and they ended in the early 2000s.

Despite improvements in technology in the 2000s and 2010s, it was not until the 2020s that the idea of remote appearances by counsel made a comeback. When that happened, it wasn’t just a product of technological innovation, it was also a product of necessity. In early 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic shook the entire world, and our criminal justice system along with it. States around the country scrambled to find ways in which essential processes of life that required close quarters contact between people could be performed at a time in which we thought such contact could prove lethal.

And so, the legal system went remote in the way that prisons, schools, funeral homes, churches and most other institutions of American life did so. That is to say, hastily and inadequately. In her 2025 article, We Need to Talk: Modernizing Attorney-Client Jail Communications, Texas A&M School of Law Professor Cynthia Alkon reports the results of a nationwide survey of lawyers she conducted shortly after the start of the pandemic. Many of the respondents were criminal defense attorneys.

A bus somewhere in Bodega Bay, a village in Sonoma County, CA. Reaching Sonoma County's Superior Court from this starting point would probably take multiple buses and hours of time.

Some problems

The overwhelming majority of the attorneys responding to Alkon's survey reported concerns about the confidentiality of their remote meetings with their clients. This was not an abstract, unsubstantiated fear. Some of the article respondents reported incidents of guards and prosecutors listening in on their remote communications, of inmates not being in private rooms during their remote communications with their attorneys, and of deputies recording the calls and forwarding them to the police and to prosecutors.

Confidentiality, however, was not the only issue. Respondents of Professor Alkon’s survey also noted the difficulty of building rapport with clients when discussing private and sensitive subjects when they were not face to face. It was not only lawyers and clients who were having trouble connecting due to remote interactions, but also defendants and judges. In its 2020 report, The Impact of Video Proceedings on Fairness and Access to Justice in Court, the Brennan Center cites a 2010 study which found that defendants whose hearings were conducted over video had substantially higher bond amounts set than those who appeared in person (with the increases ranging from 50% to 90%).

Having all parties physically present in the courtroom also reinforces the gravity and seriousness of the proceedings. In the years since the COVID-19 pandemic, there have been multiple reports of criminal defendants being punished for not understanding the seriousness of their situation. For example, a St. Joseph County, Michigan, man found himself in trouble with Judge Jeffrey Middleton when he logged into virtual court with a colossaly inappropriate username. The man was called "an idiot" by the judge, and was placed in a Zoom breakout room as a punishment). In another tragic episode of Zoom court, a man from Washtenaw County, Michigan, found himself in hot water with Judge Cedric J. Simpson when he logged into virtual court from behind the wheel of a moving vehicle to answer to charges of driving with a suspended license (in an astonishing turn of events, the judge realized the man had never had a license, an ordered him to walk himself to the county jail). In perhaps the most extreme case, a Sacramento, California, surgeon logged into virtual court while operating on a patient. These are but a few examples of how the informality of remote platforms caused defendants to behave in ways that did not rise to the seriousness of their situation. Skeptics of remote court appearances and client counseling could certainly argue that defendants may not assist their attorneys with their own defense as effectively when the attorney is just a small picture in a computer.

Another issue that may affect outcomes for criminal defendants who are assisted by an attorney who is working remotely is that of the subtle communications that happened between client and attorney during court appearances. In an episode of the Center for Justice Innovation’s podcast In Practice, the hosts noted that public defenders who joined one of their virtual panels expressed concern about their ability to communicate with their clients through video conferencing. The panelists noted that public defenders often exchange quick whispers and other communications with defendants. The inability to do so can severely undermine outcomes for defendants.

Alpine County's Courthouse in Markleeville, CA. As of late 2024, everything was being conducted via Zoom.

Some solutions

The issue of confidentiality, while the most serious, may also be the most straightforward to solve—at least theoretically. In her article, Professor Alkon suggests that:

prosecutors’ offices should clearly, as a matter of policy, prohibit anyone in their offices from using information gathered through recordings of privileged attorney-client conversations.

In practice, these prohibitions must be enforced. How might that be achieved? They should be enforced exactly as they are enforced when there are intrusions upon face-to-face private communications between attorneys and criminal defendants. Potential remedies include suppressing evidence dervied from such intrusions, disqualification of the involved attorneys, sanctions, suspensions, or even disbarment. Perhaps this seemed difficult to implement while the world was scrambling in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, but there is no reason why it should be an insurmountable challenge today.

The rapport problem between lawyers and clients is a serious one, and it is one that might not have a simple solution. Perhaps video conferencing technology will eventually improve to the point where it is able to fully capture human presence and feelings, enabling lawyers to build affinity with clients across the state as if they were mere feet from each other. Until then, we might find solace in the fact that uncongenial assistance of counsel is a lot better than no assistance at all. Similarly, I think lawyers and courts can take extra efforts to impress the need on defendants to assist in their own defense.

As for the issue of the small interactions between client and attorney that are crucial to the process, this might be an area where courts can accommodate the needs of an evolving society. This would not be the first time the courts have had to be innovative and accomodating. For example, no one will argue that the need for interpreters in court does not slow down the process, or that it does not require some extra effort from judges and juries. Yet, it is clearly a cost worth bearing. With that in mind, I do not think that having a court appearance that takes a few more minutes due to the need to quickly go into a private breakout room is too high a price. Courts can experiment and find ways to make the process more agile, while always prioritizing the ability of defense lawyers to assist their clients.

Finally, it is perhaps best that defendants appear remotely as little as possible, to eliminate the potential prejudice that is hinted at by the more negative outcomes they face when they do so. At the same time, judges should receive training on the inherent biases that humans have when they hear and see a person through a screen as compared to face-to-face. Technology has progressed quite quickly in the last few decades, and it is normal for people's instincts and intuitions to lag behind such fast-paced development. This is no reason to discard the idea. Perhaps judges and juries today deliver more negative outcomes when parts of the process are conducted remotely. This need not be the case in the future. Part of the solution, as with many other things, may be education.

Conclusion

The potential issues examined in this article are not the only ones that may arise from the practice of remote criminal defense. A further examination may reveal others. However, what I hope this post can impress upon readers is that there is absolutely no reason to give up in the face of these challenges. These are, mostly, technical challenges. America has put a dozen men on the surface of the moon; it must be capable of putting two people in a confidential Zoom breakout room.