If you want your farms to support workers who live on the land full-time, and are part of rural communities, then you want the farm to raise a bunch of different crops in close proximity, such that there's always something that needs planting, pruning, tending, or harvesting.

The farm I get my weekly box from has permanent tenant workers, who receive a living wage, and healthcare. Try to find that kind of "perk" on a big farm.

Of course, the kind of people who hold that kind of job are not going to be the same kind of people who are perfectly happy moving from place to place, keeping themselves largely anonymous to the local authorities, and sending most of otheir wages out of the country. When folks say that undocumented immigrants "do the work that Americans won't do," what they really mean, or at least should, is that Americans are people who are integrated into the fabric of their communities, whether native-born or immigrant. If you're drifting from place to place, you can't integrate. We should be encouraging farms to offer the kind of jobs that allow for long-term residence. If current residents can't or won't fill those jobs, we can happily offer them to immigrants who want to settle down and build their own American dream.

Well, the guy who was interviewed expressed his preference for the type of work offered by big monoculture farms.

I think a lot of people are happy with that kind of work, because it's so much better than the alternatives they had back in their native lands. And they're too busy just getting by to think about what even-better options might be available. Even if they have considered that it might be nice to have better options at home, or to be able to settle down and become integrated citizens here, they mostly don't have a frame of reference for thinking about what public policies might help with that, or how to go about influencing policy.

He said he preferred working on a big farm to working on a small one. The article mentions longer gigs (i.e. not having to move around as much) as one of the advantages of working on a bigger farm. And I'm sure either of those is better than not having a job at all. That doesn't mean that he wouldn't be happier with a better job or a better living situation.

The people I've talked to, even the absolutely worst off (IMO) have very clear ideas of how their lives could be improved, including clear ideas of what those in power should be doing differently. In most cases, though, they just don't have the power to make those changes.

Well, regardless, this is more about a rhetorical flourish than about the substance of what I was saying.

Monoculture farms, big or small, are inherently seasonal.

Polyculture farms, aside from being more sustainable (because the various crops interact in ways that maintain the soil, rather than having a single crop consistently depleting particular nutrients), and requiring less chemical treatment (in addition to fertilizer, polycultures don't need as much pesticide, if any, b/c you can maintain a full ecosystem on them, including beneficial and predatory insects), offer work year-round.