Eulogy for the family farm

So I spent a good chunk of my weekend helping out a farmer friend harvesting his apple crop, which I try to do every year. So there I was, amongst his Jamaican workers, picking apples off of trees, deciding which ones were good enough to bring to market, and which ones would have to stay home and be used for personal use. Of course, those ones would be the ones determined "too ugly" or "too deformed" to eat, the ones that consumers would eschew, thinking there was something wrong with them, when really, a fruit growing too closely to a twig, or struck by inclement weather would be the only cause for the lack of perfection.
A few small anecdotal observations this year:
1. The staggering number of Jamaicans (I was told about 5,000+ people!) coming up every year through the temporary worker's visas, in order to try to make decent wages for their families back home, many of them coming from March through November, staying home for three months, and returning again, year after year, leaves me scratching my head. Why do we have such economic systems in place that we take cheap labour from other countries that takes them away from their families and communities for significant chunks of the year? Why are there no safeguards for them? The workers I met were quite happy with the situation that they found themselves in with my friend, but there are stories of outright abuse against some of these workers. Why do Canadians complain that there are not enough jobs for them, when perhaps it's simply that we don't want to participate in jobs for "untouchables"? We don't seem to mind hiring foreign workers to glean our food, to raise our children, and to construct our buildings, some of the most fundamental jobs of all, as long as we don't have to pay them too much.
2. A few climate change notes:
a) There were still many, many mosquitoes out and actively biting! This is a first for me, as I am quite used to them pretty much being gone from Southern Ontario by this time of year. I was told that they had noticed it was a strange summer, much warmer and wetter (well, that part we all noticed), allowing the mosquitoes to thrive longer than usual. How this bodes for their preparations for next year, well, I guess we'll see when we go camping!
b) They had also told me that there was much hail, besides the rain, this year, destroying a good quarter of their orchard. Arriving there, I noticed huge swaths of trees were gone - all destroyed by the repeated hailstorms they experienced this summer. This is a huge economic blow to a farmer. Which leads me to:
3. So, they are talking about packing it in. Another farmer, biting the dust. Another food producer, in decline and heading to extinction. At their age, the cost of replacing those trees in the orchard, and waiting for them to start producing fruit to pay back their costs, is not worth it. They had decided it wasn't worth the cost nor the time to try to rebuild. Which means they have a smaller number of trees with which to earn their living. Which means that farming becomes less and less viable, year after year. Which means we have that much fewer fruit available to Ontarians. I am not sure why this doesn't worry people, but it happens with stunning rapidity; I just had never encountered a farmer I knew personally, and seen the state of the farm, to actually see it in technicolour...