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And as we previously mentioned, daycare isn't an option. The families who take up work as migrant farmers are poor, and we don't mean "can't afford an iPhone" poor. We mean actual destitution, where they can't afford to pay for food every night:

"My parents would have had to pay someone to watch us. Taking me to the fields removed that cost. My parents really were struggling to make ends meet. It's perfectly legal for us to work too, so why wouldn't they come with us to help make ends meet and buy us shoes? Our family wouldn't be able to pay for meals, etc if we weren't there contributing and helping to bring in that money. Every dime we made was accounted for. To pay for tires for the truck, to catch up with the house payments ..."

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But at least if everyone pitched in, we could expect a household income of no more than $19,999.

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This lack of options extends beyond the impoverished children who ruin their futures to help oranges along on their journey to your nightly screwdriver. The bottom line is, there simply isn't much money in farming. Only a small minority of farmers earn very much -- the top 5 percent of the farms in America make around 75 percent of the money in agriculture each year. The rest barely make anything, usually having to come up with some non-farming income on the side to pay the bills. It's hard to be sympathetic to the farmers in a story like this, but man. Farming seems awful for everyone.

Laws to change the system go nowhere because, ultimately, this is what society wants. Whether it's from a fast food restaurant, a Walmart, or the food truck out behind your work that got a "D" on its last health inspection, we want our food cheap, and in rib-shattering quantities. Farmers need to keep their costs low if they want to keep their farms, and so they turn to the same source of cheap labor that powered the Industrial Revolution and that train in Snowpiercer: children.

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Robert Evans wrote a book, A Brief History of Vice, in which he drank his own pee to test an ancient tobacco recipe. The least you can do is pre-order it.

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For more insider perspectives, check out 5 Horrific Things You Learn Preserving Brains for a Living and 5 Hardcore Realities of My Time as a Mormon Missionary.

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