Well which way is it? If the demand is so high that pilots are difficult to come by, how can it not pay well enough to attract pilots? Sounds to me like the farmers need to open their wallets...
Nobody orders crop dusting because they think it's fun, they do it to increase the profit from their crops. If it has utility, then it will give the farmer the budget and the willingness to pay. If crop dusting doesn't have enough utility for the farmers to pay a salary attractive enough for pilots to do the work, then it is inefficient. Alternatively the farmers or the pilots are acting irrationally.
> If it has utility, then it will give the farmer the budget and the willingness to pay.
That's not how it works at all.
Farmers are rational and the price system is behaving efficiently here. The waiting time is part of the price.
Crop dusting can still be better than not crop dusting even if the profit does not cover the "full" market price. Example: crop dusting improves farm profit by $5000/year, but costs either $8000 for a pilot in a market with abundant high quality pilots, or $4000 in a market of 10th percentile pilots with long wait times. If the actual effect of crop dusting is the same in both cases, a rational farmer will choose the latter over no crop dusting at all.
If they don't loose money or produce for waiting, then the originally stated problem of farmers having to wait for too long, is not really a problem. Then all is good, I guess?
Like poor people spending 3x commuting compared to rich people is not a problem, right? Market cleared, deadweight loss minimized, freedom from serfdom achieved, mission accomplished.
Just because someone is maximizing their (ordinal) utility given their budget set, doesn't mean that they're well off by any absolute/cardinal measurement.
That said, nobody here actually said it was a problem for farmers, only that wait times are long. I'm just pushing back on your incorrect pseudoeconomic analysis.
> farmers often have trouble getting a pilot when they need it.
That quote made it out to be a problem. If the farmer is wealthy or not has no significance to the effectivity of crop dusting. The same considerations and calculations would be true even in a communist economy.
