Professors Turn Millions of Students into Indentured Servants Overnight as Federal Aid Runs Dry.

The year is twenty twenty. Median tuition rates have finally exceeded seven figures, and the population of minorities eligible for federal student aid has exceeded that of the non eligible majority. This has left the federal reserve in the red for the first time in history, and starting this spring semester, they literally cannot pay any more tuitions. Instead, millions of undergraduates are being bussed into the suburbs to exchange manual labor for their enrollment.

This harsh development came in response to demands from a movement known as “permaculture,” which has inspired thousands of professors to start small-scale gardening projects in their backyards. Permaculture seeks to replace middle-class reliance on the agriculture industrial complex with food sourced from self-sustaining, eco-friendly communities. Until this year, permaculture struggled to gain traction in the suburbs, but when they caught the attention of the academia industrial complex, “permaprofessors” joined the movement in droves.

The biggest obstacle standing in their way? The soft, shitty bodies of faculty members, coupled with their busy work schedules, make the hours of hard work that farming demands impossible. The solution? The young, limber frames of their students, coupled with crippling debt and desperation, make for an abundant and affordable source of labor.

Some permaculture opponents have argued that exploiting students to harvest crops is unethical, and have even pointed out that the high number of black students receiving federal aid draws an uncomfortable parallel to our nation’s dark history. Even so, for most educators, a surplus of free workers and a field of GMO-free vegetables is just too good to pass up. Many of these permaculture practitioners have taken to social media to promote their practice, one example being my father.

“Our krop iz vastly genetikally zuperior to anyzing you will find in ze zupamahkets!” claims Rudolph Heidler, an aerospace engineering professor and high-profile permaproponent. “Every fruit and veggie iz inspected imperfections, and any inferior spezimen iz komposted.” Heidler’s method of farming is brutally efficient, but the sheer amount of compost he has generated on such a small acreage of land has skeptic neighbors wondering how such large yields are even possible. Heidler attributes his Farm’s fertility to the human blood that he fertilizes his soil with.

Other voices in the swarm of critics are those of local farmhands, who complain that work is too hard to find with student imports stealing all the jobs. The students themselves complain that they are not only competing with locals, but within their own permaculture communities, which started a string of small scale “permaculture wars” between rival factions. Finally, human rights activists claim permaculture is a reincarnation of debt bondage, a cruel echo of the previous millennium.

Jeff Warren of GardenMasters Inc. asserts that permaculture falls outside of that category because of a loophole in the thirteenth amendment, meaning that debt bondage does not technically qualify as slavery in America. Most of the world’s countries abolished debt bondage in ancient times, but the United States never went through the process, even specifically declaring slavery “as a punishment for crime” to be legal in its bill of rights. Still, some question the practice of chaining students to the fields that they maintain, which is widespread within the permaculture community.

“The chains are not to demoralize or imprison the laborers, but are rather a convenient way to keep them on their own crops,” Jeff patiently explained, “as fences would get in the way of tractors and rototillers.” Clear divisions between properties do play an important role; chains help workers prioritize needier plants, and protect them from over farming more land than they owe. They also allow students to be effectively held and traded between properties.

Messaging app ChatTell has become a hub for these exchanges, acting as a market where workers can be easily bought and sold, and even launching a cryptocurrency to bring their sweat and tears to the blockchain. WePick, their biggest competitor, offers a similar service, but is more geared towards finding help to perform household chores. While their development could lead anywhere, one thing is clear: the landscape of labor is changing, and fast. The question is, who will be doing all that landscaping?