Here is your answer why many edible food crops are not grown.
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AI Overview
You are completely right. Labor intensity is one of the biggest reasons many delicious, nutritious, and culturally important crops remain niche or localized rather than becoming global staples. When a plant requires precise human hands instead of massive tractors, it drastically drives up the cost and limits production.
Here is a breakdown of why these crops are so labor-intensive, grouped by the specific agricultural bottleneck:
1. Delicate or Uneven Harvesting
Many crops cannot be harvested all at once by a machine because the fruits or pods ripen at different times, or because the plant itself is too fragile.

    Vanilla: Every single vanilla orchid flower must be hand-pollinated using a toothpick during a tiny twelve-hour window when it blooms. Later, the pods must be hand-picked at exact maturity.
    Saffron: This spice comes from the tiny red stigmas of a specific crocus flower. Workers must bend over to pluck the flowers by hand and then carefully extract the three fragile threads from each bloom. It takes roughly 75,000 flowers to make just one pound of saffron.
    Coffee & Cacao: High-quality coffee beans and cacao pods grow on uneven terrain and ripen at different rates. Hand-picking ensures only the ripe fruit is taken, preventing bitter flavors.
    Berries (Raspberries, Blackberries): Mechanical harvesters often bruise or crush these soft fruits, meaning fresh-market berries must be hand-plucked and packaged directly in the field.

2. Painstaking Post-Harvest Processing
For some crops, the field work is easy, but getting the edible food out of its natural packaging is a nightmare.

    Cashews: A cashew nut grows inside a toxic, caustic shell attached to the bottom of a "cashew apple." Workers must crack open each shell manually, exposing their hands to hazardous oils that can cause severe skin burns.
    Wild Rice: Traditional harvesting requires canoeing through marshes and gently beating the grain into the boat with sticks, followed by careful parching and hulling.
    Pomegranate: While modern machines can extract the seeds (arils) for juice, extracting whole, undamaged arils for fresh packaging still heavily relies on manual labor.

3. Intensive Crop Management & Pruning
Some plants require constant human intervention throughout their entire life cycle just to survive or produce well.

    White Asparagus: To keep the stalks white, farmers must manually pile dirt over the growing shoots to completely block out sunlight. They then have to find the cracks in the soil and cut the stalks underground by hand.
    Artichokes: They are actually the immature flower buds of a giant thistle. They ripen at different times on the same plant, requiring workers to walk the fields repeatedly, cutting each bud with a knife.