What does the day's-wage language in Revelation 6 mean for an average field worker?

Les explains that the black horse indicates famine, pictured by the need to ration the food supply. He asks what happens if the great food-production areas—North America’s grain belt and citrus groves, or Russia’s Ukraine—are knocked out, and says the world’s food supply is almost annihilated, leaving the rest of the world with no food and absolute famine. In that setting, the language about a measure of wheat for a penny and three measures of barley for a penny boils down to a worker, the average field worker, having to work a full day from sunup to sundown just to earn enough money to buy enough bread to work the next day. Les describes this as runaway inflation caused by a shortage of goods and a tremendous decrease in the production of foodstuffs, with famine accompanied by disease, as seen in Africa and Somalia. He ties it together with the fourth horse, the pale one.