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Bringing Affordable Robotics To Big Agriculture
kkleiner writes "Boston-based Harvest Automation has made good on its mission to bring robots into the world of agriculture by introducing Harvey, a bot tasked with the rather modest job of moving plants around in nurseries and greenhouses because people aren't keen on doing the laborious work. At a price point of $30k each, two bots would cost the same as three unskilled human laborers who earn about $20k annually not to mention medical bills due to injury. Harvey's job may not be flashy, but considering the potted plant industry is valued at $50 billion, the bot's little impact could translate into significant money."
Living in the middle of Illinois there's a lot of farming news and farm shows around here, and you see an awful ot of impressive tech, and even science. They have self-driving combines and harvesters that use GPS, cell phone apps very useful to them (some control machinery), chemical testing of the spoil and plants available... you have to know a lot to farm these days.
I know someone's going to complain "BUT JOBS!!!" but the jobs the tech in TFA are jobs are jobs only the most desperate want. Agriculture has been constantly replacing jobs with technology for centuries. It takes fewer and fewr to feed more and more.
Someone's going to bring up GM, GM isn't used much around here, most seed is hybrid -- but the biochemists and agronomists have DNA study of the plants they breed.
There's a TV show that comes on here on Sunday morning at 5:30 AM and it's the only OTA show that's not an infomercial, and It's pretty interesting. Here's their website. I'm not a farmer but it is pretty interesting.
I wouldn't consider potted plants "Big Agriculture." That's soybeans, corn, and wheat.
Free Martian Whores!
...two bots would cost the same as three unskilled human laborers who earn about $20k annually not to mention medical bills due to injury.
That depends on the "unskilled" labor you're talking about.
People legally able to work will get $7.25 per hour (minimum wage) only when they are scheduled to work. In other words, they will work when needed and it'll be seasonal. So, said worker will be really lucky to make $7,000 for the year at that job. AND the hours will be sporadic - he won't know what days he's working or even he's going to work that week. And some of these jobs, you show up at 5AM to get in line and wait until 7AM to see if you work that day - ALL UNPAID.
I know because I had to do it to pay bills. And no, if HURTS your resume if you are a white collar worker. All those employers who say that they want you doing "something - anything" when looking for a "real" job are full of shit. If you work as a laborer, they think that you aren't good enough to work in your profession.
It's better to be unemployed than "taking anything to work."
Now illegal workers, that's a whole different ball of wax.
Those displaced workers could work on assembly lines building potted plant moving robotics. At least until those assembly lines are replaced with robots. Then those workers could work on assembly lines building robots that build potted plant building robotics. Until...
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
This is another move toward producing what humanity needs without human working. How many persons we need to feed the USA today?
At some point we will have to admit that there must be an universal income regardless of work done, Otherwise the end of the story will be robots producing goods that nobody can afford except the robot owners.
This is the road we are going down.It's easy to imagine a time when the only things of value are land and energy (and the land and energy required to make something). A breakthrough in those areas (space colonization, cheap fusion power) and nothing will be of value. My desktop 3-D printer/assembler can make be a garage sized 3-D printer/assemblerr, which in turn can assemble me a new Ferrari. It can also disassemble my old Ferrari for raw materials then disassemble itself to save space. Will we get there? Unknown, but fortunately for us science fiction writers have anticipated this for a long time and proposed some interesting and probably workable solutions.
My personal favorite is everyone gets a stipend like Native American tribes or people from Alaska. A low but above poverty amount, say 30K a year. To be fair everyone gets it. Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, me. People can work if they want to. Jobs would be scarce and desirable no matter how bad. If 40 or even 80% of the population is unemployed, who cares? We would have to get past class warfare, because anyone who had a truly needed job would be pretty valuable and probably make a lot of money, but again, who cares if you can print a Ferrari or surfboard or whatever else you want practically for free.
I was recently picking blueberries at a u-pick. This is easily the best year I have ever seen. Literally the bushes were breaking under the weight of the blueberries. You could eat the berries off the bushes like corn on the cob. The problem is that most berry areas are having a similar banner year along with there being a huge amount of berries planted. All this has resulted in a price crash. This crash has made it borderline uneconomic to harvest the berries. But if you had a robotic harvester this changes the pricing quite a bit. Once you have purchased the machine the price to run it should be very low and the amortized costs are there regardless if you run the machine or not. Thus you can harvest the berries even in banner years. Another option is to also plant excessive crops of different types and then focus your harvesting on the most profitable crops in any given year.
It is my firm belief that robotic agriculture will change the entirety of how we produce food. A few simple examples of changes that few people discuss would be the terrain that is used for harvesting. Two of the key advantages of flat land for grains is that the crop will develop consistently across large areas and thus when harvested be of a predictable quality when turned into bread and whatnot. The other is that it is far easier to build the massive harvesting machines if they don't have to contend with any variations in the terrain. The goal of the massive machines is to vastly increase the ability of a single human to do a huge amount of work.
But with robotic planting, tending, and harvesting you don't need to "multiply" the work of a single human. Thus the robots can be fairly small. Also the robots can adjust the feeding of the plants so to grow a fairly consistent crop in inconsistent terrain. Then in the end when it comes time to harvest. The robot can methodically harvest at the perfect moment for any given plant (repeatedly bypassing those not ready) plus it can methodically sort even down the single grain.
Another advantage is where the cost of the entire cycle of agriculture can be so low that you could robotically convert marginal land into low producing land and still produce food at a very low cost. The return on quality land would be higher but by being able to cheaply bring marginal land into production it will form a scenario of relentless competition thus holding down prices. Plus once again due to the nature of robot economics once marginal land was in production the cost of continued production would be very low. This could also be carefully factored into the logistics calculations where a less efficient production is competitive where it might reduce some other cost such as shipping.
This last factor might result in it being cheaper to produce greenhouses and then produce goods year-round much closer to the point of consumption rather than shipping them half way around the world.
Also robotics can be used inefficient ways such as massively processing marginal land making it quite productive. Normally this is a time eating process that is not worth it. But if you can leave some robots cooking away in a forest for a few years and come back to find nutrient rich terra pretta then again the economics change.
What I can't foresee is which direction agriculture will take. I have a feeling it will be mega massive monster farming companies with very few employees that depopulate the rural farm communities. But at the same time the low barriers to entry might mean that many people will jump in the moment a competitive opportunity is perceived. Personally where food is such a fundamental part of living (right there after clean water) that I don't believe that any small group of companies should be allowed to concentrate ownership of any nation's food production. If they get it wrong, or play evil games, massive numbers of people could suffer.
One prediction that I will solidly make is that there will be very very very very few people employed in agriculture in 20-50 years.
The lack of jobs for unskilled laborers will discourage illegal immigration. Americans don't want those jobs, or we wouldn't have vast numbers of openings for illegals!
Dry up the jobs, remove the attraction to immigrate.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
You have hit at the exact problem with all robotics where modern robotics will eat all low skilled jobs. It is a cultural problem not a technological or economic one. Some societies will become feudal with a small few owning everything and the great unwashed masses completely left out of the economic game and on some kind of punitive welfare.
But some societies will know that they are all about their people. One guess is that concepts like Minimum Basic Wages (different from minimum wage) and high income taxes will shift the focus from production and capitalism (which is easy with robotics and thus shouldn't be greatly rewarded) to consumption and fairness.
I am not talking about communism for if you look at the defective planned economy of the Soviet Union where they focused on production and things still sucked. The idea is that you focus on simple things that encourage consumption and equality and then let people figure the rest out themselves. But most societies focus on the magic term GDP and with robots that number can be very very high even with extreme unemployment. Thus it is a terrible standard to measure a happy economic situation.
But the stupidest societies of all will ban or fight robotic production.
The largest in the US paid anywhere between 25% and 50% of their revenue, but keep spouting that nonsense that anything less than 100% is not their fare share.
"the demand for the goods will drop and so will prices" Do you realize that you just quoted basic market theory while seeming to rail against the market?
And when the prices drop, then the displaced worker will be able to purchase the same amount for less. When this is taken to the ridiculous end, all those who are demanding that we adopt the utopia of people only doing what they want and still having everything they want might become a reality. However, most things break down before they get that far.
we also need to stop the big over time mindset that can drive 60-80+ work weeks. Why should some people being pulling them when others are not working.
> because people aren't keen on doing the laborious work.
Or...
> two bots would cost the same as three unskilled human laborers who earn about $20k annually not to mention medical bills due to injury.
My money is on door #2.
At this rate, adults and robots will take all the jobs young adults used to have, making them even more useless by the time they graduate college.
A business owner doesn't look at a person who does five tasks and say "I will replace your entire 40-hour-per-week job with one robot that does all five of your tasks." They look at the tasks they need done, the labor expense spent on each of those tasks, and say "I will automate the tasks that I can, and cut payroll hours accordingly."
If you needed four full-time employees to work your greenhouse yesterday, and it took a total of 20 hours per week to move pots, you now only need three full-time employees, one part-timer for 20 hours, plus a robot.
Later, once fertilizer robots are available, you take another look at your time spent fertilizing. If it takes you another 20 hours, and you can buy a fertilizer robot to do it, you reduce the head count to three employees plus two robots. Alternately, you can keep everyone on staff, but cut all their hours to 30 hours per week, (and drop all their benefits because they're now part-time.)
Of course, the laborers who have had their hours cut and their benefits dropped will have little incentive to make tasks easy for the robots. "Oh, sorry, the hose leaks and sometimes it makes those big mud puddles, and I guess the robot just got stuck." "You know, those sensors always seem to get plugged up with grass clippings." And finally, "We stopped using the robots because they weren't very reliable, what with all the traction problems and sensor failures."
John
Says who? The GAO says 12.6%. But keep spouting that nonsense that any big companies actually pay the sticker price.
PS: "The report found that even when foreign, state, and local taxes were included, the tax rate of large companies rose only to 16.9 percent of total income, still well below the official 35 percent." From the same link.
Wrong. Jobs still go overseas or go away, just that you don't see them leave.
Look at the plumbing industry. Drilling holes in a wall and sticking copper tubing through them seems like something that has to remain solidly on shore, right? Let's say it's 120 hours of work to plumb an average house. So you show up to work some day and your boss says "we're switching to PEX." Because you don't have elbows or joints, there is no soldering, and because those holes don't have to line up perfectly, plumbing a house with PEX now takes only about 40 hours. Where did the extra labor go? Some went overseas to the PEX factory, but the rest got laid off.
At the burger place? Where do you think those patties were manufactured? Do you see a McButcher shop in the back of the store? No, the animals were likely raised and slaughtered and packed in rural Brasil, or some other country with cheaper labor and farmland.
It's a global economy now. Parts and materials come from everywhere. Protectionism means little at the borders when it's only keeping out the $7.25/hour illegal immigrants. The total cost to the US economy of illegal immigrants is less than $30 billion. (Compare that to the Wall Street bailout of $750 billion, or to the Iraq / Afghanistan wars with their costs of over $2 trillion.) The real losses to the U.S. job market have come from increased efficiencies, more automation, and overseas manufacturing and labor, where $trillions of dollars have left our payrolls. But hey, let's get Fox banging the illegal immigrant drum and blame them for taking our jobs, because Mexicans are visible and the TV cop shows prove they're all criminals and drug lords. It takes our easily distracted minds off the facts of where the real losses are coming from.
John
I've shoveled manure, mucked out barns, dug ditches and footings, all by hand, and pumped septic tanks and cleaned sewers with low-end power tools and a pump truck. Not my all-time favorite work but it's honest and at the time paid just about enough to survive on (rent, food, utilities, maybe some books and brewskis.) When you're young and healthy it's OK. Later, no. This was all thirty to fifty years ago; I've no idea the spread of pay these days.
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ous&q=fortune+500+average+tax+paid
Overall the top 500 paid an average of half the 35% rate. The GAO report is a good place to start if you really want to know, or one of the news story summaries. Roughly half the entries on a screen and a half of search results were for articles on companies paying zero or less federal tax.
Why would someone buy unmanned machines that have to be manned?
Think commercial aviation. Commercial aircraft fly around on autopilot a lot, they can even land themselves. Similarly the combines/tractors/etc are on autopilot. Precisely navigating the fields, precisely dispensing varied levels of fertilizer or pesticide as testing indicated. Such automation increases yields/profits.
Government agencies have little power to regulate what private individuals do on their own land, and even less when it involves agriculture.
That is so untrue. Do not confuse a lack of power with a decision to give a group with lobbyists a break.
I was shown a pretty impressive set up in a huge greenhouse set up in south lincolnshire which produced pots of herbs.
The sowing of pots was largely automated and there were rails running down the length of the greenhouse with metal trays across the rails.
Essentially the rails were loaded at one end and robots would lift the trays and move them along the rails as the herbs grew. watering was automated so it was long production lines the length of the green house and the robots took care of the plants and the far end of the line the pots were taken off and shipped to supermarkets using minimal manual labour.
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
Articles discussing the "rise of the economic machines" come up very frequently, and every time I think "this is a good thing". Nobody wants to do these shitty jobs. These people will be available/forced to work on something that a human is better at performing. From a business point of view, robotic automation of labor lowers the cost of production. This in turn should result in lower prices for the consumer. Obviously this is very simplistic, but I believe there is a lot of truth to it. Technological advances are good for the human race.
Where is moderation: -1 False?