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Robots Step Into the Backbreaking Agricultural Work That Immigrants Won't Do
HughPickens.com writes: Ilan Brat reports at the WSJ that technological advances are making it possible for robots to handle the backbreaking job of gently plucking ripe strawberries from below deep-green leaves, just as the shrinking supply of available fruit pickers has made the technology more financially attractive. "It's no longer a problem of how much does a strawberry harvester cost," says Juan Bravo, inventor of Agrobot, the picking machine. "Now it's about how much does it cost to leave a field unpicked, and that's a lot more expensive." The Agrobot costs about $100,000 and Bravo has a second, larger prototype in development. Other devices similarly are starting to assume delicate tasks in different parts of the fresh-produce industry, from planting vegetable seedlings to harvesting lettuce to transplanting roses. While farmers of corn and other commodity crops replaced most of their workers decades ago with giant combines, growers of produce and plants have largely stuck with human pickers—partly to avoid maladroit machines marring the blemish-free appearance of items that consumers see on store shelves. With workers in short supply, "the only way to get more out of the sunshine we have is to elevate the technology," says Soren Bjorn.
American farmers have in recent years resorted to bringing hundreds of thousands of workers in from Mexico on costly, temporary visas for such work. But the decades-old system needs to be replaced because "we don't have the unlimited labor supply we once did," says Rick Antle. "Americans themselves don't seem willing to take the harder farming jobs," says Charles Trauger, who has a farm in Nebraska. "Nobody's taking them. People want to live in the city instead of the farm. Hispanics who usually do that work are going to higher paying jobs in packing plants and other industrial areas." The labor shortage spurred Tanimura & Antle Fresh Foods, one of the country's largest vegetable farmers, to buy a Spanish startup called Plant Tape, whose system transplants vegetable seedlings from greenhouse to field using strips of biodegradable material fed through a tractor-pulled planting device. "This is the least desirable job in the entire company," says Becky Drumright. With machines, "there are no complaints whatsoever. The robots don't have workers' compensation, they don't take breaks."
American farmers have in recent years resorted to bringing hundreds of thousands of workers in from Mexico on costly, temporary visas for such work. But the decades-old system needs to be replaced because "we don't have the unlimited labor supply we once did," says Rick Antle. "Americans themselves don't seem willing to take the harder farming jobs," says Charles Trauger, who has a farm in Nebraska. "Nobody's taking them. People want to live in the city instead of the farm. Hispanics who usually do that work are going to higher paying jobs in packing plants and other industrial areas." The labor shortage spurred Tanimura & Antle Fresh Foods, one of the country's largest vegetable farmers, to buy a Spanish startup called Plant Tape, whose system transplants vegetable seedlings from greenhouse to field using strips of biodegradable material fed through a tractor-pulled planting device. "This is the least desirable job in the entire company," says Becky Drumright. With machines, "there are no complaints whatsoever. The robots don't have workers' compensation, they don't take breaks."
Mexico is not so poor anymore. Its per capita income is similar to some European countries (like Bulgaria), and higher than that in the border regions with the US. Combined with the stagnant US economy, this means fewer Mexicans want to work in the US than in the past.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...
I am from a farming family (in the UK). And here are some important things to learn:
1) Huge landowning farmers are rich. On top of being rich, they get a lot of subsidies. They get the subsidies because, being rich, they can bribe politicians. This makes them richer, and more able to bribe. The EU is something I support entirely in principle, because trade is better than war, but in few areas has become more corrupt than subsidising landowners;
2) Smaller farmers struggle. You know why they struggle? Because there are about half a dozen highly profitable supermarkets which have nearly all the negotiating power in deciding the prices of goods they buy. The larger farmers are fine with this, producing the least tasty foods in the worst possible conditions (in the case of animals), because they can make profit on volume, and supermarkets can hit the consumer with a huge markup, behave wastefully (it is ridiculous. how much emphasis is put on appearance of fruit and vegetables, for example, and consumers have been engineered into believing this will have an effect on the taste/quality), and still make a massive profit;
3) The larger concerns would have no problem paying their workers more, but then they would make less profit;
4) The smaller concerns tend to be more enthusiastic about the taste and (for animals) the welfare of their product, but they cannot pay their workers more because of 2).
Unfortunately, smaller farmers are really bad at working cooperatively - the NFU is one of the most conservative unions, and dominated by 1). They could have taken up the opportunity to set up home food delivery networks, but this completely passed them by. So this business has now become associated with overpriced "organic" flim-flammers like Riverford and Abel&Cole, the mainstay of GROLIES and other dullards who have more money than sense, rather than mainstream consumers of food (i.e. almost everyone).
That's a statement of median salary vs. GDP, which is only tangentially related to spending (i.e., only in the sense that consumer spending affects GDP). And wages and salaries really have been falling relative to GDP over the past 50 years.
On the flip side, there are a lot of things that are cheaper today than they were 50 years ago, such as clothing and food (according to this article, those two expenses went from about 42% of the average household budget in 1950 to about 17% in 2003).
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Or more to the point, to compete with strawberries grown in other countries under whatever conditions they deem acceptable.
You can't get strawberries from much further away than Mexico, and even those are inferior to fruit from within the country. Strawberries don't ship well. Most Mexican strawberries never ripen, some of 'em get kinda close but if you know what the real thing is like (I grew up in Santa Cruz) then you know they're crap.
You can get frozen strawberries from further away, but that's expensive too.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"