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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."
The choice isn't pay a high wage or pay a low wage.
The choice is grow strawberries that you can sell at a price people will pay, or don't grow strawberries.
But when you consider that the people who used to pick fruit are now working in factories sticking consumer goods in boxes, you have to consider our society's priorities pretty messed up. Aside from water and air, there is nothing as important to human life as food. Why does worker reward not reflect this?
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
The choice isn't pay a high wage or pay a low wage.
The choice is grow strawberries that you can sell at a price people will pay, or don't grow strawberries.
No. The choice is use that land to grow strawberries that you can sell at a price people will pay or use that land for something else.
That land does not have to be left fallow and, most importantly, that land doesn't even have to used for farming. It is the owners of that land who wish to artificially restrict themselves, and they are demanding society harm itself to protect their personal preferences.
Like those hades begotten rice farmers in California...
Or more to the point, to compete with strawberries grown in other countries under whatever conditions they deem acceptable.
I've long supported the concept of a VAT-equivalent for pollution (PAT = Pollution Added Tax), where goods are taxed at fixed rates for different pollutants embodied by each manufacturing step, goods leaving the PAT zone are rebated, and goods entering the PAT zone are taxed based on an estimate of their embodied pollution, similar to how VAT works with value changes / rebates / taxes. VAT serves as a way to tax goods without unfairly harming the competitiveness of your products and favoring imported goods, and PAT could extend that logic to pollution controls. But maybe PAT isn't enough. Maybe we also need a HRAT, a "Human Rights Added Tax", which imposes extra fees based on things like human rights abuses, poverty wages, etc embodied in the production of a product, to provide a level playing field for countries with higher standards.
One would have to handle things relatively, of course - a poverty wage in southern California is not the same as a poverty wage in Nigeria, for example, and you don't want to make international sales prohibitive for poor countries simply because their per-capita GDP isn't sufficient. But I'd find it fair to add extra costs at the dock for products produced by factories with inhumane working and living conditions, etc, which keep workers trapped in such conditions by all sorts of means (threats of deportation, threats of violence, unpayable "company store"-type debts, etc). So a strawberry farm in Nigeria paying its workers $2,50 an hour wouldn't be seen as abusive (like one in California would) since that's over double the average national wage and easily meets local cost of living expenses - but a Nigerian farm that left its workers exposed to toxic doses of pesticides and threatened to seize everything their workers own if they try to quit would be seen as abusive even if the nominal salary was $2,50 an hour.
"...but Republicans plan to come back with a new plan, where they just slash the tires on all the ambulances."
You are right, but I think to a point.
50 years ago you didn't need a cellphone or a personal computer. Life would be very difficult without a PC today and likewise for a cellphone. If you are old like me you will remember the ubiquitous payphone, and you will also remember paper-and-phone-driven processes that no longer exist because things are handled more efficiently using computers-and-Internet.
But it's true that very few *need* Cable TV, Netflix, or the latest smartphone.
i always thought it would make a great conspiracy dystopian story where the superrich, with everything automated, don't need us anymore
so they simply kill us all off
the earth reduced to 700,000 souls from 7,000,000,000 in a matter of days (some sort of highly infectious agent?)
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The choice isn't pay a high wage or pay a low wage.
The choice is grow strawberries that you can sell at a price people will pay, or don't grow strawberries.
In Greece we grow strawberries, with most of the production exported to northern Europe. Northern Europe eats strawberries because to grow strawberries at a price people will pay you need low wages (or robots!) - despite Greece's huge (25%) unemployment, no Greek is working in the fields as a strawberries picker (that's the hard labour), so we must employ (paying -illegaly- low wages) all those illegal immigrants (they are illegal, and it's important to note that because it's important for the point i try to make - AND because they are illegal...) invading Greece/Europe seeking higher wages than those they earn in their places of origin (but are satisfied with lower wages than those legal in Greece/Europe - so, by both being illegal immigrants and illegal worker, they steal the ability of legal workers, some of them legal immigrants by the way, to buy strawberries).
I don't try to blame only the illegal immigrants (our Greek producers that illegaly employ them are also to blame), just to claim that this problem is much more complicated than just "sell at a price people will pay, or don't grow strawberries", and the choises you present must include other factors - some of them quite embarrassing for the usual left-wing person that wants both "open borders" and "wage equality" (those problematic situations -together with the cultural problems Muslim, legal or illegal, immigrants create- contributes to the nationalist rise in Europe).
Antisthenes: "Wisdom begins by examining the words/names." - excuse my English, i am (slightly...) better with my Greek!
Aside from water and air, there is nothing as important to human life as food. Why does worker reward not reflect this?
The price of a commodity has little to do with "importance", but with scarcity and cost of production. Air is the most important commodity, yet it is free. Water is the second most important, yet it is extremely cheap (as a residential consumer in California I get about 5 gallons for a penny).
you have to consider our society's priorities pretty messed up.
Do you believe that air is free because of messed up social priorities?
Years ago I picked blueberries and apples in Maine, cherries in NY and pecans in Arizona. It's always the same story. The farmers want low-paid slaves. They go to great lengths to discourage local workers so that they can get foreigners who can be exploited.
An apple farmer I dealt with would shout, threaten and demand that people could easily carry a 24' wood ladder vertically, with no practice. When he'd scared away the locals he'd go to the state labor board and say, "See? Americans won't do this work. I need a planeload of Jamaicans." The Jamaicans could all be housed in one big building and were not allowed off the property unescorted, by law. They were essentially incarcerated servants.
Though the picking in New England was still better paid than the picking in Arizona and S. California because the supply of desperate, illegal Mexicans was virtually unlimited in the Southwest.
The H1-B visa situation in the tech industry must surely be similar. For tech employers to say they can't find Americans for the jobs is a ludicrous lie. In any other industry if an employer said "Americans won't or can't do it" the natural answer would be that the employer is simply not willing to pay a fair wage.
The issue here is not labor. It's factory farming done by giant corporations whose R&D focuses mainly on how to cut corners in order to increase profit.
You're an idiot. The middle class isn't being drained via taxation. Taxes are lower right now than at any point in the last century. It's the stagnation of wages that's causing the middle class to have problems. It's amazing how people will assert something as true that can be debunked with five seconds of Google searching.
What is puzzling you is called the paradox of value. It can be described as the apparent paradox that water is necessary to life, while diamonds are not, but diamonds are much more expensive than water. The answer is that decisions to buy and sell are made at the margin, so the question isn't "How valuable is water to you?" but rather, "How valuable is the next gallon of water to you?" Since, in "our society", we have enough water to support life and agriculture, the marginal gallon of water is used, say, to water golf courses and wash cars. These low-value marginal uses means that the price of water is low, as is actually seen.
Similarly, with the average American's BMI pushing 30, the marginal value of the next strawberry isn't very big to the vast majority of Americans. So the price of strawberries is low, and there is little room to pay strawberry pickers a good wage. Also see Worth: Just because you're necessary doesn't mean you're important.
So, plot twist?
The super rich, having vanquished the threat of mass uprising, end up finding that the plague they unleashed can (the horrors) actually infect them too!
Oregon is a major producer of strawberries in the U.S. Sixty years ago, most of the strawberries here were picked by local youths, as their summer jobs. In the decades that followed, the tradition of kids having manual-labor jobs fell victim to increasing affluence, changing social values, and an influx of migrant workers. A new generation of parents no longer felt it important to teach their kids the work ethic through hard, manual work. Some might argue that, if the strawberries are spoiling in the fields, it started decades ago with the spoiling of our kids.
Actually living in the Ventura-Oxnard area I've found our locally mass-produced (oversized) fruit to look amazing but be actually rather bland tasting. Whereas the home-grown smaller ones from my mom's garden in upstate NY are so full of flavor that it makes you wonder what the california "factory" farms have lost.
Strawberry's are also a luxury item as opposed to staple food. They should be expensive and priced so that workers can be paid better. It is hard unpleasant work that destroys your back and generally doesn't offer any way of advancement, when they are done harvest you get dropped and it's up to you to find your next job.
I for one wouldn't really miss strawberries if the price went way up.
(-and as they also use so much water in california the price should go up for that reason alone!)
The problem is that the underlying assumptions we have about labor and its value are becoming increasingly outdated. For pretty much the entirety of human history, productivity has depended on human labor, and thus, human labor had specific value, even if unskilled. Even as we added animals and machines, you needed a human to lead/operate/drive them. The difference now is that we increasingly don't need those people any more, because the machines drive themselves. The production is no longer done by humans, it's done by robots, and as such the basic value of unskilled human labor is falling, and in a perfectly efficient market, is not enough to support that laborer.
This is a big problem, and it's only going to get worse. The pool of jobs available for people who can't somehow retrain into an advanced skill is going to shrink, and it's going to keep shrinking, regardless of whether that's fast or slow. Right now we've been propping up the old system with a measure of economic interventions - both by subsidizing the value of labor via social safety net programs, and by setting price floors via minimum wage laws. In the long run, it's not going to remain a viable solution.
What we'll eventually need to do is something like a guaranteed basic income, where everyone is given enough money for basic living expenses. You'd then be free to earn additional (disposable) income on top of that by working. This keeps people from starving and rioting, but it also preserves the market functionality of the economy, because people still have money to buy the goods the robots produce.
How do you pay for this? For one, change from taxing human labor, i.e. income, and instead tax the new source of production - robots. You could also get rid of all the other social safety net programs, because they're now redundant (and probably less efficient), and get rid of the minimum wage as it's no longer needed. When no one is forced to work to survive, markets can be allowed to freely set the price of labor, however low.