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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."
While structural unemployment is a progressive circumstance that will hurt a lot of people very badly if it isn't handled properly I do hope these robots are good enough and cheap enough to replace human labor. Technological unemployment is a first world problem if anything is. That said, when someone says an American won't do the job what they mean is, "I'm not willing to pay a living wage for this job"
If we don't define the terms properly we'll end up with solutions that don't fit the problems.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
we don't have the unlimited labor supply we once did = we don't have an unlimited amount of "slave labor"
And I say the above as an opinion. I base that on the unwillingness of the businesses wanting to pay higher wages which would solve this issue. Or am I incorrect about this?
Man, I never even imagined seeing a time when we ran short of Mexicans.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
So the guys from Mexico will be replace with... hardware from Mexico?
Stupid immigrant hardware taking the jobs of local hardworking hardware... /sarcasm
The choice is grow strawberries that you can sell at a price people will pay, or don't grow strawberries.
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...
Oh noes, but that's not creating jobs, that's losing them, which is automatically bad right?
People will grow out of the 9-5 slave-aholic mindset sooner or later I guess.
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
Oh there are tons of people ready to take that work. Just this year we had the collective American freakout about thousands of Central American kids coming across the border to escape endemic political violence and drug cartel violence (both of which are caused by US actions). There are loads of Central Americans eager to come to the US and work for peanuts, just as there always were. What has changed is that the US won't let them in.
(Although I thought those laws were still mostly unenforced still? Maybe the whole shortage is just spin by the robot industry?)
Once you put food production into the hands of robots, we are soon going to be in trouble.
Read it and weep
1. Unlimited under or unemployed illegal aliens that can't find work.
2. Said illegal aliens need welfare.
3. Middle class being drained via taxation to pay for said welfare.
4 Talk of Illegal aliens being granted amnesty so they can vote in 2016. They will vote for "benefits".
Welcome to the new American feudal system. Only a matter of time before titles come back in vogue. Who will be your Lord?
Life is not for the lazy.
I agree with one exception - there is no way the government will be paying people just for living in the country. That would be a "welfare state" and be deemed evil by too many political elite.
I expect something more along the lines of the movie Elysium (without the space base). A stark separation of the upper class from everyone else.
Exactly. People seem to forget that labor is also a market. If people are unwilling to perform the job at a given pay rate, then the rate is then too low and must be adjusted.
For some reason we have allowed the creation of a permanent immigrant underclass in the US and convinced ourselves that no one else here is willing to do the job. Horseshit. No one is willing to do it at the artificially low wage that agribusiness wishes to pay. Supply and demand has been legislated out of the equation and has flipped the labor market upside down.
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.
That said, when someone says an American won't do the job what they mean is, "I'm not willing to pay a living wage for this job"
It's not a matter of not being willing to pay higher wages. The economics of the industry are such that it is impossible to pay substantially higher wages. Profit margins in farming are low in the best of times and labor cost is a very substantial percent of the cost of most agriculture products. Higher wages in crop picking does not result in meaningfully higher productivity. A person has a physical limit on how much work they can accomplish in a given amount of time. Higher wages will not result in better productivity beyond a certain point. There also is no way for a single farm (even large agribusinesses) to set prices high enough to offset paying higher wages. We as consumers demand that food prices be kept low and unless you can remove the labor component from the price equation the only way to keep prices low is to pay low wages.
I would love to pay farm workers better wages for picking crops but I really do not see a way to make it a reality. Has nothing to do with a willingness or not to pay living wages.
Exactly. People seem to forget that labor is also a market. If people are unwilling to perform the job at a given pay rate, then the rate is then too low and must be adjusted. For some reason we have allowed the creation of a permanent immigrant underclass in the US and convinced ourselves that no one else here is willing to do the job. Horseshit. No one is willing to do it at the artificially low wage that agribusiness wishes to pay. Supply and demand has been legislated out of the equation and has flipped the labor market upside down.
Exactly. Employees leave out the "at the wage I want to pay" at the end of their "I can't get people to take this job..." whine. It's no surprise as people get better educated they don't want to do back breaking labor at low wages.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
They will just import more of the future people like they did last time. "They took our jobs!"
Like almost everyone else, you're blindly blaming the business and ignoring the other half of the equation - the consumer. How much will Joe or Jane Sixpack pay for a pint of strawberries? That ultimately determines how much the business can pay the picker.
You can't have low prices, high quality, and high wages for the worker - pick two.
It's easy to talk about material goods as being "unnecessary" especially if they do not contribute to one's physical safety or health, like shelter, food and water.
For better or for worse, though, we are a consumer society and some things almost start to seem to become needs not because they contribute to our physical safety or health but because they contribute to our ability to integrate socially.
You may not "need" the latest smartphone but at the same time, especially among younger people, you could almost say you need to have a smartphone capable of accessing social networks in a reasonable manner because it's extremely difficult to integrate with many peer groups without one. You will not be able to participate in group dynamics or posses the same social information as other people.
The same thing could be said (more tentatively, because there are other outlets) about Netflix. If you're not able to engage with people socially because you are unaware of the types of programs they consume and cannot participate in discussions about them you are also hindered in group dynamics.
Outside the electronics/media sphere, you can make similar judgements about clothes. You don't "need" clothes that fit a specific fashion or brand paradigm -- you can buy used clothes or dollar store clothes and meet the minimal functional needs for clothing. But style and manner of dress is very important for engaging in peer groups, and like it or not people are in/excluded or find it easier or harder to engage in social activities if their mode of dress is compatible with their peer groups.
Now it's easy to make a lot of value judgements -- especially about social networking (the companies, phenomenon, etc) -- but their existence, usage and impact on social life is a reality and at some point I think some of these things become needs for reasonable social integration. Excluding them because they don't meet some minimalist description of "need" starts to sound myopic and mean spirited because I don't know anyone who just lives based on minimal need.
I assume the original poster doesn't want to do the backbreaking work either -- but that's a moot point, they're too rich and white for that anyway.
How is this marked insightful?
Yes the labor is a market. So is the price of the goods sold. The market for the labor is capped by the amount that allows the goods to be still sold at the market after the costs of producing it, and getting it to the retailer.
> If people are unwilling to perform the job at a given pay rate, then the rate is then too low and must be adjusted.
No. The rate might not be too low. The rate might actual be the correct rate. Just because people aren't willing, or able, to work for that rate, does not mean that it is possibly or the correct decision to increase the labor's wage.
And in my opinion this story is a good example of the markets working properly.
Consumers are willing to pay a certain amount for a good.
The previous workers have better opportunities, and are deciding to stop working for the lower wage.
The producers have accepted this, still want to produce the good, and have instead found other ways to ensure the cost of production meets the ability to sell it at a price that consumers are willing to pay.
It is interesting that finally someone built a machine that can harvest a Strawberry. The rest of the article is an example of bovine scat. I've been there. HughPickens.com, I challenge your work. Prove it.
Its the generic excuse when they introduce machines that put people out of work, or introduce lower paid non-union labor, or do something else that drags wages down. I for one, am sick of this pseudo-'leftist' language being used to justify driving down the price of labor, and putting people out of work.
Have gnu, will travel.
Off-topic:
If the unskilled labor market is completely "free market" then you have a high risk of exploitation. You can bet that if there was no minimum wage that many low-skilled workers would be paid a lot less than $7.25/hour. While there would be more total jobs available at the low end and the teen/young-adult unemployment rate would probably be lower, there would be a lot more "working poor" who had to rely on public assistance in order to survive (or they would be living in 3rd-world conditions because that is all they could afford to do). This is not good for an economy or a nation.
On the other hand if labor is so highly regulated that investors thinking about starting new companies avoid creating jobs that are unskilled just to avoid the regulation, you will have a shortage of work for those who are not-yet-skilled (i.e. teenagers and adult who could be trained but haven't been yet) and those who will be perpetually unskilled due to intellectual and/or physical limits or due to choice (there are a few people who simply do not want to learn new job skills). This isn't good for an economy or country either.
Striking the "right balance" of regulation and the "right form" of that regulation (e.g. direct government regulation or laws that make it easy to unionize or a combination of the two) is not easy and it's typically a moving target: The ideal regulations in given country and industry will change as the industry changes and as the country's economy changes. About the best we can hope for is to be "close enough" to having the "right balance" that the economy functions reasonably well, the short- and long-term unemployment rate and discouraged-worker-rate overall and the rates for specific sectors (e.g. young adults without any college education) aren't so high as to be considered uncivilized, and the actual wages for almost all workers isn't so low as to not cover a very basic standard of living.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
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.
Even the supply of immigrant labor is starting to dry up at current wages (per OP).
That is definitely a sign that the wages are too low.
If the wages can't be raised without killing the other side of the market, it means that the market for strawberries harvested with human labor is simply unsustainable.
Forget diamonds, copyright is forever.
The work that lazy ass "I'm too good for that..." bastards won't do... While drinking Schlitz by the gallon on their trailer home porches
No. The rate might not be too low. The rate might actual be the correct rate. Just because people aren't willing, or able, to work for that rate, does not mean that it is possibly or the correct decision to increase the labor's wage.
And in my opinion this story is a good example of the markets working properly. Consumers are willing to pay a certain amount for a good. The previous workers have better opportunities, and are deciding to stop working for the lower wage. The producers have accepted this, still want to produce the good, and have instead found other ways to ensure the cost of production meets the ability to sell it at a price that consumers are willing to pay.
1) Not being able to fill jobs at a given pay rate is the *classic* economic sign that the wages offered are too low. One of the farmers in the article said that people were not willing to move to the country to farm. This is further the classic case on non-incentivized labor. That quote says they know exactly what the problem is, the producers just aren't willing to remedy it with higher wages.
Personal commentary: They've been use to paying immigrant labor depressed wages for decades. Maybe they just believe that fruit pickers "shouldn't make that much" and the Mexicans are being uppity.
2) And you know what the consumer price cap for strawberries is? Please inform us, what is the price elasticity co-efficient of produce? And if indeed the farmers were to pay $3 - $5 an hour more for labor, how much exactly would that add to the price-per-unit of the goods?
First slaves, then "family farms", then Mexicans, and now possibly machines. From it's early days in the U.S. farmers have looked for ways to depress labor costs This trend continues today. The article linked to is filled with lazy quasi-economics and farmer fear mongering. One is well served to look outside the industry and it's participants to understand its true economics.
How exactly did you get from 'do it on your own dime' to 'i want a dime every time you do it'?
In fact, that used to be where most of their berries went, since they grew types that did not transport very well at all.
The argument is along the lines of the fact that smoking, obesity, etc. have a direct cost to society. From lost productivity to higher healthcare costs, unhealthy lifestyle choices do have a real cost to others who share the planet.
Get an education. If their country won't take care of them why should the USA? A click bait story.
Picking strawberries is extremely labor intensive, but it still seems like human beings would be better at picking out the good ones without damaging them than robots would. I've always thought swarms of small robots would be more useful for pest control: Seeking out and terminating with extreme prejudice any weeds, bugs, or rodents in the field. This could eliminate the use of herbicide and pesticide, hence no more need for "Roundup Resistant" and other GMO seeds. Grain losses to mice run into double-digit percentages in some states; seems like a mouse hunter-killer system could pay for itself.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
California rice has a lot of arsenic in it. They should just stop for that reason alone.
Wrong state. The arsenic problem is in former cotton fields, where arsenic was used as a pesticide to kill the boll weevil. This was OK for a non-food crop, but not great for food crops, particularly rice, which has a marked tendency to pick up arsenic from the soil wherever it's present.
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 same could be said about growing old.
Seems more like a simple supply-and-demand problem to me. Exploitation is easy when you have a huge oversupply of unskilled labor. Cut way back on the labor supply, and wages would rise automatically, with no need to force companies by state fiat to pay employees more than they are worth in a free market. How do you "cut back on the labor supply"? Aye, therein lies the rub...
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Child labor laws were different then, and a greater percentage of families lived on small family farms. Huge corporate farms make it possible to amortize the costs of millions of dollars worth of equipment over significant acreage, but they require huge amounts of seasonal labor to function. The only way to keep seasonal labor employed is to have them move with seasonal demand; migrant labor can just as easily come from another country as another state. Oh, yeah, and 500 years ago, we picked all our own maize ourselves, without any help from you damn undocumented immigrant whites!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
This is exactly why we need the fucking GOP to get off their GD ass and resolve the fucking illegal issues.
The idea of giving ALL illegals amnesty is a joke. But even worse is the idea of taking kids that have grown up here thinking that they are Americans and sending them to another nation. It absolutely shows no compassion.
What is needed is a compromise in which the good kids are allowed to earn citizenship, the parents of any kids that remained here are allowed to have a 'pink card' ( basically, no citizenship and no social benefits such as SSI, Medicare, etc, however, they are allowed to remain and work), while sending all others packing.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
You've summarized the H1B Visa argument in a single sentence...
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
You need to unhock yourself from the front of kock brothers pants.
Seriously.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
nobody is entitled to have people work for them at whatever price they deem sufficient. that's not how a free marked works.
It seems that every single time this sort of topic pops up, we have some SJW crying about greedy 1%'s not paying "a living wage". Even when a "living wage" is not quite at issue, we still have poor downtrodden NFL players being denied a extra $2.5M/year by some rich bastard team owner.
I am always left wondering why the SJW folks (or the NFL players) don't simply, in this case, form a non-profit corporation, buy a strawberry farm, pay $25/hr + healthcare + vacation for pickers, and sell the produce? Leading by example would "prove" that it is possible to make money (or at least not lose money) by selling strawberries picked by $25/hr labor.
There's not a thing preventing anyone from "solving" this "living wage" problem: just open up a competing business that pays a "living wage".
Well, nothing except competition.
I wish I had mod points for this bit of cleverness.
When even the menial, back-breaking labor jobs disappear, what are the masses of humanity (on both sides of every border) supposed to do? If the One-Percenters don't change soon, they won't be able to find high enough gates for their communities nor enough mercenaries to keep them alive against the human tidal wave of the underclass shouting "I'm hungry NOW!!".
So step 1, nationalize service industries by claiming the private (free) sector can't do it; step 2, penalize the (free) individuals requiring service claiming they're using too much.
It's hard to conclude that seeking power & control wasn't behind #1 and #2 all along.
"The robots don't have workers' compensation, they don't take breaks."
And they absolutely will not stop! Ever! Until you are dead.
While traditional "Adam Smith" style economic models say that "free" trade, even lopsided trade, and automation will benefit the overall economy in terms of aggregate GDP; the model says little if anything about the distribution of the benefits of such. For the past 35 years we've seen nearly all of the GDP expansion go to the wealthy. The benefits haven't "trickled down", if you will.
Thus, the 99% may have a good reason to be weary of lopsided trade and automation. It's not just ignorance or fear of change.
Table-ized A.I.
I picked strawberries as a kid, the job blew chunks and paid awful. If robots can do it, hooray!!!! I swear everyone has become such a bunch of luddites. There are social issues about making sure people are empowered to demand good wages for the work only humans can do, but good riddance to this kind of job! And if robots do everything in the future, maybe socialism will be the answer then. The truth is people are more motivated to work by feeling useful and successful anyway.
Backbreaking? Picking strawberries is one of the easiest unskilled labor jobs possible.
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yes but then they're out of the pool of productive people. it's better to keep people productive and contributing to society so we can pay for all the smokers and fatties who duck out early.
I'm more generally referring to things like Hollywood leftist multimillionaires advocating for $15/hour for burger-flipping "living wage". They could take some of their money, buy a Burger King, and pay $15/hour. No one would stop them.
The NFL players could all quit, form a new player-owned football league, and pay themselves whatever they like.
People complaining a CEO's pay is too high could buy enough shares in the company and vote to change to CEO's pay. Or better yet, create a company that directly competes with the too-rich-CEO and pay the CEO of that company equally to the ever-important janitor.
People complaining about NCAA athletes being "exploited" could form a for-pay system where athletes who want to get into the NFL or NBA could play without being forced to go to class or comply with NCAA rules while waiting out the NFL & NBA age limit rules.
It's always about how "the man" is "keeping them down" and how government needs to force someone to do something that the market won't really bear.
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.
The moment you give people guaranteed basic income and replace them with robots - everything that robots can produce becomes FREE, with price of labor producing those products becoming zero.
Because production scales up and cost goes down with number of robots added. Including the production of more robots.
Nothing changes in areas where you still need humans - other than the price of labor being replaced with price of QUALITY.
Not quality as in "this is a 5 stars product" but quality as in "this product is purple - I like purple".
You can get the price of materials and labor down to zero with enough robots.
There is no such thing as scarcity of LOVE AND DESIRE, nor is there an upper limit to the price we are willing to pay for certain things.
We already got examples of that with artists and performers being paid bajilions of dollars for songs and movies nobody actually likes.
Paul Blarp: Mall Blarp 2 made about $62 million so far. It cost $30 million to make.
It has 4% on Rotten Tomatoes, up from 0% it had last week.
There is no reason for that movie to cost so much OR make so much - other than people simply willing to pay for even a chance of entertainment of the kind of QUALITY they might expect from a Kevin James movie.
There are people out there with DESIRE for that crap.
Countries spending billions on nukes they hope they'll never use are the same thing.
Only instead of paying for an illusion of entertainment they are paying for an illusion of security.
There are some things money can't buy.
But that don't mean we should stop tryin.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
everything you've said is idiotic and irrelevant.
Said the guy whose "argument" is nothing more than argumentum ad lapidem.
What do you do for an encore?
Roll on the floor crying "NO! NO! NO! YOU ARE WRONG!" while tearing your hair out?
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
I didn't say it was *my* argument. Read carefully. I was just pointing out the argument that is often used.
I never said it was an argument I agreed with. It is just the argument I often hear from sin tax proponents.
First off, strawberries aren't food? Since when? And pizza and Big Macs are?
I already explained above why strawberries are not food but an edible luxury item, AND gave you a HIGHLY comparable example of almonds.
Both need to be farmed, both are actually really expensive to produce, both use up a lot of water and land...
Only difference being that you can scale down the price of strawberries easier by adding cheap labor while more pickers won't make almonds cheaper because a tree is not a vine, and because the cost of picking is practically non-existent for almonds while cost of planting vines is not comparable to a cost of planting and nursing trees.
And the fact that you are refusing to acknowledge the difference between a MEAL like pizza or burger off of which you can live and work just fine, as many do - and a luxury food item which is basically water and a small amount of sugar and fiber...
That makes you either delusional, dishonest or both. And your "argument" is either nonsense or a strawman. Well... it's actually both, but most strawman are.
What's next? Comparing chocolate to bacon? How about cake and water?
They should all do you just fine - as none of those are produced in the same way nor do they have similar nutritional values nor do they cost the same to produce OR purchase.
I KNOW! How about comparing apples and oranges?
Whatever difficulties there are in picking strawberries are irrelevant, as the production of every food substance has it's own set of challenges. Pizza dough has to be used when it's thawed and can't be refrozen. Same with hamburger. Cheese needs to be refrigerated. French fries can only be up to 2 hours old and then need to be pitched. Buns have to be thrown out once they get stale, and so on. None of which are germane to the discussion of wages.
This whole part is just one big ignoratio elenchi, a false analogy and a strawman where you try to present different actions, all with different costs as if they are one and the same.
Hint: IT'S WHAT YOU ALREADY DID IN THE ORIGINAL ARGUMENT.
You do realize that you compared laboring in the fields with "buns have to be thrown out if stale"?
And then you dot your list of nonsense with a non sequitur.
What? Are you going down a list of fallacies, checking off one by one?
YOUR ANALOGY OF FAST FOOD INDUSTRY WITH FIELD LABOR IS FALSE - WHICH DESTROYS THE BASIS OF YOUR WAGE ARGUMENT.
You can't compare fast food that gets produced year round, 9 to 5, in malls and restaurants - to sunrise to sundown labor in the fields, during a very short period when strawberries are ripe.
Nor do you have to plant a pizza and wait for it to grow, water it, keep it safe from pests for months...
Nor can you hire 500 workers to make that pizza faster - you know... the way more pickers pick the pickings pretty post-haste.
if strawberries are so difficult to pick, and so delicate, one would think you'd need skilled labor to do it correctly and efficiently.
Digging a ditch is difficult. Does that require skilled labor?
How about lifting heavy things?
Nice obtuseness though. Really.
Or are you now making fun of people working in the fields?
"If it were so hard to keep your back bended the whole day, there'd be a school for that. Har-har-har! Ow! My carpal tunnel!"
Not a single "point" you make makes any sense, as you are talking out of your ass.
The story is about people moving on to BETTER jobs. Not necessarily better paid jobs. Wage is not a single measure of a job.
Try working in a field for a day and compare that to a similarly or worse paid work done inside.
Try working on a farm and compare that to a similarly or worse paid work in a city.
Also, the story is about a specific crop. Not just any crop. And certainly not about pizza.
And it is about a technological solution for planting and harvesting that crop NOT because that would be cheaper.
There
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Yeah, I stopped after the first paragraph
Ah yes... Famous last words of those with no arguments apart from repeating that black is white.
And then you go "If people only ate more blah-blah-blah"... which is AGAIN just ignoratio elenchi.
Babbling about irrelevant points cause you have no leg to stand on.
You came to "people should eat more nuts", in a topic about automated strawberry pickers, over a fallacious argument about wages, which you have related to pizza.
That large thing on the horizon you no longer see? That was the topic. You are out at sea, lost and confused.
And in conclusion all you offer is "Nah-ah. You is wrong. WRONG! WRONG! WRONG!!!"
BTW... how can you know if my argument is "fallacial [sic] at best" if you don't read until the end?
Maybe I completely change my mind by the end?
Bah... give my best to the sharks.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Not posting anonymously, because who cares if people know I'm fat. I'm fat, in a nutshell, because you can't make any money exercising, and working for free is bullshit.
Yeah, I should work for the health benefits, my "payment" for tying up a bunch of my limited spare time doing boring sweaty things, because extending my life to the age when I shit in my pants and can't remember my name is totally worth all those reps in the gym.
Meh.