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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.
Man, I never even imagined seeing a time when we ran short of Mexicans.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
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."
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).
It's short-sighted and stupid.
The end result will be torches and pitchforks. And even (some of) the rich know this.
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.
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.
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.