World's First Robotic Farm To Produce 11 Million Heads of Lettuce Per Year (inhabitat.com)

MikeChino writes: Japanese company SPREAD is preparing to open the world's first robot-controlled farm. The facility is designed to produce 11 million heads of lettuce each year, and it's expected to ship its first crop in Fall 2017. The new 47,300 square feet Vegetable Factory in Kansai Science City will also reduce construction costs by 25 percent and energy demand by 30 percent.

Comments

environmental impact

[Nick]

Great for water and energy conservation, and this technology can be moved into places that are difficult to grow produce. But if this really catches on, wonder what this will do to the industry as a whole, and the people put out of work.

Re:environmental impact

[psycho12345]

The same impact as the last 3 centuries. The US used to be composed of mostly farmers and agricultural workers (slaves), something like 90% of the population

Today, agriculture employs less then 3% of the populace. Now, in absolute terms, the number of farmers has gone up, but the population they support has gone far higher.

Re:environmental impact

[barc0001]

Agriculture's workforce has been shrinking continuously since the industrial revolution. Even in the late 1800s, 70-80% of the population was involved in agriculture or food production, now that number is less than 2% for first world nations. Not all crops will benefit from this particular innovation so it will remove some people initially, and then as the puzzle is solved for other crops, more and more people. But it won't be a sudden displacement so a lot of the job losses will be in the form of retirement or switching to other agri jobs on other crops.

Re:environmental impact

[Anonymous Coward]

"It will put people out of work" is never a good reason to reject adoption of a new technology. The fundamental purpose of such tech is to eliminate human labor. It is supposed to put people out of work, and that is exactly why we pay for it!

The proper response is to adapt our culture and laws to work well in an economic environment that relies on such tech. If we are afraid that a bunch of poor people will be unable to survive (because of this tech), then we should address that problem through better use of our tech (to meet their needs), and/or better laws and cultural practices.

If you are unwilling to do this, you might consider joining a nice Amish community, as they always have plenty of work to do! Alternatively, you could try your hand at rejecting all tech and living as a nomad out in a forest, but I am willing to bet you will get pretty fed up with that lifestyle right away.

Re:environmental impact

[bluefoxlucid]

Hunter-gatherer man used to spend 15-20 hours per week per person to collect food. Now 2% of our population are farmers; the rest are busy building information super highways and rocket ships.

I should start over with this paper. I instead started blogging, as I wanted to study more classical and modern economic theory so as to directly assault the field. One of the biggest problems I'm having is dividing the information: I've got a general theory of economic behavior, covering the growth of wealth, the cycle of (un)employment, scarcity, and population growth and restriction; and then I have things like inflation, supply-and-demand theory (mine explains why high-demand goods are cheaper, while low-demand goods are more expensive--this is what subjective theory of value tried to handwave away), and extension theories all the way out to taxes.

The description of how reduction of labor per good creates a cycle of unemployment and re-employment leading to the production of more goods per person (and thus a higher general standard of living) is *not* in the same class as an explanation of how taxes on labor affect unemployment. My biggest criticism about modern economics is its pathological focus on store prices and stock markets; the base theories I produce may lead to arguments about store prices and unemployment, but they're not about value. I've rejected value as a valid economic concept.

Re:environmental impact

[lgw]

And we'll keep moving, and keep getting more efficient - that's called "technology".

The only thing we really might "run out of" is fossil fuels (it's not like we're going to run out of aluminum or something), and we can always fall back on solar and nuclear. Solar has quite a high ceiling on total available power, it's just currently not the cheapest way (and of course you need something at night). Sometime in the next few hundred years fusion will stop being "just 20 years away" and actually happen, and fossil fuels will be a moot point.

It's also only a matter of time before heavy industry moves to asteroids - I used to think that wouldn't be this century, but it's mostly a robotics challenge and that field is moving so amazingly fast these days that I think I might live to see the beginnings of the shift. Long term, we don't need to be "self-sufficient" as we'd describe it today, and "next few hundred years" is a long time in terms of technological progress.

Re: I welcome our new robotic overlords' produce

[Anonymous Coward]

Lettuce wait and see if this pans out.

Re:Profitable? Really?

[gstoddart]

"Kansai Science City" suggests to me this is as much about investigating it and building the technology as it is about a business model.

But, I don't think they're ignoring that either:

Relying on lessons learned from their first farm in Kameoka, SPREAD says their new business model will cut labor costs by 50 percent. The company claims sustainability is at the heart of what they do, and that the new 47,300 square feet Vegetable Factory in Kansai Science City will also reduce construction costs by 25 percent and energy demand by 30 percent.

I for one welcome our new robotic, lettuce-growing overlords.

Red stone is amazing

[Barlo_Mung_42]

People can do all kinds of cool stuff with it.

Have you visited Graygarden?

[Anonymous Coward]

The whole place is run by robots.

Re:Profitable? Really?

[The-Ixian]

Man.... lettuce for dinner again?

Lettuce isn't food.

[dsmatthews9379]

It is simply a crunchy form of mildly flavoured water.

Re: I welcome our new robotic overlords' produce

[slazzy]

Oil contamination may increase though, they should lube the robots with food safe oil.

Re: I welcome our new robotic overlords' produce

[lgw]

So...if this starts becoming predominant in the US, I wonder how many Mexican workers will return home after being displaced by the robots?

This has already played out in California. The state shifted towards tree nuts years ago because they were easier to automate. Still a bunch of immigration (legal and otherwise), just not agricultural. Plenty of unskilled and semi-skilled jobs not yet automated: hotels, restaurants, construction, and landscaping dominate.

Eventually all the low-skill jobs will be automated away, but eventually we're all dead.

Re:Excellent!

[blue9steel]

As long as we fix the social system then that's something to celebrate.

Re: I welcome our new robotic overlords' produce

[chipschap]

They will need to turn over a new leaf.

Re:Excellent!

[LunaticTippy]

Maybe not. >90% of jobs today didn't exist a hundred years ago. I have great faith in humanity finding stupid ways to busy itself for money. Once we figure out how to cleanly make cheap power and robots are taking care of necessities we can all live like kings and do stupid stuff for cash. If things keep progressing faster our culture won't be recognizable in another hundred years. We simply can't imagine what people will be like or do with their time.

It is truly astonishing to think that there are people alive who remember a time before radio, electricity, computers, antibiotics, etc.

People worried about the cotton gin and so forth, but nobody can argue that conditions were better back then for anybody.

Re:Excellent!

[Kjella]

Maybe not. >90% of jobs today didn't exist a hundred years ago. I have great faith in humanity finding stupid ways to busy itself for money. Once we figure out how to cleanly make cheap power and robots are taking care of necessities we can all live like kings and do stupid stuff for cash. If things keep progressing faster our culture won't be recognizable in another hundred years. We simply can't imagine what people will be like or do with their time.

Assuming the reduced costs of living caused by automation exceeds the reduced value of your labor. If you work minimum wage and you're being replaced by a $5/hour robot you lose more than you gain. If you can step up and do something else in demand, great. But if there's an oversupply of burger flippers and taxi drivers who just don't have it in them to become doctors and engineers and automated chefs and self-driving cars are eroding the old jobs you might find yourself cut short.

Maybe it's easier to see this in a global perspective, why don't we give a bunch of illiterate subsistence farmers in Africa food so they can write software for us? Because it doesn't work, that's why. They need an education before they're able to add value to our economy. Like that, only they're your neighbors and it's not an education they lack. People who are not particular smart, creative, attractive or charming but perfectly capable of a routine job except those have all been automated away.

I'm sure you've all experienced it in some limited way like the mythical man-month where the person is in total dragging the total performance down and you're better off not having them on the team. Or that there's something wrong with their skills or personality like coders turning good code into junk, intrigue makers ruining the work environment and so on. But those are the exceptions, the theory is that automation can make it the norm. That the automation is constantly getting better and takes more skill to add value on top of.

The counterargument is essentially that the cheaper it gets, the easier it is to redistribute just enough wealth and spread enough technology to not cause riots or a revolution or anything like that. That they'll spread just enough money on work and welfare programs to keep the population passive, not living like kings at all. Just living well enough that it's not worth doing anything desperate that could disrupt Wall Street and the big money but moderately content wage slaves. The chains are a lot plushier than before.

Robot farming was inevitable...

[Tempest451]

Any process that requires repetitive manual labor in a systematic process will and should eventually be replaced by machines. The planting and harvesting of crops is done my human-driven machines already it was inevitable that the human element would be removed all together. Next will be civil and private construction where humans only be involved in the design and coordination phases of the process.