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Washington State Orchard Owners Look To Robots As Labor Shortage Worsens (seattletimes.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Seattle Times: Harvesting Washington state's vast fruit orchards each year requires thousands of farmworkers, and many of them work illegally in the United States. That system eventually could change dramatically as at least two companies are rushing to get robotic fruit-picking machines to market. The robotic pickers don't get tired and can work 24 hours a day. FFRobotics and Abundant Robotics, of Hayward, California, are racing to get their mechanical pickers to market within the next couple of years. Members of the $7.5 billion annual Washington agriculture industry have long grappled with labor shortages, and depend on workers coming up from Mexico each year to harvest many crops. While financial details are not available, the builders say the robotic pickers should pay for themselves in two years. That puts the likely cost of the machines in the hundreds of thousands of dollars each. FFRobotics is developing a machine that has three-fingered grips to grab fruit and twist or clip it from a branch. The machine would have between four and 12 robotic arms, and can pick up to 10,000 apples an hour, Gad Kober, a co-founder of Israel-based FFRobotics, said. One machine would be able to harvest a variety of crops, taking 85 to 90 percent of the crop off the trees, Kober said. Humans could pick the rest. Abundant Robotics is working on a picker that uses suction to vacuum apples off trees.
Maybe they can just pay the living wage so kids who can't even find work in McDonald's go to work in the orchards instead.
If my full time job allowed me to take a couple of weeks sabbatical I would gladly go work in an orchard to decrease my stress level
Keeps Doctor Roboto away.
Robotic Mexicans? Truly terrifying..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
There is, however, a shortage of workers that will work a seasonal contract job with no benefits at the wages that Washington's agriculture industry wants to pay.
I for one welcome our new robotic fruit pickers.
h1b that shit.
Automation will mean that millions of low-paying, back-breaking agricultural jobs will be carried out by machines. 50-70% of those farm workers are in the country illegally.
Those jobs will be replaced by thousands of well-paying jobs in IT, programming, design, manufacturing, and maintenance, filled by educated Americans that pay more in taxes than they require in services.
And at the same time, agricultural products will end up being cheaper and higher quality.
That's a good deal all around.
A small number of people benefit from the presence of illegal alien workers. The vast majority of the population
does not benefit but suffers instead.
Robots don't commit crimes, don't drive drunk, don't eschew the use of birth control thanks to an unquestioning
allegiance to a religion ( and so breed like rabbits ) and they don't need welfare or food stamps. Nor do they do
a shitty job in the building trades ( ever seen the quality of work done by the average Mexican framer or drywaller ?
It is very poor. ).
The more robots, the better, and it cannot come soon enough.
And when there is no work for the illegal aliens, eventually they WILL go back where they came from, whether
there is a wall built on the border or not. The US is not enriched by the presence of millions of illegal aliens,
and the sooner they get their miserable asses back where they belong, the better.
Cue the knee-jerk responses from the social justice warrior twerps, whose opinion means less to me than the last
turd I flushed. Yeah, I voted for Trump. The main reason I did was so I could see the looks of dismay and despair
on the faces of the clueless SJW losers. Money cannot buy that kind of enjoyment !
Americans should not stand for goods and service produced by forced, child, or otherwise illegal labor.
There is no labor shortage in the United States. Given high enough pay and benefits, all jobs will be filled by legal workers.
If picking fruit paid more and had more benefits than programming, I would have no problem picking fruit on the side.
If the prices of goods and services are artificially low because of forced, child, or illegal labor then they will have to rise. If it's uneconomical to make a good or service in the United States using legal labor, then that good or service should not be produced here. It really is that simple.
It's harder to enter the country illegally, so it's harder to hire people illegally, so you buy robots cuz people on welfare won't do the job.
I fail to see the problem, outside of the "people on welfare" part.
I always thought it would be cool to have robots get rid of bugs and weeds rather than spraying chemicals. Now since they are picking the fruit/vegetables maybe they can be made to do those two things also.
Nobody should have to do the mind-numbing repetitive jobs that machines can do. As for the argument of "people need these jobs," perhaps you should reconsider your stance on universal basic income because this is going to start happening throughout our society. People have claimed these types of robots were fantasy but the fantasy is believing humans were needed for menial tasks.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
There has been a lot of technological innovation in agriculture lately:
Vertical and indoor farming
Aquaculture
Robotics - for far more than harvesting
Cultured meat
etc.
These innovations will provide more and better food at lower cost and with less suffering of both humans and animals. It will also reduce pollution, reduce energy use, and improve food security. That seems like a win/win/win to me.
Good to see this happening.
Computer targeted laser powered mosquito killer could be adapted to kill other bugs, and even ignore good bugs like bees and ladybugs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
If you disagree, please post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like
There is a reason that American teenagers aren't working in orchards... if growers paid enough to get teens to take the jobs, nobody would be able to afford fruit.
No. The reason is that the laws (child labor, working conditions) make it impossible for them to use teenagers any more.
Meanwhile the illegals can't complain about working conditions - and will work for less than minimum wage in (those occupations where it applies.)
US citizens needn't apply because they can't compete. (Even if they were willing to work for sub-legal prices and/or in sub-legal conditions, the employer can't risk that they might turn around and demand the missing money or compensation for the conditions.) The illegals, meanwhile, can afford to work that cheaply because social programs can pay for much of the support of them and their families - turning programs intended to help the poor into subsidies for their employers.
Meanwhile, the government's non-enforcement of the laws against the illegals working means that, in highly competitive markets (such as construction contracting), employers are left with a Hobson's choice: Use illegal labor and be competitive, or try to use legal labor and go out of business.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
and many of them work illegally in the United States.
Ask a farmer that willingly follows the rules, there are some, they will tell you they have no cost effective method to hire legitimate labor. A worker fills in the SSN line with a number that might actually be valid with no cost effective way for the farmer to validate it.
Which, gets us to the problem that big agriculture, and construction doesn't want to touch, a cost effective system to track labor.
Can't find workers, fruits rot on the trees. It seems we need those murders and rapists to pick our fruits.
c'mon automate everything possible already, i cant wait to read more about stuff like this other such as the insane repair/servicing costs of fixing or replacing a loose cable or faulty sensor that won't work because it's not "digitally signed" or some other bullshit reason on these kinds of machinery. It's not as if tractors and other hardware are already an example of abuse on the illusions of cost savings.
Not really. There are plenty of students, homeless etc who are willing to work for almost nothing.
As another wrote, the farmers (or contracting companies at arms length) are not willing to pay illegal wages to the sort of people who can take them to court instead of getting deported.
It's also not just fruit picking.
Or you could pay your workers more. If you can't get theworkers you need at a given wage then obviously you need to offer higher wages. It's not like people have a hard time understanding supply and demand except when it comes to labor.
Skilled construction work used to pay more, and it could put one into the lower middle class. When foreigners started coming in, wages fell, so Americans now try to avoid construction work, because it is low pay.
As for farming, I think labor intensive crops should leave the USA.
There are three big problems for agricultural robots:
1. Damage to the fruit (or grain or vegetable).
2. Damage to the plant (broken branches, damaged roots).
3. Damage to the robot (down-time, repair).
The history of agricultural robots extends back for well over a century, since the first steam tractor was made and folks created ever more complex attachments and accessories. The lack of success for higher levels of agricultural automation to replace manual (human, not animal) labor was due to many, many problems that have been difficult to solve all at once.
The robots are already here, but not where or how you may expect. The highest levels of automation have to do with saving water and energy, directly reducing the costs of running a farm. Automated combines take optimal paths through fields, and can run continuously. Automated soil moisture monitoring and irrigation systems save enormous amounts of water, and also minimize fertilizer runoff.
Robots that increase energy costs must have other offsetting direct economic benefits.
Only an extremely capable (and complex) robot can replace what the human body can do when it comes to harvesting fruit and vegetables. Each fruit and vegetable requires its own specialized robot: There is nothing like a "General Picker Robot", not now, and not soon.
Literally hundreds, perhaps thousands, of different robot types will be needed to automate all harvesting.
"Members of the $7.5 billion annual Washington agriculture industry have long grappled with labor shortages, and depend on workers coming up from Mexico each year to harvest many crops"
Coming up from Mexico? Nope. They were already here. Anyone that lives in the areas where agriculture is the base for the local economy knows that the illegals don't go back.
When I stayed in Germany's Odenwald (where you could get a nice apple by walking roadside anywhere, and lifting an arm), they just let the fruit drop. Then they'd scoop from the ground with a tractor, pulp, press, and make the most delicious Apfelsaft or (next year) rather strong rough cider. Appropriate technology Rules Ja Wohl.
I have a problem with you hiring illegals. It hurts non-illegals. You are an asshole.
Hiring an illegal hurts workers and (in the short term) helps the illegal worker. It screws good people who do the right thing. It rewards sleaze. It hurts us all.
"Would you have any problem with the four hour commute from your desk in the city to a broccoli field in Modesto?"
Is there any point to that weird statement? You deliver it as if you were making a point.
and this whole part:
America's unemployment rate is at 4.7%, which is already about as low as NAIRU unemployment can go. There are 11 million illegal workers. There is no way all those jobs could be filled with legal workers. That is not realistic at all.
As if it were possible to suddenly remove all 11 million illegal workers. Its not so complaining that is not realistic is silly. Please stop trying to justify your selfish bullshit.
Eventually we won't need trees to grow fruit! We will be able to have fruit emerge from rows of plant tissue cultures. $15 billion in research can get that working.
Then, somebody will say .. hmm why do we need fruits when we can just grow fruit tissue cells? They can secrete orange juice or whatever. Another $15 billion in research work can get that working.
Then someone will say why do we need orange fruit cells growing in tissue culture vats to secrete orange juice?
Why not just synthesize the orange juice directly using chemistry -- all you need is carbon, oxygen, hydrogen and some minerals. Another $15 billion in research can get that done.
Let's hope it doesn't become "why is orange juice needed if robots don't drink orange juice?" .. that's the attitude of people who think humans value comes from their work.
This is a symptom of two much larger problems -- the coming automation of menial work leading to massive unemployment, and employers that squeeze every single inefficiency out of a process.
If employers had a choice, they'd make people work for free -- they have no desire to pay even the minimum wage. After all, it cuts into their profits. I'm one of those people who thinks we should leave some slack in the system -- not because I'm a lazy entitled idiot, but because I don't want to see all the desperate unemployed people running around stealing and killing each other.
If you take automation to the extreme end of the spectrum, every job that people typically do is automated, including things like paper filing, IT, programming and fruit picking. This time, skilled workers aren't going to be able to sit back and say "oh, it's those lazy factory workers that don't want to retrain." The reality is that there is no retraining workers for this next phase. If you're below an IQ of, say, 120, there's no work for you. Where that leads, I have no idea...eugenics? Culling of the low end of the population?
People who think that all these migrant workers can just retrain to be data scientists are fooling themselves. I've dealt with a large cross section of society in my various jobs -- there are actual limits on how much a person can handle intellectually. In the past, we had work for them, but I'm not sure what we're going to do now.