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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 $7.5 billion annual Washington agriculture industry have long grappled with labor shortages, and depend on workers coming up from Mexico each year to harvest many crops. While financial details are not available, the builders say the robotic pickers should pay for themselves in two years. That puts the likely cost of the machines in the hundreds of thousands of dollars each. FFRobotics is developing a machine that has three-fingered grips to grab fruit and twist or clip it from a branch. The machine would have between four and 12 robotic arms, and can pick up to 10,000 apples an hour, Gad Kober, a co-founder of Israel-based FFRobotics, said. One machine would be able to harvest a variety of crops, taking 85 to 90 percent of the crop off the trees, Kober said. Humans could pick the rest. Abundant Robotics is working on a picker that uses suction to vacuum apples off trees.
If you can't compete with the cost of automation, give up and find something else, the price has been set.
Europe has long had robotic pickers. They don't have Mexicans. Poles want real money.
It's not done until the robot pickers are INXS. They should be running up and down the rows looking for perfectly ripe fruit with an array of sensors, not taking 90% in one pass.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I'm in a "weird" part of the country without much in the way of migrant workers and Americans do all "the jobs Americans won't do".
A friend of mine has a teenage son who's worked at a nearby orchard for a couple years, after school and summers. I know, he can't exist according to labor economists who don't get that bottom-wage jobs are for kids with no experience. He's off to college next year, and I doubt a robot will be taking his job.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
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.
Picking fruit in a commercial production orchard is not like wandering in a pleasant garden and occasionally reaching out to pluck an apple. It is a grueling, dawn-to-dusk exertion in which you position a ladder, fill a container as fast as you can, carry the now 50lb+ container to the truck or drop point, and then repeat over and over again. For each ton of apples you pick, you get around $30. 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.
Here's what happened up here in Canada. In the late 1980's you could pick fruit/veggies/tobacco/etc and earn enough money to put you through a year of university, if you got on a good farm you could earn enough to put you through 2-3 years. This was still the norm in the early 90's, by say '94ish there was a great push of factory farms. And suddenly there were people saying "oh we can't afford to pay these people those wages." And suddenly they loosened the wage rate, and more followed suit. It went from hourly to bushel, and then you started hearing the "but people won't work for what we're paying!" So they relaxed the hiring regs, and allowed the importing of 3rd world labor to do those jobs. And the wages still fell.
If you want to fix the problem, the laws have to be changed. Most governments have no interest in changing the laws on this, and now it's the norm. Now people are seeing this with the abuse of H1B's in the US, and here in Canada with TFW's. The difference between the two is a TFW can be used in any job. The current area we're seeing a flood of people in is with business cleaning run by fly-by-night shops that hire people who are illegally in Canada. But businesses from the CIBC(big bank up here) replacing workers with TFW's, to skilled trades in the oil patch have been hit.
Om, nomnomnom...
Meanwhile the illegals can't complain about working conditions - and will work for less than minimum wage in (those occupations where it applies.)
Well, pickers are often paid by the amount they pick, rather than simply an hourly wage. The reason your average young American can't make decent money is because these are SKILLED LABOR positions. It often takes a few years of picking a particular item of produce before you get enough experience to do it most efficiently. Many pickers specialize in certain fruits or vegetables; hence why many of them are "migrant," since they follow the harvest of what they're good at.
The problem isn't that one can't earn more than minimum wage doing picking -- it's that most Americans view picking as a temporary job or summer thing that they'll do until they find something better. But you have to do it for quite some time before it becomes profitable.
You might read up on what happened in some southern states that passed laws to make it more difficult to hire illegals. They still had migrant legal workers who were pros and could make money, but most of the Americans they'd try to train would quit in a week... It's hard work, and unskilled workers can't keep up enough to make decent money.
Either you pay the kids to do useful work ...
Doing a subsidized job that a robot could do better is not "useful work".
How about the kids stay in school or apprentice in a useful trade instead?
He's off to college next year, and I doubt a robot will be taking his job.
I'm sure someone could invent a robot that smokes weed, listens to Ween, sleeps in until three in the afternoon and then gets online to beg for help writing that essay that's due tomorrow.