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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 $7.5 billion annual Washington agriculture industry have long grappled with labor shortages, and depend on workers coming up from Mexico each year to harvest many crops. While financial details are not available, the builders say the robotic pickers should pay for themselves in two years. That puts the likely cost of the machines in the hundreds of thousands of dollars each. FFRobotics is developing a machine that has three-fingered grips to grab fruit and twist or clip it from a branch. The machine would have between four and 12 robotic arms, and can pick up to 10,000 apples an hour, Gad Kober, a co-founder of Israel-based FFRobotics, said. One machine would be able to harvest a variety of crops, taking 85 to 90 percent of the crop off the trees, Kober said. Humans could pick the rest. Abundant Robotics is working on a picker that uses suction to vacuum apples off trees.
I'm in a "weird" part of the country without much in the way of migrant workers and Americans do all "the jobs Americans won't do".
A friend of mine has a teenage son who's worked at a nearby orchard for a couple years, after school and summers. I know, he can't exist according to labor economists who don't get that bottom-wage jobs are for kids with no experience. He's off to college next year, and I doubt a robot will be taking his job.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(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.