8 ms·

Robot Crop Pickers Means Fewer Farm Workers

44 points by hourislate 10y ago

mars4rp 10y ago
there is a huge opportunity for robotic in farming. Tech industry completely ignores it because it's not sexy enough!
- jrowley 10y ago
  I'd say it's not a particularly easy issue to tackle, but I can imagine a farmer renting a specialized fleet of robots to pick x crop and then another set of robots for y crop. It will be hard to create a general purpose robot for picking both oranges and almonds, but only a matter of time.
- tobltobs 10y ago
  or is it because a fruit picker working for a few $ per hour is just cheaper?
  - mars4rp 10y ago
    hiring taxi drivers are relatively cheap too, but all big tech companies are investing on self driving cars. and because of all the investments and research we know we will have a working model soon. also investment reduce the cost. I can argue that cheaper and better food is even more important for the society and human race than autonomous cars, but because it is not sexy enough no one really spent money on it!
    - petra 10y ago
      It may be that innovations that enable shipping of agricultural products from countries with cheap labor will be cheaper than robots.
    - tobltobs 10y ago
      Is all this investment in self driving cars done to replace taxi drivers? Will food get cheaper if picked by robots? And even if, what the use of it if nobody can pay the cheaper prices anymore, because they don't have work anymore, because their work is done by robots? Do you really think big money does decide by sexiness of the product where to invest? Like some JS Hippster selects a framework?
      - mars4rp 10y ago
        yes absolutely I believe that is how investments get decided on big corporations. think about it, the only goal of any CEO is to drive the stock price up. investing on sexy projects create hype and drives the stock prices up, the more you get media coverage about your new project and more people here about it, there going to be more investors and stock prices are going higher !
    - kmicklas 10y ago
      > because of all the investments and research we know we will have a working model soon This definitely does not follow.
  - MBCook 10y ago
    A lot of crops are mechanized. Wheat, corn, many nuts, some kinds of vegetables, some fruits. But as the article points out there are some crops that are just too delicate to harvest mechanically without destroying too much (or basically all) of it, so it's not economical. If your choice is $50k for labor on a $100k of crop or a large upfront investment plus $0 labor and only 10% of your $100k crop is harvestable... the choice is obvious. (all numbers made up)
    - jelliclesfarm 10y ago
      true. field harvesting machines are fascinating. fruit trees are different. nut tree shakers are already pretty common but they are highly polluting...raising clouds of dust. most people dont know how destructive large scale commercial farming is to the environment. gilroy, salinas, central valley...fresno, modesto, stockton...the air quality is the worst. as is water pollution. and farm workers and their children have the worst diets in the country. and they are worst paid...and most vulnerable. declining quality of life and poor health of an entire underclass of the population IS costly. when the children of farm workers are at a higher risk for developing type 2 diabetes before they hit their teens, its a problem. its not luddite to replace farm workers with machines. i cant even...ugh. we need machines. we need farming robots. it is the right thing to do. i am a tiny tiny farm...but the farms that feed the world sprawl over thousands and thousands of acres. they are ginormous and its a mess, frankly. while many tasks in most farms is mechanised, there is certainly a price for it. the advantage to robot farm workers is that they can put in more hours, can self power themselves(we will see this in the future), clean energy, wear and tear can be repaired.
  - modeless 10y ago
    No. My dad is a peach farmer. Human workers are more expensive than automation, but not only that: they are difficult to find and come with tons of regulation and legal risk. Peach harvesting machines exist and my dad would love to use them, however they bruise the peaches too much to be used. Current machines simply shake the tree and let all the peaches fall into a net. Also, those machines are single purpose but picking is not the only labor intensive task. Thinning, propping, and pruning also require a lot of labor. GP has been downvoted, but I think they're right to some extent. There is huge potential for robotics in farming, and although some projects exist I think there is underinvestment relative to other areas. Some of the most advanced and productive farms in the world are less than two hours drive from the heart of Silicon Valley, yet I see no collaboration there.
- searine 10y ago
  >Tech industry completely ignores it because it's not sexy enough! Tech ignores it because the profits are razor thin. It's hard to improve on sun+dirt+human hands.
  - tropo 10y ago
    I'd pay more for food that has never been exposed to animals. This includes humans, birds, rodents, bugs... and their manure too of course. The store counts too. Seal it before it leaves the greenhouse.
- jobu 10y ago
  > Tech industry completely ignores it because it's not sexy enough! More like tech journalism ignores it. There's already been a ton of investment in farm automation. John Deere Autonomous Tractor - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xh2O0c9VBO0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xh2O0c9VBO0 Agrobot Strawberry Harvester - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKT351pQHfI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKT351pQHfI Ferrari RemoWeed - http://www.ferraricostruzioni.com/en/series/remoweed http://www.ferraricostruzioni.com/en/series/remoweed Agricultural Drones - http://www.precisiondrone.com/ http://www.precisiondrone.com/ Lely's Automated Milking Machine - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYg0haya28I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYg0haya28I
- bsder 10y ago
  The tech industry ignores it because it will never return the home run that VC capital needs. Merely profitable businesses don't fit into the tech ecosystem very well.
  - beat 10y ago
    Most of the tech industry is "merely profitable businesses". Unicorns are for VCs and little girls who still believe in stories.
rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
Just gonna put an idea out here: what if food was so abundant it was free? How much cheaper would it be to live? How much could be saved on redistribution schemes like unemployment benefits or Social Security? 50,000 years ago, everybody's job was to find or hunt food. If you didn't your kin-group starved. Then the Ice Ages thawed and we developed agriculture, so only about 70% of the people had to produce food, while the others could specialize in the production of tools or the provision of services like health care. Industrialization and the Green Revolution have made food so plentiful, we can have foods from all over the world available to us at any time of year. So instead of worrying about the future of yesterday's dead jobs, let's make the cost of living as low as possible.
- WaxProlix 10y ago
  > Just gonna put an idea out here: what if food was so abundant it was free? The land it's farmed on has inherent value to someone; there's no amount of labor cost reduction or automation that can bring food costs below the value of the land + whatever raw materials go into production (seed, feed, whatever). > Industrialization and the Green Revolution have made food so plentiful, we can have foods from all over the world available to us at any time of year. And yet people starve all over the place; not just in 3rd world countries but here in the USA. So either it's not that plentiful or we have a serious logistical problem.
  - Girlang 10y ago
    Nobody's starving in the U.S. Our problem is obesity. Raising the cost of food would be a good thing.
  - leereeves 10y ago
    How many people in the US starve to death from simple lack of access to food, without other physical or mental problems that prevent them from obtaining food from one of the many available sources?
  - chris_va 10y ago
    > And yet people starve all over the place; not just in 3rd world countries but here in the USA. So either it's not that plentiful or we have a serious logistical problem. It is the latter, in case you were curious. Access to food requires uninterrupted distribution, which is not always the case.
whyileft 10y ago
Sooo... the workers still doing the work get paid more than they used to and we create new jobs designing and manufacturing the equipment. HN really needs to starting flagging these poor stupid workers will all be out of work porn. Diagnosing doctors will be replaced way before migrant farm labor disappears.
- ceejayoz 10y ago
  Do you really think the proportions of that are going to work out? That laying off a thousand farm workers will somehow generate a thousand replacement engineering jobs (and that these farm workers will somehow get trained to fill them)?
  - whyileft 10y ago
    They will not be laid off in such numbers because there is little economic incentive to do so. Machines cost a lot of money. And they require maintenance over time. You have to realize how little these workers make. Paying US rent full time a person could barely afford to feed and shelter themselves on the money these workers make. We are talking 50 cents a bucket. Pennies per item. There is not a lot of room for automation to undercut. Workers in decision making and diagnosis type roles cost significantly more and mostly only require software(not hardware) to replace. Think about how much a doctor gets paid per cancer diagnosis? Or per cancer treatment prescribed?
up_and_up 10y ago
I have friends that have lived, worked and farmed in Watsonville, CA for a long time. My wife's grandfather has also farmed in MI for decades. The consensus is that farm-workers are getting harder and harder to come by. There is a labor shortage. This shortage has encouraged the investments and greater interest in picking technologies. So to reframe, there are fewer farm workers anyway, due to better border control, lack of interest, or whatever and the picking technologies become more useful.
- enraged_camel 10y ago
  >>There is a labor shortage. This shortage has encouraged the investments and greater interest in picking technologies. It's funny how it hasn't encouraged paying people more.
  - up_and_up 10y ago
    Its tough to raise the price of an agricultural product to accommodate for higher wages. The market sets the price. Plus its literally backbreaking work. Illegals would rather hang drywall, paint houses or whatever and make 50% more.
    - leereeves 10y ago
      And it's an international market. Pickers in America are competing against the cost of labor in developing nations.
- nradov 10y ago
  There is no shortage of farm workers any more than there is a shortage of gold bars. Employers are simply unwilling to pay the market price.
beat 10y ago
Robots have been replacing farm workers a lot longer than this. 200 years ago, 90% of the population was involved in farming. Today, it's less than 3%.
pjc50 10y ago
We can regret the loss of jobs to automation, but picking is brutal. Very hard on the body. And it's seasonal, so it won't sustain you all year. I don't think it'll be missed.
- st3v3r 10y ago
  I mean, it'll probably be missed by those who rely on it for their livelihood. I doubt they'll be offered much in the way of retraining or scholarship.
  - nashashmi 10y ago
    And that is the crux of the problem. Advances like robots working alongside humans are very good and healthy to quality of life, but the number of people who are displaced by such advances is unfair, brutal, cruel. The main people who are behind these acts are less considerate. A fact should be established that these technologies are needed, but the intentions with which they are built is sinister and evil. This leads to robots that are not helping a civilization advance but hurting it. Optimizations could have been created for the worker, but instead they are created for the manager, for the owner, for the businessman, for the shareholder, and for everyone else who thinks workers are the biggest problem in the business.
  - Pica_soO 10y ago
    Thats what Peter Thiel said about CEOs
  - pjc50 10y ago
    The thing is, it's not much of a livelihood or career - you can't do it all year, and it's very much only for the young and fit. And usually imported guest workers. Citation for "young": https://www.theyworkforyou.com/wrans/?id=2004-06-10.175439.h https://www.theyworkforyou.com/wrans/?id=2004-06-10.175439.h : average age of guest workers issued permits was 22. Broader discussion of fruit picking seasonal immigration (which mentions automation too): https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/2016-11-30/debates/9F85AF34-B112-4AA8-BBF7-6ECB4542EC14/SeasonalAgriculturalWorkersScheme https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/2016-11-30/debates/9F8...
tn13 10y ago
Email puts mail delivery man out of work. This luddite news clickbait should not have a place on HN.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- st3v3r 10y ago
  Showing concern for those who will be without a way to support themselves or their families is not being a luddite.
- Jedd 10y ago
  Historically, the luddite concern was that technology would replace humans with no consideration for what society would do with/for those humans. This was, and assuredly still is, a valid and pressing concern. Technologies (outside of military) are rarely regarded as intrinsically bad, but very few administrations over the millennia have felt comfortable talking to their citizenry about how they're going to approach massive social and economic changes. This is in part a failing with governments throughout history, but doubtless also a sad indictment on human nature (difficulty with short vs long term plans, concerns over wealth disparity, preference for inherited social expectations / status quo, etc).
chris_va 10y ago
This site has estimates for agricultural workforce over time: https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural-employment/ https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural-employment/ It is impressive to see how small the fraction has gotten already.
philipkglass 10y ago
It's funny how two people can read the same article and come away with opposite impressions. I didn't see anything in the article mourning the loss of these jobs. I won't mourn the displaced jobs either. They're physically demanding, don't offer steady employment, and don't pay very well. I didn't see anything like Luddism expressed or implied in the article. Is it Luddism if articles about labor saving technology don't always tack on a fairy tale ending that goes "...and the surplus workers lived happily ever after, assured that Lump of Labor is a fallacy and that there's no such thing as demand satiation."?
- st3v3r 10y ago
  But the thing is, it's not labor saving. It's labor displacing. That's not to say we shouldn't try to automate this kind of thing; as you said, it's terrible work. But it's still work that someone depends on to be able to support themselves and their families. And usually, with this kind of thing, there isn't much thought put into how to help those who are displaced by increased automation. Those people still need to be able to support their families.
  - philipkglass 10y ago
    I'm a big fan of decoupling the historical relationship between having salable labor-power and having an income that can be exchanged for goods and services. If the productive economy can go Full Robot, I think that it should, and governments should start planning how their people can get goods and services as opposed to getting jobs. That said, I think it's fair to expect displaced workers' countries to take the lead on adaptation strategies for their own voters. Some displaced crop pickers are eligible to vote in the US but I think that the bulk of them are eligible only in countries outside the US. Undocumented immigrants don't bother me but neither do I feel like it's the responsibility of Americans to provide temporary foreign workers, documented or not, with jobs in the US.
  - jimnotgym 10y ago
    Its reports like this that make me believe that Universal Basic Income will be a necessity in the next century as all the low skilled volume jobs are taken by machines
phreeza 10y ago
We read quite a bit on here about robots and machine learning replacing jobs. Yet productivity growth seems to be almost stagnant, last I heard. So judging by the statistics, this is as yet not a real, large scale phenomenon.
Animats 10y ago
The apple-picking machine from Phil Brown Welding shown not only isn't robotic, it doesn't pick apples. It just supports human apple pickers by putting them in a good position for picking, and collecting the fruit.[1] Real robotic apple-picking machines are still experimental.[2] Too slow, too fragile, too much tech support required. The video of the SRI International spinoff, Abundant Robotics, shows too many people involved, and too much duct tape. FFI Robotics in Israel has a similar demo system. Someone should build a good one within the next few years. But they're not here yet. In practice, many apples are harvested with tree shakers.[3] Simple, cheap, and fast, but a bit hard on the tree. Then they're picked up off the ground with another large, but dumb, machine.[4] There's a variation on this where the tree shaker snaps a net around the tree and catches the fruit as it falls. Once out of the fields, all further processing can be mechanized, and usually is in the developed world. Incredibly fast computer vision systems inspect fruit, berries, and sometimes even kernels of corn and grains of rice. Here's a typical grape-sorting machine, with good slow-motion closeups of the separation of perfect grapes from defective ones.[5] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJEtz8ejPvw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJEtz8ejPvw [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBcWZcjXr-I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBcWZcjXr-I [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6kBvc92KB0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6kBvc92KB0 [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzQ0pfbIW0w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzQ0pfbIW0w [5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbSww5SBqN4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbSww5SBqN4
jelliclesfarm 10y ago
harvest automation is the most difficult and imo, the least urgent. there is a difference between robots assisting human labour and robots replacing human labour. strawberry picking in japanese hydroponic farms comes closest to decent automation. the robotic gripper can pick the ripest strawberry just in time. this is mostly possible because ripe strawberries can be easily recognised because it completely turns colour. colour sensors are utilised here. i have heard of brix measuring also, but i cant imagine how it can be done. strawberry picking is brutal in a regular farm and it is hideous for the soil. it has to be picked a tad unripe so it is ripe when it reaches the supermarket or wholesalers. that's why u-pick strawberry farms are so prevalent. dutch milking robots are the best example of automation in agriculture..altho' its not technically 'agriculture', but rather animal husbandry..but..oh well.
mvidal01 10y ago
It would have been nice of Bloomberg to mention that Brad Goehring is a politician. https://www.facebook.com/pg/Brad-Goehring-118538778165929/about/ https://www.facebook.com/pg/Brad-Goehring-118538778165929/ab...

44 points by hourislate 10y ago

mars4rp 10y ago

there is a huge opportunity for robotic in farming. Tech industry completely ignores it because it's not sexy enough!

jrowley 10y ago
I'd say it's not a particularly easy issue to tackle, but I can imagine a farmer renting a specialized fleet of robots to pick x crop and then another set of robots for y crop. It will be hard to create a general purpose robot for picking both oranges and almonds, but only a matter of time.
tobltobs 10y ago
or is it because a fruit picker working for a few $ per hour is just cheaper?
- mars4rp 10y ago
  hiring taxi drivers are relatively cheap too, but all big tech companies are investing on self driving cars. and because of all the investments and research we know we will have a working model soon. also investment reduce the cost. I can argue that cheaper and better food is even more important for the society and human race than autonomous cars, but because it is not sexy enough no one really spent money on it!
  - petra 10y ago
    It may be that innovations that enable shipping of agricultural products from countries with cheap labor will be cheaper than robots.
  - tobltobs 10y ago
    Is all this investment in self driving cars done to replace taxi drivers? Will food get cheaper if picked by robots? And even if, what the use of it if nobody can pay the cheaper prices anymore, because they don't have work anymore, because their work is done by robots? Do you really think big money does decide by sexiness of the product where to invest? Like some JS Hippster selects a framework?
    - mars4rp 10y ago
      yes absolutely I believe that is how investments get decided on big corporations. think about it, the only goal of any CEO is to drive the stock price up. investing on sexy projects create hype and drives the stock prices up, the more you get media coverage about your new project and more people here about it, there going to be more investors and stock prices are going higher !
  - kmicklas 10y ago
    > because of all the investments and research we know we will have a working model soon This definitely does not follow.
- MBCook 10y ago
  A lot of crops are mechanized. Wheat, corn, many nuts, some kinds of vegetables, some fruits. But as the article points out there are some crops that are just too delicate to harvest mechanically without destroying too much (or basically all) of it, so it's not economical. If your choice is $50k for labor on a $100k of crop or a large upfront investment plus $0 labor and only 10% of your $100k crop is harvestable... the choice is obvious. (all numbers made up)
  - jelliclesfarm 10y ago
    true. field harvesting machines are fascinating. fruit trees are different. nut tree shakers are already pretty common but they are highly polluting...raising clouds of dust. most people dont know how destructive large scale commercial farming is to the environment. gilroy, salinas, central valley...fresno, modesto, stockton...the air quality is the worst. as is water pollution. and farm workers and their children have the worst diets in the country. and they are worst paid...and most vulnerable. declining quality of life and poor health of an entire underclass of the population IS costly. when the children of farm workers are at a higher risk for developing type 2 diabetes before they hit their teens, its a problem. its not luddite to replace farm workers with machines. i cant even...ugh. we need machines. we need farming robots. it is the right thing to do. i am a tiny tiny farm...but the farms that feed the world sprawl over thousands and thousands of acres. they are ginormous and its a mess, frankly. while many tasks in most farms is mechanised, there is certainly a price for it. the advantage to robot farm workers is that they can put in more hours, can self power themselves(we will see this in the future), clean energy, wear and tear can be repaired.
- modeless 10y ago
  No. My dad is a peach farmer. Human workers are more expensive than automation, but not only that: they are difficult to find and come with tons of regulation and legal risk. Peach harvesting machines exist and my dad would love to use them, however they bruise the peaches too much to be used. Current machines simply shake the tree and let all the peaches fall into a net. Also, those machines are single purpose but picking is not the only labor intensive task. Thinning, propping, and pruning also require a lot of labor. GP has been downvoted, but I think they're right to some extent. There is huge potential for robotics in farming, and although some projects exist I think there is underinvestment relative to other areas. Some of the most advanced and productive farms in the world are less than two hours drive from the heart of Silicon Valley, yet I see no collaboration there.
searine 10y ago
>Tech industry completely ignores it because it's not sexy enough! Tech ignores it because the profits are razor thin. It's hard to improve on sun+dirt+human hands.
- tropo 10y ago
  I'd pay more for food that has never been exposed to animals. This includes humans, birds, rodents, bugs... and their manure too of course. The store counts too. Seal it before it leaves the greenhouse.
jobu 10y ago
> Tech industry completely ignores it because it's not sexy enough! More like tech journalism ignores it. There's already been a ton of investment in farm automation. John Deere Autonomous Tractor - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xh2O0c9VBO0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xh2O0c9VBO0 Agrobot Strawberry Harvester - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKT351pQHfI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKT351pQHfI Ferrari RemoWeed - http://www.ferraricostruzioni.com/en/series/remoweed http://www.ferraricostruzioni.com/en/series/remoweed Agricultural Drones - http://www.precisiondrone.com/ http://www.precisiondrone.com/ Lely's Automated Milking Machine - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYg0haya28I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYg0haya28I
bsder 10y ago
The tech industry ignores it because it will never return the home run that VC capital needs. Merely profitable businesses don't fit into the tech ecosystem very well.
- beat 10y ago
  Most of the tech industry is "merely profitable businesses". Unicorns are for VCs and little girls who still believe in stories.

rm_-rf_slash 10y ago

Just gonna put an idea out here: what if food was so abundant it was free? How much cheaper would it be to live? How much could be saved on redistribution schemes like unemployment benefits or Social Security? 50,000 years ago, everybody's job was to find or hunt food. If you didn't your kin-group starved. Then the Ice Ages thawed and we developed agriculture, so only about 70% of the people had to produce food, while the others could specialize in the production of tools or the provision of services like health care. Industrialization and the Green Revolution have made food so plentiful, we can have foods from all over the world available to us at any time of year. So instead of worrying about the future of yesterday's dead jobs, let's make the cost of living as low as possible.

WaxProlix 10y ago
> Just gonna put an idea out here: what if food was so abundant it was free? The land it's farmed on has inherent value to someone; there's no amount of labor cost reduction or automation that can bring food costs below the value of the land + whatever raw materials go into production (seed, feed, whatever). > Industrialization and the Green Revolution have made food so plentiful, we can have foods from all over the world available to us at any time of year. And yet people starve all over the place; not just in 3rd world countries but here in the USA. So either it's not that plentiful or we have a serious logistical problem.
- Girlang 10y ago
  Nobody's starving in the U.S. Our problem is obesity. Raising the cost of food would be a good thing.
- leereeves 10y ago
  How many people in the US starve to death from simple lack of access to food, without other physical or mental problems that prevent them from obtaining food from one of the many available sources?
- chris_va 10y ago
  > And yet people starve all over the place; not just in 3rd world countries but here in the USA. So either it's not that plentiful or we have a serious logistical problem. It is the latter, in case you were curious. Access to food requires uninterrupted distribution, which is not always the case.

whyileft 10y ago

Sooo... the workers still doing the work get paid more than they used to and we create new jobs designing and manufacturing the equipment. HN really needs to starting flagging these poor stupid workers will all be out of work porn. Diagnosing doctors will be replaced way before migrant farm labor disappears.

ceejayoz 10y ago
Do you really think the proportions of that are going to work out? That laying off a thousand farm workers will somehow generate a thousand replacement engineering jobs (and that these farm workers will somehow get trained to fill them)?
- whyileft 10y ago
  They will not be laid off in such numbers because there is little economic incentive to do so. Machines cost a lot of money. And they require maintenance over time. You have to realize how little these workers make. Paying US rent full time a person could barely afford to feed and shelter themselves on the money these workers make. We are talking 50 cents a bucket. Pennies per item. There is not a lot of room for automation to undercut. Workers in decision making and diagnosis type roles cost significantly more and mostly only require software(not hardware) to replace. Think about how much a doctor gets paid per cancer diagnosis? Or per cancer treatment prescribed?

up_and_up 10y ago

I have friends that have lived, worked and farmed in Watsonville, CA for a long time. My wife's grandfather has also farmed in MI for decades. The consensus is that farm-workers are getting harder and harder to come by. There is a labor shortage. This shortage has encouraged the investments and greater interest in picking technologies. So to reframe, there are fewer farm workers anyway, due to better border control, lack of interest, or whatever and the picking technologies become more useful.

enraged_camel 10y ago
>>There is a labor shortage. This shortage has encouraged the investments and greater interest in picking technologies. It's funny how it hasn't encouraged paying people more.
- up_and_up 10y ago
  Its tough to raise the price of an agricultural product to accommodate for higher wages. The market sets the price. Plus its literally backbreaking work. Illegals would rather hang drywall, paint houses or whatever and make 50% more.
  - leereeves 10y ago
    And it's an international market. Pickers in America are competing against the cost of labor in developing nations.
nradov 10y ago
There is no shortage of farm workers any more than there is a shortage of gold bars. Employers are simply unwilling to pay the market price.

beat 10y ago

Robots have been replacing farm workers a lot longer than this. 200 years ago, 90% of the population was involved in farming. Today, it's less than 3%.

pjc50 10y ago

We can regret the loss of jobs to automation, but picking is brutal. Very hard on the body. And it's seasonal, so it won't sustain you all year. I don't think it'll be missed.

st3v3r 10y ago
I mean, it'll probably be missed by those who rely on it for their livelihood. I doubt they'll be offered much in the way of retraining or scholarship.
- nashashmi 10y ago
  And that is the crux of the problem. Advances like robots working alongside humans are very good and healthy to quality of life, but the number of people who are displaced by such advances is unfair, brutal, cruel. The main people who are behind these acts are less considerate. A fact should be established that these technologies are needed, but the intentions with which they are built is sinister and evil. This leads to robots that are not helping a civilization advance but hurting it. Optimizations could have been created for the worker, but instead they are created for the manager, for the owner, for the businessman, for the shareholder, and for everyone else who thinks workers are the biggest problem in the business.
- Pica_soO 10y ago
  Thats what Peter Thiel said about CEOs
- pjc50 10y ago
  The thing is, it's not much of a livelihood or career - you can't do it all year, and it's very much only for the young and fit. And usually imported guest workers. Citation for "young": https://www.theyworkforyou.com/wrans/?id=2004-06-10.175439.h https://www.theyworkforyou.com/wrans/?id=2004-06-10.175439.h : average age of guest workers issued permits was 22. Broader discussion of fruit picking seasonal immigration (which mentions automation too): https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/2016-11-30/debates/9F85AF34-B112-4AA8-BBF7-6ECB4542EC14/SeasonalAgriculturalWorkersScheme https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/2016-11-30/debates/9F8...

tn13 10y ago

Email puts mail delivery man out of work. This luddite news clickbait should not have a place on HN.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
st3v3r 10y ago
Showing concern for those who will be without a way to support themselves or their families is not being a luddite.
Jedd 10y ago
Historically, the luddite concern was that technology would replace humans with no consideration for what society would do with/for those humans. This was, and assuredly still is, a valid and pressing concern. Technologies (outside of military) are rarely regarded as intrinsically bad, but very few administrations over the millennia have felt comfortable talking to their citizenry about how they're going to approach massive social and economic changes. This is in part a failing with governments throughout history, but doubtless also a sad indictment on human nature (difficulty with short vs long term plans, concerns over wealth disparity, preference for inherited social expectations / status quo, etc).

chris_va 10y ago

This site has estimates for agricultural workforce over time: https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural-employment/ https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural-employment/ It is impressive to see how small the fraction has gotten already.

philipkglass 10y ago

It's funny how two people can read the same article and come away with opposite impressions. I didn't see anything in the article mourning the loss of these jobs. I won't mourn the displaced jobs either. They're physically demanding, don't offer steady employment, and don't pay very well. I didn't see anything like Luddism expressed or implied in the article. Is it Luddism if articles about labor saving technology don't always tack on a fairy tale ending that goes "...and the surplus workers lived happily ever after, assured that Lump of Labor is a fallacy and that there's no such thing as demand satiation."?

st3v3r 10y ago
But the thing is, it's not labor saving. It's labor displacing. That's not to say we shouldn't try to automate this kind of thing; as you said, it's terrible work. But it's still work that someone depends on to be able to support themselves and their families. And usually, with this kind of thing, there isn't much thought put into how to help those who are displaced by increased automation. Those people still need to be able to support their families.
- philipkglass 10y ago
  I'm a big fan of decoupling the historical relationship between having salable labor-power and having an income that can be exchanged for goods and services. If the productive economy can go Full Robot, I think that it should, and governments should start planning how their people can get goods and services as opposed to getting jobs. That said, I think it's fair to expect displaced workers' countries to take the lead on adaptation strategies for their own voters. Some displaced crop pickers are eligible to vote in the US but I think that the bulk of them are eligible only in countries outside the US. Undocumented immigrants don't bother me but neither do I feel like it's the responsibility of Americans to provide temporary foreign workers, documented or not, with jobs in the US.
- jimnotgym 10y ago
  Its reports like this that make me believe that Universal Basic Income will be a necessity in the next century as all the low skilled volume jobs are taken by machines

phreeza 10y ago

We read quite a bit on here about robots and machine learning replacing jobs. Yet productivity growth seems to be almost stagnant, last I heard. So judging by the statistics, this is as yet not a real, large scale phenomenon.

Animats 10y ago

The apple-picking machine from Phil Brown Welding shown not only isn't robotic, it doesn't pick apples. It just supports human apple pickers by putting them in a good position for picking, and collecting the fruit.[1] Real robotic apple-picking machines are still experimental.[2] Too slow, too fragile, too much tech support required. The video of the SRI International spinoff, Abundant Robotics, shows too many people involved, and too much duct tape. FFI Robotics in Israel has a similar demo system. Someone should build a good one within the next few years. But they're not here yet. In practice, many apples are harvested with tree shakers.[3] Simple, cheap, and fast, but a bit hard on the tree. Then they're picked up off the ground with another large, but dumb, machine.[4] There's a variation on this where the tree shaker snaps a net around the tree and catches the fruit as it falls. Once out of the fields, all further processing can be mechanized, and usually is in the developed world. Incredibly fast computer vision systems inspect fruit, berries, and sometimes even kernels of corn and grains of rice. Here's a typical grape-sorting machine, with good slow-motion closeups of the separation of perfect grapes from defective ones.[5] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJEtz8ejPvw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJEtz8ejPvw [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBcWZcjXr-I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBcWZcjXr-I [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6kBvc92KB0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6kBvc92KB0 [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzQ0pfbIW0w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzQ0pfbIW0w [5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbSww5SBqN4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbSww5SBqN4

jelliclesfarm 10y ago

harvest automation is the most difficult and imo, the least urgent. there is a difference between robots assisting human labour and robots replacing human labour. strawberry picking in japanese hydroponic farms comes closest to decent automation. the robotic gripper can pick the ripest strawberry just in time. this is mostly possible because ripe strawberries can be easily recognised because it completely turns colour. colour sensors are utilised here. i have heard of brix measuring also, but i cant imagine how it can be done. strawberry picking is brutal in a regular farm and it is hideous for the soil. it has to be picked a tad unripe so it is ripe when it reaches the supermarket or wholesalers. that's why u-pick strawberry farms are so prevalent. dutch milking robots are the best example of automation in agriculture..altho' its not technically 'agriculture', but rather animal husbandry..but..oh well.

mvidal01 10y ago

It would have been nice of Bloomberg to mention that Brad Goehring is a politician. https://www.facebook.com/pg/Brad-Goehring-118538778165929/about/ https://www.facebook.com/pg/Brad-Goehring-118538778165929/ab...