Chill... They're actually not replacing the farmer, but the hired hand that picks the tomatoes. That's manual labour requiring a 10-minute introduction ("This o

Chill... They're actually not replacing the farmer, but the hired hand that picks the tomatoes. That's manual labour requiring a 10-minute introduction ("This one is ripe, this one is not"). Such robots could potentially improve soil and food quality: they could manually remove weeds, making chemicals unnecessary, and they could possibly also replace the current, heavy machinery that requires large monocultures for efficiency. Imagine strawberries picked by a robot from almost-wild plants grown in between the natural vegetation on terrain that was previously inaccessible to farming. Or growing any number of crops in a chaotic mix on current fields.