Manual picking is not so bad if you're only trying to meet your own needs, rather than trying to make a living at it; my family used to visit "u-pick" farms whe

Manual picking is not so bad if you're only trying to meet your own needs, rather than trying to make a living at it; my family used to visit "u-pick" farms when I was a kid, and we could easily collect all the fruit we would need for a year in a few hours of work. My mother spent far more time canning and preserving it all than we ever did picking it. Perhaps this idyllic post-scarcity future would include networks of community orchards, akin to the "p-patch" garden system we have in Seattle.