" . . . California’s $54 billion agricultural industry cannot afford to wait. As the country’s epicenter of both technology and agriculture, the state is leading the move to automate in the fields and packing plants.
Driscoll’s, the berry titan based in Watsonville, Calif., has invested in several robotic strawberry harvesting start-ups, including Agrobot, which uses imaging technology to assess a berry’s ripeness before it is harvested. It is currently in test phase.
Last spring, Christopher Ranch, a giant in garlic, began using a 30-foot-tall robot to insert garlic buds into sleeves, the nets into which they are bundled for sale in supermarkets. . .
At several stations, a pair of robots with yellow arms that end with a round suction head gripped five-pound packages of shredded lettuce, one by one, and placed them into boxes moving on a belt. Nearby, larger robots did the backbreaking, repetitive work of lifting and stacking filled-up cartons.
Maria Guadalupe, 43, a recent graduate of the company-sponsored technology course, has gone from packing bagged salads into boxes to setting up and monitoring robots that do her old job. 'This is much better work,' she said above the din of the production floor. . ."
Farms are struggling with a shrinking, aging labor force and a crackdown on immigration. Robots are both replacing humans and attracting young workers...
Yet another set of forces pushing towards even more industrialization of agriculture... the robots have been seeming inevitable, and even apart from that the economics of farming seem to be pushing out small and medium-sized farmers faster and faster. On Nov 7 NPR's Marketplace featured an interview with the owner of Burch Farms, plus a related newsletter bit titled "Who will grow our food?" Ties to e.g. weather and tariffs are included. They say census data show that "the average age of a farmer in the United States is now 58" and quote a state Farm Bureau person saying “When you’ve lost $58 billion nationally in net farm income in five years, that’s pretty discouraging to a young person graduating from college thinking about going back into production agriculture.” Then today I saw a pointer to an article about farm bankruptcies increasing across the upper Midwest: there's a new report from the Federal Reserve (Kansas) about e.g. farm income and loan repayment rates continuing to deteriorate.
I don't think any of this is new, just accelerating. But it's great that at least some of the field workers are being retrained!
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