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As California’s labor shortage grows, farmers replace workers with robots

latimes.com

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Re: As California’s labor shortage grows, farmers replace workers with robots

#51

Post by Torgo »

rectangletangle wrote: post #12
mrfusion wrote: post #4

It seems like picking a lot of fruits are easily in the realm of what computer vision is capable of these days. What would be the first steps to doing a start up in this space? Anyone interested?

A lot of the issues currently are related to the mechanical handling of the fruit. It's very important not to bruise or damage the product. Buyers generally have strict rules on exactly how the fruit is picked, e.g., how much stem is still attached to the fruit, for both weight and quality reasons. Other issues arise if the orchard is on uneven ground, or their are irrigation lines in the way. Certainly not insurmoun…

potentially robotics could increase your yields by making uneven plots of land more viable for planting.

Re: As California’s labor shortage grows, farmers replace workers with robots

#52

Post by evgen »

Retric wrote: post #16
Animats wrote: post #2

I've mentioned those machines before. They're still prototypes, nowhere near rugged enough for field use. Agrobot: [1] Too many parts, too many places that can catch dirt, too slow. If they can solve the sensor problem, they need to do a complete mechanical redesign to make it field-ready. Abundant Robotics: [2] Too slow, too fragile. For comparison, here's a Festo vision-guided robot picking up randomly oriented obj…

Speed is significantly less important than your suggesting. The hard parts are not damaging the crop and most importantly not doing the wrong thing.

I would have to disagree on that point; speed is vitally important for equipment like this. Speed and accuracy determine how many of these machines you would need during the short window of peak ripeness. Speed determines how long it will take to get a return (if any) on the capital investment required for the machine. There is a reason that agricultural equipment is so large and most of it has to do with the short window a farmer has available for harvest. A machine that harvests an acre an hour might be useful, a machine that harvests an acre a day is a tourist attraction.

Re: As California’s labor shortage grows, farmers replace workers with robots

#54

Post by Torgo »

JustAnotherPat wrote: post #22
csdrane wrote: post #9

Or they could, you know, offer higher wages.

Picking fruit and vegetables has always been peasant and serf work. The market has never once said, 'you should be paid more,' because there always is an underclass and even if you paid triple what you pay now it'd be the same class of people working the job. The problem is every American thinks he's too good to be at the bottom of the barrel these days.

The underclass is economically coerced. People with options aren't rejecting it because of status, but because it is extremely unpleasant work.

Re: As California’s labor shortage grows, farmers replace workers with robots

#55

Post by ihsw2 »

PeterisP wrote: post #26
avs733 wrote: post #10

They could also, which is notably mentioned no where in the article, pay more? In a market driven economy...which companies want...employees have market power as well when their is a shortage.

The rising wages is notably mentioned in the article, and it is the implied reason for automation - the industry is not going to replace cheap workers with expensive workers, it's going to restructure everything (including the crop species it grows) to ensure that cheap workers are replaced with machines. If some industry is employing $10 million of labor and market wages go up 20%, the expected outcome is not spendi…

Tell that to the plethora of hotels that are constantly hiring contractors to clean their hotels because their staff either quit due to lack of pay or being overworked due to lack of staff.

The same for trucking companies that are haemorrhaging drivers.

The same for the construction industry.

Market efficiency implies the market is managed well. It's not half the time.

Re: As California’s labor shortage grows, farmers replace workers with robots

#57

Post by adventured »

sol_remmy wrote: post #39
masterleep wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wonderful news! Just set the minimum wage to $100/hr, and we'll be in fat city!

The Seattle experiment would have to be repeated for higher levels of minimum wage. I would suggest a basic income instead though, then people won't have to pick fruit to survive :)

Paying the top 1/2 of earners a basic income is hyper regressive and inefficient (you have to turn around and tax it back from them).

The current progressive income tax system paired with a higher income tax credit - instead of a counter productive higher minimum wage - is a vastly superior approach that has already been proven to work very well.

BI is a fantasy at best. At worst, it'll wreck any economy that attempts it - which is also why none has or will. There's no scenario under which BI works out financially.

Re: As California’s labor shortage grows, farmers replace workers with robots

#58

Post by ipsum2 »

evgen wrote: post #52
Retric wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speed is significantly less important than your suggesting. The hard parts are not damaging the crop and most importantly not doing the wrong thing.

I would have to disagree on that point; speed is vitally important for equipment like this. Speed and accuracy determine how many of these machines you would need during the short window of peak ripeness. Speed determines how long it will take to get a return (if any) on the capital investment required for the machine. There is a reason that agricultural equipment is so large and most of it has to do with the short w…

I don't have any experience in the commercial farming space, but since we're talking about strawberry picking here, aren't they picked far before the time that they're ripe, and ripened after using ethylene? (This is the main reason strawberries don't taste as good as they used to)

Re: As California’s labor shortage grows, farmers replace workers with robots

#59

Post by mod »

Animats wrote: post #23
Qworg wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree with your conclusion in the small, Who else is working on it to take up the slack?

Don't know. Doing good mechanical design requires an organization that's good at making machinery. Not that many people are really good at mechanical design. I occasionally mention that I'm into restoring antique Teletype machines. All the good Teletype machines were designed by two people - Howard Krum and Ed Klienschmidt. Competitors mostly copied them, or produced unreliable machinery. (I once worked at a hydrauli…

AVE (a youtube channel) pulled a Juicero apart and looked at it, and came to that same conclusion. Way overdesigned, but really nice guts in the thing.

He thought they were losing money on the hardware, fwiw.

It's a fun watch, if you're into that kind of thing. Warning, he probably uses NSFW language, he does frequently in most videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Cp-BGQfpHQ

Re: As California’s labor shortage grows, farmers replace workers with robots

#60

Post by otempomores »

coredog64 wrote: post #49
tonyedgecombe wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or just import more from Mexico and have Californians concentrate on the higher value jobs.

This would be the best thing. US farm subsidies mean that Mexican farmers can't compete with US farms. If we stopped stupidly subsidizing farming[0], the Mexican economy would be able to make use of more of their citizens. They'd get the tax revenue, and maybe there'd even be more incentive to clean up corruption. [0] Food security might be worth some subsidization, but not the level that the US currently has.

Nobody wants a food free market. A seller advantage would still be starvation.
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