The Age of Robot Farmers
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The Age of Robot Farmers
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Re: The Age of Robot Farmers
#2“Apples, citrus, strawberries, leafy greens, grapes”—those are the five big enough to justify automation.
Some questionable assumptions there.
Re: The Age of Robot Farmers
#3“Apples, citrus, strawberries, leafy greens, grapes”—those are the five big enough to justify automation. Some questionable assumptions there.
Right, for one thing, with automation, it's also reasonable to produce many smaller crops and make up for what you lose in individual crop volume with combined varietal volume.
Or, more likely, produce another, lesser-known fruit or vegetable and market the hell out of it.
Re: The Age of Robot Farmers
#4“Apples, citrus, strawberries, leafy greens, grapes”—those are the five big enough to justify automation. Some questionable assumptions there.
I'm working an an agricultural robotics startup and can confirm that if anything, it's challenging to find robotics use cases in specialty crops that have a large enough market to justify the R&D investment necessary to get the product working in the first place. Corn and soy add up to hundreds of billions of dollars of market value a year, while even a huge specialty crop like strawberries is ~1/100 of that. There's an argument to be made for building out a robotics platform in a crop with higher value per acre (i.e. a specialty crop), then moving to the larger markets (i.e. row crops), but the degree of specialization real world robotics requires is a counterpoint to that - making the jump is often nontrivial.
PS - if anyone reading this is a roboticist/mechanical engineer in the Bay Area and interested in working on something like this or even just talking more, let me know! My email is my username (at) stanford.edu
Re: The Age of Robot Farmers
#5“Apples, citrus, strawberries, leafy greens, grapes”—those are the five big enough to justify automation. Some questionable assumptions there.
Right, for one thing, with automation, it's also reasonable to produce many smaller crops and make up for what you lose in individual crop volume with combined varietal volume. Or, more likely, produce another, lesser-known fruit or vegetable and market the hell out of it.
Sure. Or for example intercrop in ways infeasible with traditional harvesting methodologies to achieve higher density and support more heterogeneous and nutrition-dense farmland ecosystems. Or perhaps remove current needs for transport, processing, sorting, washing, distribution loss, packaging. Or even relocate a plant or set of plants to an alternate location for picking instead of picking in-place.
Re: The Age of Robot Farmers
#6“Apples, citrus, strawberries, leafy greens, grapes”—those are the five big enough to justify automation. Some questionable assumptions there.
I'm working an an agricultural robotics startup and can confirm that if anything, it's challenging to find robotics use cases in specialty crops that have a large enough market to justify the R&D investment necessary to get the product working in the first place. Corn and soy add up to hundreds of billions of dollars of market value a year, while even a huge specialty crop like strawberries is ~1/100 of that. There's…
I run a robotics company in China myself. Would be very interested to chat further and will send you an email.
Re: The Age of Robot Farmers
#7“Apples, citrus, strawberries, leafy greens, grapes”—those are the five big enough to justify automation. Some questionable assumptions there.
I'm working an an agricultural robotics startup and can confirm that if anything, it's challenging to find robotics use cases in specialty crops that have a large enough market to justify the R&D investment necessary to get the product working in the first place. Corn and soy add up to hundreds of billions of dollars of market value a year, while even a huge specialty crop like strawberries is ~1/100 of that. There's…
I've mostly been under the impression that the big wins for machine intelligence in farming is weed and pest control.
Although a Mexican friend of mine said strawberry harvesting is utterly brutal. He also said harvesting grapes is easy work compared to anything else.
Re: The Age of Robot Farmers
#8We need basic income now.
Re: The Age of Robot Farmers
#9We need basic income now.
Lots of countries have an aging pop of farmers where young people are not very attracted to that as a career. This satisfies that trend and allows those regions to remain productive with even fewer people.
Re: The Age of Robot Farmers
#10> In 2011, for example, Georgia enacted a strict immigration law that targeted undocumented workers and their employers. Later that year, the state reportedly lost eleven thousand crop workers. To fill the gap, officials established a program whereby nonviolent offenders nearing the end of their prison terms could do paid farmwork. The program had few takers, and many prisoners and probationers who did try it walked off the job, because the work was so hard. Georgia farmers lost more than a hundred and twenty million dollars.
> “It’s very expensive,” Wishnatzki said of the process of getting visas for temporary agricultural workers—they are issued under a program called H-2A —because of all the red tape and the cost of housing. (“Expensive” is a relative term: H-2A workers are still among the lowest paid in the country.) “But at least it guarantees that we have workers, so we’re able to plant a crop,” he continued.
Farmers now have to actually house and pay their workers instead of giving them scraps under the table for back-breaking manual labor under the brutally hot Georgia summer sun? It's difficult to sympathize, to put it lightly.