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The Age of Robot Farmers

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Re: The Age of Robot Farmers

#71

Post by bluGill »

pnutjam wrote: post #67
bluGill wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Farmers I know (in California) quit trying to find native workers when at $25/hour they still were not getting anyone to apply, even though that is double the $12/hr McDonalds in pays. That is before you factor in most native workers didn't show up for work regularly. Immigrant workers see $15/hr as riches beyond belief: back home they get about half of that per DAY. To us it looks bad, but to them it is much better…

I'm not seeing any indication that wages ever reached $25 / hour. https://www.epi.org/blog/farmworker-wages-in-california-larg... https://www.latimes.com/projects/la-fi-farms-immigration/ And the job requires at least an hour commute, with 12 hour days. That should require a premium. It's not full-time work.

That was prices offered to locals, not immigrants. By the time you deal with all the paperwork immigrants are worth less. However they work hard, and are happy to get those wages. Again, by our standards working conditions are bad, but to them they are getting rich...

Re: The Age of Robot Farmers

#72

Post by pragmaticlurker »

I see Robot Farmers still a nice try but not a feasible solution. There are many aspects which are still difficult (e.g. Olives, general Trees with Fruits).

It's the same as for self-driving cars: on daylight and clear condition, they work fine, but in case of snow and in the darkness...well, no

Re: The Age of Robot Farmers

#73

Post by olau »

ggm wrote: post #47
chongli wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The price of strawberries needs to reflect the real costs here which include paying pickers a living wage. Replacing pickers by robots only masks the problem What? If we had robot pickers then maybe we could get strawberries to be cheap enough that everyone could afford them, not just those who are wealthy enough to not worry about such jobs.

Displacing workers without considering the workers is an externality in action: everyone else picks up the cost. That's what I feel has happened every time work is automated: the specific company sheds labour cost and society at large has to remediate. If we automate farm work equitably I'll be all in favour: the injury rates and low pay are horrendous. Equitably means we have to man up and address what happens to th…

Huh? We have already automated most of the farm work in the past century through big machines?

It is really what have made our current civilization possible.

Re: The Age of Robot Farmers

#74

Post by linuxftw »

swelz wrote: post #36
thinkloop wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Georgia farmers lost more than a hundred and twenty million dollars > H-2A workers are still among the lowest paid in the country Why don't they pay labour $100M?

I think a larger issue is that food/resource prices may be too low. Obviously, the farmers need to charge for the food/resource, but if they aren't able to turn a profit when properly hiring and paying staff/contractors to work for them, that's an issue. We don't know if the $100MM would cover the new cost or not. I believe there is an issue where we've (the US) relied on such low-cost labor for farms far too long an…

Yes, the food market is heavily distorted. If giant ag businesses that employ immigrants can't make a profit, it means there's too many farms in operation. Farms will close, food prices will rise, and the market will stabilize.

A huge positive to this, smaller family-run farms that don't hire immigrant labor would actually be able to compete with the larger industrial farms. We might even be able to reduce total miles food travels farm to table because it's simply not profitable to ship produce cross-country when local farmers can produce at a competitive price.

Re: The Age of Robot Farmers

#75

Post by icebraining »

imtringued wrote: post #62
ajmurmann wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's obviously because of the way our economy is set up. One possible outcome of more automation could be higher standard of living while doing less work for everybody. Another possible outcome is a large part of the population being unemployed or underemployed, without health care and trouble to keep housing and even put food on the table, while a small portion of the population that owns the robots lives in luxury.…

I don't get it. You're saying the incompetent government's fiscal policy is unable to handle the growing inequality and therefore instead of fixing the government we should just ban robots? Seriously... Nowadays I think the biggest problem developed countries face is the opposition to progress because they are already happy with what they have and any improvement becomes an "us vs them" scenario where the new thing i…

> instead of fixing the government we should just ban robots?

I don't think it's "instead", but "until".

> opposition to progress because they are already happy with what they have and any improvement becomes an "us vs them" scenario where the new thing is demonized.

Find me a single worker who will say no when you tell them "you now own this robot, and can live from its output instead of working".

Re: The Age of Robot Farmers

#76

Post by jmathai »

mikro2nd wrote: post #61
jmathai wrote: post #26

One of my favorite OSS projects is farmbot. I wish more people knew about it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r0CiLBM1o8

Farmbot is a toy. A nice toy, to be sure, but a toy for rich urbanites who want a little veggie garden and it'll never be anything more than that. It goes nowhere near addressing the scale of real-world farming and I see no way it ever can. The concept won't even scale to small-scale market gardening -- the 1- to 10-hectare scale. I'm not saying that farm-robotics in general can't work or scale -- it's a something I'…

What makes you think that? These first few iterations are expensive (in the thousands of dollars) and require assembly but those are not difficult problems to address over time.

Are you saying people wouldn't want to have an automated home garden in their back yard if they could afford it?

Re: The Age of Robot Farmers

#77

Post by tim333 »

pragmaticlurker wrote: post #72

I see Robot Farmers still a nice try but not a feasible solution. There are many aspects which are still difficult (e.g. Olives, general Trees with Fruits). It's the same as for self-driving cars: on daylight and clear condition, they work fine, but in case of snow and in the darkness...well, no

Nitpick - self driving cars have worked fairly well in snow and darkness but still manage issues in good conditions eg. hitting fire trucks (Telsa) or not being able to merge in heavy traffic (Waymo).

Re: The Age of Robot Farmers

#78

Post by noonespecial »

mikro2nd wrote: post #61
jmathai wrote: post #26

One of my favorite OSS projects is farmbot. I wish more people knew about it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r0CiLBM1o8

Farmbot is a toy. A nice toy, to be sure, but a toy for rich urbanites who want a little veggie garden and it'll never be anything more than that. It goes nowhere near addressing the scale of real-world farming and I see no way it ever can. The concept won't even scale to small-scale market gardening -- the 1- to 10-hectare scale. I'm not saying that farm-robotics in general can't work or scale -- it's a something I'…

That sounds suspiciously like the "just get a horse" argument about the first cars.

Re: The Age of Robot Farmers

#79

Post by yazan94 »

bluGill wrote: post #71
pnutjam wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not seeing any indication that wages ever reached $25 / hour. https://www.epi.org/blog/farmworker-wages-in-california-larg... https://www.latimes.com/projects/la-fi-farms-immigration/ And the job requires at least an hour commute, with 12 hour days. That should require a premium. It's not full-time work.

That was prices offered to locals, not immigrants. By the time you deal with all the paperwork immigrants are worth less. However they work hard, and are happy to get those wages. Again, by our standards working conditions are bad, but to them they are getting rich...

> By the time you deal with all the paperwork immigrants are worth less.

I don't see how immigrants are worth less after the paperwork. More expensive maybe, but it seems their worth is related to the work they can output and that isn't directly impacted by the paperwork.

And maybe they are happy to receive those wages, but let's not pretend that they aren't being taken advantage of if they really are being paid less than minimum wage, work 12+ hours, etc.

Re: The Age of Robot Farmers

#80

Post by nabnob »

jhoechtl wrote: post #27

I was wondering wheather a free supply of food enabled by robots doing the job, and free basic housing could solve some of mankinds problems. Is there literature on the topic, had anyone done the maths? Utopia or feasible, that's what I am wondering.

The issue of poverty worldwide is more related to distribution/ownership, and not caused by a lack of food. I think if these robots were owned collectively, it would benefit people. But that's not what's happening - like any other technology, these robots will probably be owned by a handful of people.
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