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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

#121

Post by evgen »

WalterBright wrote: post #120
Retric wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a cost vs. speed trade off, if a machine can do the work of 2 people or 20 people is not the important bit. The important bit is if they can get more work done at lower costs. So, something that get's 1/4 as much work as a person done, but works unattended and only costs 1,000$ then that's a great investment.

A machine can also work 24/7, meaning that a machine that works as well as one person can replace 4 people.

Yes and no. Your machine can pick 24/7, but you need to move the picked produce from the machine hopper to trucks and then to sorting/packaging/etc. Picking the produce is the pointy end of the spear, but there is still a lot of logistics involved in harvest. How much disruption and reorg will this require for the rest of the harvest operation? For some of those giant cereal crop harvests in the US the combines actually do run almost 24/7 during the short window available, so it is obviously possible to do this but changing the tail of the process significantly imposes additional costs on this sort of a replacement.

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

#122

Post by olegkikin »

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…

You can't seriously compare these machines to Festo, which basically works in 2D space in highly controlled environment with zero obstacles.

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

#123

Post by rjsw »

rgbrenner wrote: post #100
criddell wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In another comment on this thread, a farmer said he couldn't hire people at $25 / hour. If a machine can do it, then a machine should do it. Especially work that's difficult and can be dangerous - like farm work.

Yes, but farm workers only work part of the year, and only work on each farm for a few weeks.. then move onto another farm. So having 1 farm paying $25/hr, does not change much for the worker.. after they finish at that farm, they'll need to go to another that's paying near minimum wage (the average for a farm worker).. and the result is that they are still in poverty (the average farm worker lives below the poverty…

This basically requires the worker to be either homeless or that they can leave a house somewhere else empty while they are working on a farm.

How does welfare in the US cover housing costs ?

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

#124

Post by jack9 »

"As California's slave labor shortage grows..."

The awful conditions and pay and protections result in people not wanting to do the work, since it's not even a livable wage. Might as well be begging (or move to somewhere else to beg), which is the easier and ultimately healthier choice.

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

#125

Post by wcarron »

astrange wrote: post #106
hi1234567890 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't realize this would prompt so much emotion. I only said it as a consideration. As a reminder this is a quote from Bill Gates ""If a human worker does $50,000 of work in a factory, that income is taxed," Gates said in an interview with Quartz. "If a robot comes in to do the same thing, you'd think we'd tax the robot at a similar level." < Google it.

If the robot's owner gets an extra $50k income from this, we're actually getting more in tax because their marginal income is higher.

Assuming the owners of capital are actually paying their fair-share of taxes on that extra $50k, as codified by the law.

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

#126

Post by dragonwriter »

astrange wrote: post #106
hi1234567890 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't realize this would prompt so much emotion. I only said it as a consideration. As a reminder this is a quote from Bill Gates ""If a human worker does $50,000 of work in a factory, that income is taxed," Gates said in an interview with Quartz. "If a robot comes in to do the same thing, you'd think we'd tax the robot at a similar level." < Google it.

If the robot's owner gets an extra $50k income from this, we're actually getting more in tax because their marginal income is higher.

> If the robot's owner gets an extra $50k income from this, we're actually getting more in tax because their marginal income is higher.

If the robot is owned by an individual taxpayer paying personal income tax on the income, and if you ignore taxes other than income tax that levied on labor income, and if you ignore accounting tricks, etc., this is fairly obviously true from the way progressive tax rates work.

OTOH, it becomes less obviously true when you consider how the robots are likely to be owned in the real world, the full set of taxes on income in the real world, and the greater practical ability of the rich to avoid taxation in the current system.

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

#127

Post by s73ver »

bflesch wrote: post #14
snarf21 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is definitely worth considering but there is the other side. Do you want prices to continue to rise as labor costs and healthcare grow? Or would you prefer these prices actually drop even as your income grows? I'm not saying either is right or wrong. Maybe this is solved with UBI or some other approach. If the taxes are super high, the incentive to automate is diminished.

This idea is definitely NOT worth considering. With high margins, these robots actually get built, and the price will go down as other competitors catch up. In the end, everyone ends up better as it has been proven again and again in history.

Except those who end up out of a job, and unable to provide for themselves and their families.

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

#128

Post by shostack »

ihsw2 wrote: post #55
PeterisP wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

From a hotel accounting standpoint I honestly wonder which is more profitable for what I'd assume can be classified as a low-skill job:

1. Hire more employees and/or pay higher wages or other benefits to retain experienced (and thus presumably more efficient and effective staff)

2. Churn and burn with abandon because there will always be people desperate enough for any job to keep themselves off the street, even if it's just until they can find something marginally better

I'm not making any judgements on the morality of this...just raising the question since I have a guess that #2 is more profitable.

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

#129

Post by randyrand »

jack9 wrote: post #124

"As California's slave labor shortage grows..." The awful conditions and pay and protections result in people not wanting to do the work, since it's not even a livable wage. Might as well be begging (or move to somewhere else to beg), which is the easier and ultimately healthier choice.

Relative to what? Humans have been farming for thousands of years under worse condition and worse pay, yet humans still did it. In fact, even more humans used to do it. So awful pay and conditions are not a showstopper.

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

#130

Post by HillaryBriss »

noonespecial wrote: post #79
delbel wrote: post #63

Does anyone know of any groups or hacker like groups working on these types of problems? I own a small farm and for the life of me I cant find workers even at $25/hr. I have so far bought several tractors and implements and I am planning to semi-automate as much as possible. But that is not ready this year and I am basically by myself with a shovel... I would like to fully automate as much as possible, and I have zer…

I can't magic you up any workers but here's a hint: You'd be astonished at how quickly and accurately a large air compressor with a small amount of water added to the flow can dig a shallow trench or small hole.

e.g. trenching on a hillside using compressed air: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ur8nbEJxXD8
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