As California’s labor shortage grows, farmers replace workers with robots
latimes.com
latimes.com
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 objects. Agricultural robotics needs that kind of speed.
This is going to be solved soon, but probably not by those startups.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKT351pQHfI [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mS0coCmXiYU [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aH_t_1-tl40
(I once worked at a hydraulics R&D facility for a big machinery company. They had that capability, and it took several acres of plant, with everything from overhead cranes to machine shops to scanning electron microscopes. It also took hundreds of people who've done it before. You need that kind of industrial backup. A laptop in a Starbucks is not enough. That gets you a design like Jucero, way overdesigned and overpriced.)
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
The hard parts are not damaging the crop and most importantly not doing the wrong thing.
I picked some peppers from my garden yesterday. A few are not as ripe as I want so I put them into a bag with a banana. Bananas produce more ethylene and by tomorrow all peppers should be red. No taste impact.
Hell... if it costs more than employees you can't find... then to get the work done, it costs more... Then it's either market forces push prices up or companies close.
A large portion of the point of these "machines" is an answer to the labor shortage (and to a lesser extent, the rising cost of labor - IE fight for 15).
Many of these problems will be solved by market forces - higher demand, more people working to solve the issues, issues getting solved, machines going into mass production, economies of scale, rinse, repeat...
The internet also tells me that the average California farm is about 400 acres (a little less than 2/3 of a square mile).
400 * 17424 ~= 7 million feet of row. Million. That's 1320 miles if you want to walk or ride the whole thing one row at a time. I think you're right about speed mattering a great deal.
Today, you need a smartphone's worth of compute power, good vision and control software, and very good mechanical engineering. There are demos of machines picking almost everything; it's now a student project at ag schools. Here's an orange picker, built using an off-the-shelf robot arm. Too slow to be useful. [2] The electronics cost is no longer the problem; its the mechanical parts.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDDVdBLHY7I [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qnQ94JFqYZY
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.
I discovered it when I accidebtly blew a hole in an asphalt parking lot trying to use the compressor to clear sand.
Compressor was a little 50hp Rand diesel tow behind. 120psi 180cfm. In soft soil no water is even needed. A little water (like 2-5 gpm makes everything nicer). I started by making a little brass siphon fitting and then upped it to a garden hose fitting by the end.
Layed miles of sprinkler pipes with it. Always figured it would make a fantastic automatic digger for something or other.
It looked like a tiny little trailer that you pulled behind a jeep or something. It ran all day on a few gallons of diesel.
If this was happening anywhere near me, I would be all over it. I am in the complementary situation; I have a ton of ideas about how I want to build up an experimental farm/nursery/farm-tech incubator, but inadequate space and funding. Hope we see your work here in the future.
On a side note, I feel your pain, my wife grew up in a farming community (kids were late to school because the cows got out) and there is food rotting in the fields because the migrant workers haven't been there en mass the last couple of years. With the INS crackdowns, it's only gotten worse. We love farm stands and join CSA's when we can find them, you guys are great. Keep fighting the good fight!
How is that possible? What part of the country are you in?
Is it that everyone willing to do the work lacks the necessary skills? Or just that no one is willing?
You can probably go to your local FedEx hub and find a bunch of guys who load trucks for less than $15/hr.
That’s because immigrant farmworkers in California’s
agricultural heartlands are getting older and not being
replaced.
The Union of Independent, National and Democratic
Farmworkers (SINDJA) calls for all independent and
autonomous boycott committees to unite for a global
day of action on November 19th. We invite all families
to support the International Boycott against
Driscoll’s in solidarity with farmworkers in San
Quintín, Mexico. In the US, when you sit down at
your tables on Thanksgiving Day, we’re asking you
to please think of the farmworkers in San Quintín,
who work 12 to 15 hours a day for as little as 6
US dollars in take-home pay. Meanwhile, Driscoll’s
is making multiple millions in profits.
This is one of the big questions we'll have to ask in the next 20 or so years, and it just isn't farms. We are going to have to deal with plenty of industries that will merely consume resources and produce without providing any other benefits to society.
I don't know. Hopefully people smarter than me are thinking about this.
It would be a mistake to simply call this "land reform" and confuse it with (e.g. Zimbabwe) while ignoring positive examples (e.g. Ireland). It's a fundamentally different situation brought about by technological progress. The balance of benefits to society of having a risk-taking entrepreneur who is able to (often) produce a desired good and disperse some of the profit to employees is altered. A re-evaluation has become necessary. Ditto for many other industries.
And Ireland is not the only EU nation with a history of positive land reform movements in the late 19th and early 20th century.
-- Refs: Wiki-1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)#Landlor...
>From about 4000 BC oxen are harnessed and put to work. They drag sledges and, somewhat later, ploughs and wheeled wagons (an almost simultaneous innovation in the Middle East and in Europe). The plough immeasurably increases the crop of wheat or rice. The wagon enables it to be brought home from more distant fields.
One could add that development has been particularly rapid over the past 50 years or so.
In a market driven economy...which companies want...employees have market power as well when their is a shortage.
[0] Food security might be worth some subsidization, but not the level that the US currently has.
And automated farm technology will (continue to) cross borders. These machines won't remain only in the US. They will be used in Mexico too.
From the article:
> And native-born Americans aren’t interested in the job, even at wages that have soared at higher than average rates.
> Not surprisingly, wages for crop production have climbed 13% from 2010 to 2015 — a higher rate than the state average, according to a Los Angeles Times analysis of Labor Department data.
> Growers who can afford it have begun offering savings and health plans more commonly found in white collar jobs.
Margins are thin, though, and the article makes it sound like it is more efficient to grow less labor-intensive crops and import the other crops.
Conspicuously absent in every single article claiming that Americans "aren't interested" in farm work is exactly what constitutes "higher than average rates". You _will_ find Americans interested in this work at some rate, but it's going to be higher than what you think it "should" be. In a country where a $15 minimum wage is expected for relatively comfy fast food work, back-breaking outdoor labor is going to be significantly more expensive. But you will find takers at some price.
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 line).
The result is that no one is going to move from even a minimum wage job to farm work unless the pay is even higher and/or other farms get onboard with the higher wages.
Anyway, having people do work that could be automated feels like another version of the broken window fallacy.
* in California. So farmers don't matter, just like other workers who lose their jobs to automation. Got it, thanks for the help.
Nobody said that and I can't believe you would think anybody actually sees the world like that. I would hope that we can find more meaningful ways for people to spend their days than doing things that can be better accomplished via machinery. Otherwise we really are just paying one group to break windows so another group can be paid to fix them and that's not good for anybody.
Producers should be looking for ways to produce more efficiently. Governments should be working on the social problems. We all have a part to play in making our economy work well.
Or providing solutions, just automating their jobs away.
Ignore the social repercussions or try and shift responsibility for who should help them all you want, I suggest it is a very unwise thing to do.
How does welfare in the US cover housing costs ?
Farms are heavily dependent on immigrants, mostly illegal immigrants from mexico (90% are foreign born) for crop workers. They work on our farms for very little pay (but probably more than they would have in mexico), work here for 10 years or so saving as much as possible, then go back to mexico. They may travel from CA > WA through the season; or on the east: FL > OH > ME (this prolongs their work season). They're on average very poor, with little education (6th grade is the average).
With the more recent restrictions on the flow of illegal migrants, many are finding it's impossible to come back to the us (or they choose not to come back). Disrupting the flow of illegal migrants that the farms depend on.
That is the source of the labor shortage that the farms are now complaining about.
Essentially for years they have taken advantage of illegal immigrants to depress wages in their industry. And now they have been cut off, and theyre finding it difficult to adjust their wages to appropriate levels so they can compete in the domestic labor market.
Farmers deserve no sympathy for the labor shortage.. it's an exploitative arrangement. They should automate as much as possible, and for everything else they should pay market rates (whatever those may be... even if it's $100/hr or more (remember its short term hard labor, 2nd most dangerous work in the US)).
This shortage is actually a great thing, if it lasts. Whatever workers are left, might finally get paid a livable reasonable wage.
Edit: if your curious about their conditions, here's the National Agriculture Workers Survey that covers all of this: https://www.doleta.gov/agworker/pdf/NAWS_Research_Report_12_...
It's currently "offline for maintenance", so here's google's cache: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:HiRr7h...
I was trying to find out how things would work if a legal worker alternated between working on farms and living on welfare somewhere out of any work season.
The UK is starting a similar shakeup, most seasonal agricultural work is done by workers from poorer countries in the EU who go back home once the work is done.
I feel that it will be hard to find the market rate for this kind of work in the short term.
At some point, the goods won't move unless they are inelastic goods (which individual foods aren't). There is no single food product which people can not live without.
[1]http://www.inflation.eu/inflation-rates/united-states/histor...
If some industry is employing $10 million of labor and market wages go up 20%, the expected outcome is not spending $12m on labor, you should rather expect something like spending $9m on labor and $2m on machines that weren't worth it back when labor was cheap but are worth it now.
Many industries, including this one, employ humans only because (and only while) they can do it cheaper than the machines. Yet. As the technology matures and becomes cheaper, and people want to earn more, the result is going to be simply less jobs.
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.
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.
But I think you can get trapped in a number 2 situation regardless -- eg, there's an economic downturn, so people spend less, the business "cost optimizes", which causes people to spend less, etc.
I think the second case is a sort of "survival" mode witnessed in fundamentally unhealthy economies where businesses are being squeezed because people in general are being squeezed.
i think the idea still needs some refinement before it can be rolled out at a Holiday Inn though
Therefore paying these workers more should not raise prices. It might make them rise to middle class though :)
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.
I'd also like to see actual evidence that BI cant work out financially. You get X tax dollars out of your economy, you Pay out X/population to each person. How does that not work out?
Subtracting two lines is hyper inefficient?
[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-06-26/seattle-s...
Source: https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/farm-labor.aspx
For some reason they say they can't figure out.. people aren't jumping at the chance to live in poverty.
When they say they cant find people, and they're paying $7/hr or have increased it to $10/hr... it's a joke. They don't want to compete in the free market for labor.
They will only try paying a person $12 an hour if the robots don't work.
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.
I can't vouch for the following, but it seems like something a reasonable person would write: http://www.sarahwoodbury.com/life-expectancy-in-the-middle-a...
That's why we need a "farmworker" visa system, which lets workers come when required and go back as needed. Millions of people work on such visas all over the world; I don't see why it won't work in the US.
The problem is, many people dont go back.
>After decades of crackdowns, the net flow across the U.S.-Mexico border reversed in 2005, a trend that accelerated through 2014, according to a Pew Research Center study
Implement a farmworker visa that lets these workers go back and forth as needed, and suddenly they don't have to bring their families here; they can go back for events and festivals, maintaining a healthy social life. They can't be blackmailed by criminals, because they're here legally. You can even charge them a little bit for catastrophic health insurance.
How can you claim this? Why not bring your family over and let them enjoy the good life.
http://nfwm.org/education-center/farm-worker-issues/low-wage... [0]
Or robots, I guess.
Sadly employers behave like raising wages was not even an option. I guess that's human nature - money going from you pocket is a more tangible expense/loss than money not going into your pocket due to lost profits/opportunity.
This is the heart of the matter. Humans have to eat. It's fundamentally different than any other market.
(farm labor is overwhelmingly concentrated in harvesting produce)
Unless the work was picking onions or strawberries or some other crop which involves spending all day in a terrible bent-over posture. If the pay was the same, though, I'd rather spend the day harvesting apples than spend it making burgers for assholes.
The worst case is about the same. The average day is better picking fruit.
Also, one nice aspect of getting humans out of the fields is that large numbers of human workers (at least) won't be exposed to pesticides.
Yes we're all "economically coerced", by the need to produce economic resources in order to consume economic resources.
It's like Bastiat said 160 years ago:
"Man recoils from trouble - from suffering; and yet he is condemned by nature to the suffering of privation, if he does not take the trouble to work. He has to choose, then, between these two evils. What means can he adopt to avoid both? There remains now, and there will remain, only one way, which is, to enjoy the labor of others."
It's worth it to them to invest in tech rather than continue to pay higher wages.
You can spin it in both directions... on one side, those poor people who do back breaking labor... on the other side, those poor people who can't get jobs that are done by robots.
Interesting time we live in.
What would be the first steps to doing a start up in this space? Anyone interested?
Other issues arise if the orchard is on uneven ground, or their are irrigation lines in the way.
Certainly not insurmountable, but not easy. Then there's the distinct problem of adoption.
I’m definitely interested in the farm/cv realm. It takes funding though.
Modern governments don't have the political will to break the social taboos necessary to instill discipline and personal responsibility in the homeless population, especially when there are large interest groups in the public sector who stand to lose financially from any serious effort to address the underlying causes of homelessness, especially if that effort rejects their ideological assumptions about the causes of homelessness.
These will 99.999999% be McJobs.
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.
You point is so delusional I really wonder how you can develop this kind of mindset and still end up in a technology/startup community like hacker news.
If you have a substantive point to make, make it thoughtfully; otherwise please don't comment until you do.