Robots Wielding Water Knives Are the Future of Farming
31st May 2017
JUST AFTER DAWN in the Salinas Valley south of San Francisco, a raucous robot rolls through a field spitting clouds of vapor. It’s cutting lettuce heads with water knives—super-high-pressure beams—and gobbling up the produce. The heads roll up its mouth and onto a conveyor belt, where workers in hoodies and aprons grab the lettuce and tear off the loose leaves.
Right across the road, workers are harvesting lettuce the agonizing old-fashioned way—bent over with knife in hand. “If you’re a beginner, it kills you because your back really hurts,” says Isabel Garcia, a harvester who works atop the robot. “It takes somebody really strong to be doing that kind of work.”
Message: Automation is in the process of killing unskilled manual labor. Increasing the minimum wage will only speed up this process.
Because if humanity expects to feed its booming population off a static amount of land, it’s going to need help.
Typical modern pseudo-journalism. (a) Population isn’t ‘booming’; the rate of increase is rapidly slowing, and many First World countries are actually declining in population. (b) The amount of land devoted to agriculture isn’t static; right now we use less land than we ever have, and if we need more, we can put idle land back into production. One of the most distasteful features of popular web sites like Wired is that it hires a lot of proglodyte millennials who take their cultural-Marxist myths as gospel and write as if everybody has the same prejudices that they do. Coming across that in an otherwise interesting/useful piece of writing is like biting down on a bit of eggshell at breakfast.
For sure, the robots will definitely support the dwindling farming workforce. Fewer immigrant workers are coming to the fields, and their demographics are shifting.
Thank you, Donald Trump. Just sayin’.
“Just with a changing population here in California, we’ve got an aging workforce,” says Mark Borman, president of Taylor Farms California, which operates the robot. “So people who are coming out to do agricultural, we’re not getting that younger population into the job.”
Apparently there are jobs that Mexicans are no longer willing to do. Progress, I guess.
That means not only using robots to help fill those jobs, but modifying the product they grow to make things easier for the machine. Taylor Farms has selected a kind of romaine that grows more like a light bulb, which leaves a longer base for the water knife to more efficiently slice. So while workers are adapting to work with the robot, the farm is adapting the produce to work with the machine. This is what the future of agriculture looks like: Humans modifying food to fit robots as much as they modify their own behavior to suit the machines.
This is the same process that gave us our current plethora of tasteless but easily produced produce. No one writing about food thinks this is ‘progress’. Don’t get Michael Pollan started.
“We’re not looking to replace a workforce,” Donohue says. “We’re looking to maintain an industry and the food supply for North America.”
Although, if that means replacing a workforce, well, can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs. I am reminded of the Dilbert cartoon where the pointy-haired boss chides Alice for not working at 110%. “That’s like stealing from the company.” When Alice points out that she’s not getting paid for her overtime, which is like the company stealing from her, he responds “That’s not stealing, that’s being competitive.”
But Donahue has an existential argument on his side that, say, car factory operators don’t: Humanity is in danger of not being able to feed itself.
No, it’s not. That’s (again) just proglodyte mythology, with no Real Science behind it.
By 2050, the world population could boom to almost 10 billion people.
Note the weasel-word ‘could’. It could all die off in a new Black Death, but it probably won’t, and it probably won’t reach 10 billion, either, given the current trends.
Farmers will have to feed those humans—not to mention their livestock—with the same amount of land. Hell, even less land, as ocean levels continue to rise.
‘Continue to rise’? Are they rising now? Really? Any proof of that? No, just another proglodyte assumption. (More eggshell in the scrambled.)
California may be out of its brutal drought, but there’s no telling how climate change will shape the coming decades.
But, even though ‘there’s no telling’, you Social Justice Warriors will be happy to tell us anyway.