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posted by cmn32480 on Monday April 27 2015, @10:26AM   Printer-friendly
from the we-welcome-our-new-robot-overlords dept.

Ilan Brat reports at the WSJ that technological advances are making it possible for robots to handle the backbreaking job of gently plucking ripe strawberries from below deep-green leaves, just as the shrinking supply of available fruit pickers has made the technology more financially attractive. “It’s no longer a problem of how much does a strawberry harvester cost,” says Juan Bravo, inventor of Agrobot, the picking machine. “Now it’s about how much does it cost to leave a field unpicked, and that’s a lot more expensive.” The Agrobot costs about $100,000 and Bravo has a second, larger prototype in development.

Other devices similarly are starting to assume delicate tasks in different parts of the fresh-produce industry, from planting vegetable seedlings to harvesting lettuce to transplanting roses. While farmers of corn and other commodity crops replaced most of their workers decades ago with giant combines, growers of produce and plants have largely stuck with human pickers—partly to avoid maladroit machines marring the blemish-free appearance of items that consumers see on store shelves. With workers in short supply, “the only way to get more out of the sunshine we have is to elevate the technology,” says Soren Bjorn.

American farmers have in recent years resorted to bringing in hundreds of thousands of workers from Mexico on costly, temporary visas for such work. But the decades-old system needs to be replaced because “we don’t have the unlimited labor supply we once did,” says Rick Antle. "Americans themselves don't seem willing to take the harder farming jobs," says Charles Trauger, who has a farm in Nebraska. "Nobody's taking them. People want to live in the city instead of the farm. Hispanics who usually do that work are going to higher paying jobs in packing plants and other industrial areas."

The labor shortage spurred Tanimura & Antle Fresh Foods, one of the country’s largest vegetable farmers, to buy a Spanish startup called Plant Tape, whose system transplants vegetable seedlings from greenhouse to field using strips of biodegradable material fed through a tractor-pulled planting device. “This is the least desirable job in the entire company,” says Becky Drumright. With machines, “there are no complaints whatsoever. The robots don’t have workers' compensation, they don’t take breaks.”

 
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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by aclarke on Monday April 27 2015, @12:41PM

    by aclarke (2049) on Monday April 27 2015, @12:41PM (#175674) Homepage
    Steam engines have been in use on farms for over 200 years. Before that, horses and oxen have been used with machines in agriculture for thousands of years. Back to the present, anyone who has seen a combine harvester can see how "robots" replace farm workers' "backbreaking" tasks.

    If you want to be impressed, take a look at milking machines. RFID tags on the cows tell the milking machine which cow it is, and can track output per cow. It can administer a distinct mix of foods and medicine for each cow automatically while she is being milked, and correlate that against milk production to help maximize each cow's output. Even the cleaning of stalls is automated in many barns.

    This is a neat story, but it's a story about how technological advances are allowing yet more labour-intensive jobs to be taken over by machines. It's the continuation of a trend that's been in place for a long time.
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  • (Score: 2) by looorg on Monday April 27 2015, @12:56PM

    by looorg (578) on Monday April 27 2015, @12:56PM (#175681)

    This RFID on cows is kinda neat for the consumer, I'm not certain it does much for the cow. Where I live they also track a bunch of other date like milking time and which farm the milk comes from and then they print that on the milk carton. It doesn't really change anything regarding the milk (still delicious!) but it's one of those extra fun information things. It's nice to know that the milk comes from farms that are close by.

  • (Score: 2) by ikanreed on Monday April 27 2015, @01:15PM

    by ikanreed (3164) Subscriber Badge on Monday April 27 2015, @01:15PM (#175686) Journal

    Well, sure. But I'm interested in the nature of individual advances. It colors the world around us, evolution is almost as interesting as (and far less terrifying than) revolution.

  • (Score: 5, Funny) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Monday April 27 2015, @01:27PM

    by GreatAuntAnesthesia (3275) on Monday April 27 2015, @01:27PM (#175692) Journal

    > Even the cleaning of stalls is automated in many barns.

    I don't know why but when I read this the image that popped into my head was one of those sweeper machines they have at the bowling alley: A big mechanical hand comes down from the ceiling and lifts the cow two feet in the air. A giant brush on an arm sweeps underneath, pushing all the hay & dung into a big gutter at the back. Cow is gently replaced in the stall, chewing nonchalantly.

    • (Score: 4, Insightful) by cafebabe on Monday April 27 2015, @03:40PM

      by cafebabe (894) on Monday April 27 2015, @03:40PM (#175746) Journal

      I have an image of a spherical cow looking very surprised.

      --
      1702845791×2
  • (Score: 2) by M. Baranczak on Monday April 27 2015, @11:44PM

    by M. Baranczak (1673) on Monday April 27 2015, @11:44PM (#175898)

    The jobs that are easy to automate have been automated a long time ago. We're now getting into the hard-to-automate jobs like picking fruit, and that's turning out to be much harder. Look at this machine: costs $100k, and it only works for one kind of fruit, and only if the rows are planted a certain way.

    Still, it's pretty impressive. Years ago, I briefly worked on a raspberry farm. My boss had a machine for harvesting the berries; it had several soft plastic wands that flailed around and knocked the ripe berries off the bush and onto a conveyor belt (the unripe ones are attached more firmly, so they tend to stay on). It had a tendency to bruise the fruit, and it collected a lot of unwanted crap like leaves, stems, and bees; so it was only used for raspberries that were going to be squeezed for juice. The ones for retail had to be hand-picked. This machine looks a lot more sophisticated.