Farm Robots?

Hold on a cotton-pickin' minute!

Katie and her sister inherited a small farm. I told her it’s a shame it’s 3 hours away: we could farm it. She held my hand, quietly telling me, “The pharmacy has a medicine for that.”🙄

No, she does not wax nostalgic for living on a farm! 175 years ago, a majority of labor occurred on a farm. By WW I, farm labor was no longer #1: manufacturing/industrial was. And in 1954, service jobs finally overtook industrial ones.

The Wall Street Journal had two articles this week on Ai and robots: one topic is that Amazon is looking to lay off 10,000 office workers. They’d also like to hire more robotic packers in their warehouses, but the technology still needs to improve. Gripping stuff isn’t easy, but that day will come. Robots regularly beat humans in “Rock Paper Scissors”. They cheat. 😡

The other WSJ article talked about the farm holy grail, robot fruit pickers. They expect we’ll harvest 11 billion pounds of apples this year. Most of those apples are picked by non-Americans. I recall, as a kid, that a little orchard that abutted our neighborhood hired us kids to pick apples after school, 2 hours a day. We made chump change, but we were happy for it. But there are problems with hiring fruit pickers, as politically it is polarized.

What about robots?

The article points out that, “It’s true that farm work is getting more automated. Farmers have mechanized much of the work on row crops such as corn and soybeans, which can be harvested with large equipment. But crops such as peaches and asparagus require delicate handling.” Orchards are different. Fields can be planted much more precisely, lessening the need for greater automated precision. Orchards are much less precise than fields, so the robots have to do more discernment: on ripeness, even on the location of the fruit. Current machines are more likely to bruise fruit, and they pick more slowly. Plus ya gotta get the stems off else, they act like hooligans and stab the others in the bins! Honeycrisps don’t do well with robots … yet.

“Another complication is that to accommodate robotic pickers, many farmers would need to plant new orchards with apples growing on trellises rather than in rows of traditional lollipop-shaped trees. Farms are moving toward this model, but that takes time and money. Establishing a trellised orchard can cost two to four times as much as establishing a conventional free-standing orchard. To enable robots to navigate fields and harvest efficiently, many farms would need to plant fruiting walls—apple trees that have been trained to grow in dense canopies against flat vertical surfaces.”

To make it work, we’ll need to change how an orchard looks, to make it better for picking. And no doubt we’ll have to change characteristics of the fruits as well. Will wise people plant some trees now so they can still have some “originals” to compare to the future apples? Artisanal apples?

Overall, the farmers say it is coming. It’ll take 5-7 years to plant trellised apple orchards, so it will be a slow process for awhile.

The article concludes that we’ll continue to need foreign apple pickers awhile.