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In many cases
No but machines could help secure our border.
Not others.
They won’t complain after using a short handled hoe.
NOPE
There was an interesting article in the past few days about a robotic cotton picker that selectively picks ripe bolls and, using sticky “fingers,” carefully strips out the cotton fibers. It avoids having to spray desiccant on the fields to use large cotton harvesters. But it was unbelievably SLOW.
I saw another interesting YouTube video about robotic drones spraying crops. The operator stood by on a large trailer that acted as a landing platform. He refilled the tank with chemicals and swapped out battery packs. The drone could make one up and return pass over a large field. It could fly a lot closer to the crops, be more selective in spray, avoid drift, and avoid obstacles. It looked real promising but the author never addressed economics.
Nut orchards are highly mechanized now with tree shakers that knock the nuts off the branches.
All of these things look real promising, but you have to wonder about the changes in labor requirements. Fewer unskilled laborers and more highly skilled repairmen and operators / programmers.
Thanks for posting.
Well in fact it has been happening for a long time. From the cotton gin and on. We have tree shakers to dislodge apples and oranges and pears etc, less need for pickers. With futuristic machines with infrared and cameras and various detection devices etc they could harvest everything 24 hours a day. From there it can go to bags and boxes or canneries and onto pallets moved by self driving forklifts and to grocery stores on Tesla self driving semi trailers.
Some human oversight will be needed for a while but even that at some point could be replaced by machine. Timing, who knows but yes absolutely machines can get to where they do it all from tilling and plowing and watering and planting and harvesting and processing and delivery.
They largely were replaced by illegals a couple of decades ago. That delayed some investment in modernization. But a lot of the cloud-based and other IT automation now is really seizing control from the farmers, though they don’t all realize it yet.
Virtually all crops now can be harvested mechanically.
There are laws in California which actually prevent a) using such machinery and b) researching and developing them by the state schools.
Jerry Brown pushed this garbage through the legislature in the 1970s at the insistence of the UFW (you know, Cesar Chavez and the gang). Job protection por los campesinos. If we didn’t have that, there would be ZERO of them in the fields anymore.
Next time you hear those buttwipes griping about their jobs, just laugh.
Can Bloods and Crips be replaced by MS-13 and Tren de Aragua?
Just imagine how much better off present America America would be if the Rust Brothers had invented their machine a hundred years earlier.
Farm workers have been getting replaced by machines for better than 150 years.
OTOH, jobs for people who build, maintain and sell machines have increased in that same time frame.
Farmers only pay a fraction of the real cost of illegal labor. The illegals clog the emergency rooms, schools, jails, section 8 housing at no cost to the farmer or the illegal. There is about one Demonrat-voting government clock puncher on the taxpayer dime per lettuce picker. These same clock punchers are now in charge of and actively stealing elections to keep their customer base jumping the Rio Grande.
thx for the post.
informative and concise, engineering, agricultural and historical/political facts are marshaled and organized with clarity and common sense. kudos to the author.
This has always been the goal, in farming and in business. An employee is an expense, and expenses are bad for profits. This is taught in Economics 101.
Machines are helpmates....Nothing will replace the farmer.
Machines won’t P & D in the fields, which will make buying fresh vegetables a lot safer.
Sure they can. Check out the farms that are automated in circles with the machine that plants, waters. I am not sure how it harvests or if that was by another machine but I never saw a person any time I passed by which was very frequent when I lived near by. Just saw various stages of growth, harvested.
Every single job will be taken over by automation and AI.
And then we who are considered ‘excess people’ will be slaughtered by the billions, probably by an engineered 99.9% fatal disease.