For the record, I have no problem with robots picking my strawberries. If it makes our strawberry industry more competitive, even better. I’m just wary of Luddites.
I’m agreeing with you in advance of the Luddite onslaught with < / sarc > not required.
Having actually been a farmer (unlike most people who like to bloviate about farming on FR), I’m not in the least concerned with mechanized ag.
In fact, most farmers would rather buy equipment than hire field labor if they can make it pencil in five to seven years’ time (or less). Field labor is a whole lot of headache on two feet. They’re late, they’ve been doing drugs or they’re drunk, they don’t show up, they do stupid things while on the job, etc. In today’s environment, unskilled labor is a huge liability for capital-intensive businesses. There was never a shortage of “potential labor” that showed up at our farm gate, looking for work. 99% of them never made it past the gate, because one glance at their face told me that they were either an alcoholic or a meth-head, and I never saw any point in hiring people who were in a chemically altered state to operate equipment costing me between $10K to $90K per machine.
The single biggest problem for the California strawberry industry (which grows the majority of US strawberries) isn’t labor or mechanized costs, it’s the environmentalists who have put treaties and plans in place to ban the use of methyl bromide fumigants. Without that treatment for soil pathogens, eventually large-scale strawberry production in California will basically cease and the land will go into other crops. Strawberry production will go to Mexico. It’s probably about five years off - the soils will be able to grow economically viable strawberry crops for another three to five years with the expensive (and less effective) substitutes for methyl bromide, but one of the better ones (methyl iodide) was pulled off the market by the Japanese company that made it without warning the producers this past year.