Posted on 02/28/2024 9:25:24 PM PST by zeestephen
Philip Martin is Professor Emeritus of Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of California at Davis...Long essay, but should be of interest to anyone in the food business, and of interest to any general readers who wonder how dinner gets to the dinner table.
(Excerpt) Read more at cis.org ...
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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.
You mean the Mississippi Aggies replacing who historically harvested their cotton.
HAIL STATE
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.
True, to the extent possible machines have already replaced people in other ways I don’t see how a machine could replace people in terms of picking certain crops
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.
There won’t be any “farm workers” for planting, cultivating or harvesting crops in another 15 years. As a John Deere guy told me, they can put in a crop of corn without a farmer being involved other than to initiate actions. The reason farmers still drive tractors is because farmers like to drive tractors. But where the tractor goes and what it does is all automated. See “Precision Agriculture”.
Can Bloods and Crips be replaced by MS-13 and Tren de Aragua?
Exactly.
Lot of tomatoes grown near me for Red Gold
It still takes a lot of labor for growing the plants in a nursery and planting them
They then have to hand pick the first ones as they ripen and come back later with mechanical harvesting, which still takes hands on for sorting out bad or still green ones
I certainly hope not,
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.
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