Posted on 04/24/2015 7:28:14 AM PDT by reaganaut1
OXNARD, Calif.—A 14-arm, automated harvester recently wheeled through rows of strawberry plants here, illustrating an emerging solution to one of the produce industry’s most pressing problems: a shortfall of farmhands.
Harnessing high-powered computing, color sensors and small metal baskets attached to the robotic arms, the machine gently plucked ripe strawberries from below deep-green leaves, while mostly ignoring unripe fruit nearby.
Such tasks have long required the trained discernment and backbreaking effort of tens of thousands of relatively low-paid workers. But technological advances are making it possible for robots to handle the job, just as a shrinking supply of available fruit pickers has made the technology more financially attractive.
...
Farmers of corn and other commodity crops decades ago replaced most of their workers with giant combines and other machines that can quickly cut and gather grain used for animal feed, food ingredients and ethanol. But 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.
An abundant supply of workers, particularly from Mexico, willing to plant, pull weeds and harvest ripe crops for relatively low pay also had suppressed the need for mechanization. But the number of unauthorized immigrants in the U.S. workforce has been declining since its peak in 2007, according to the Pew Research Center, in part because of increased job opportunities in Mexico, as well as tighter U.S. border patrols.
With workers in short supply, “the only way to get more out of the sunshine we have is to elevate the technology,” said Soren Bjorn, Americas unit head for Driscoll Strawberry Associates Inc., the country’s largest berry brand. Driscoll’s largest berry grower, Reiter Affiliated Companies LLC, is partly financing the development of Mr. Bravo’s Agrobot.
(Excerpt) Read more at wsj.com ...
bump
Why “workers in short supply” with the intense foreigner importation efforts of Big Ears & Co.?
Oh, he couldn’t possibly want them to be working for the conservative capitalists? Just be dependent on the liberals?
Uh-huh. And with that I dismiss the entire article...
Kudos though to Big Robotry. Ever since the combine, men have been engineering better and better ways to automate harvests. People will still be needed to run and service the machines, though. It will never be a people-free industry. Nature is too gnarly for that.
This invention could stop the money that props up illegals flooding the country.It's a game changer.
Pew, not as in church, but as in stink... someone really ought to press them for explanation.
Someone has to engineer, build, operate, and service the robots.
I for one welcome our new robot overlords.
are these Mexican robots?
Chattel slavery was also a spiritual/moral ball-and-chain. Call me simple minded, but I say when you do that to people (this isn’t either POW conscription or indentured servitude, the types of “slaves” mentioned in the bible) and then you go before God as Dixie did and beg to be a “free” country — you are just asking for instant karma, to mix terminology shamelessly. God’s going to laugh you off as a hypocrite and will be no help.
Only if you intend to idolize them. As tools they are wonderful.
They don’t come here for the ‘jobs’.
They come here for the freebies.................
The rise of robotization is yet another reason we need no more immigrants - legal or illegal. They are being imported for reasons of political and economic power, not because they are needed.
I have friends with very large farms. When they harvest the corn, the guy just sits there and lets the machine do all the work. He takes control if it needs to stop for any reason, but it literally will harvest whatever field or partial field it is set to cover. They are GPS controlled and the guy in the cab only gets involved to over-ride the autopilot - stuff like stopping to clear debris or other “special” circumstances.
My brother in law owns a 115 foot yacht that could drive itself from his favorite cove in Alaska all the way to Seattle.
If the Lord waits, we are going to see HUGE changes in getting things done without human inervention.
A cynical move in the name of humanitarianism... more like manipulatarianism to coin a word.
In the long term that won’t prosper before God let alone people.
We wish. Only a small percentage of border jumpers are heading for temporary jobs in agriculture these days. Most of them are heading for already established urban neighborhoods of fellow colonists who hang drywall, repair cars, deal drugs and collect free $h*+ from the gullible gringa.
From my perspective, automation may increase the "quality of life" for many, but removing human beings from direct production increases the speed of moral decay, and decreases the capacity for applying practical knowledge (common sense) within society.
Build a man's character, thus truly improving the quality of an entire culture by handing him a shovel and having him clean out ditches... not by sending him to government school to learn how to program PLCs on a Ditchdigger 3000.
Physical labor is undervalued is all I am saying.
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