The Briefing Room
General Category => Economy/Business => Topic started by: Suppressed on July 21, 2017, 02:24:58 pm
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As California’s labor shortage grows, farmers race to replace workers with robots
By GEOFFREY MOHAN
Photography by GARY CORONADO
JULY 21, 2017 | REPORTING FROM SALINAS, CALIF.
http://www.latimes.com/projects/la-fi-farm-mechanization/
Driscoll’s is so secretive about its robotic strawberry picker it won’t let photographers within telephoto range of it.
But if you do get a peek, you won’t see anything humanoid or space-aged. AgroBot is still more John Deere than C-3PO — a boxy contraption moving in fits and starts, with its computer-driven sensors, graspers and cutters missing 1 in 3 berries.
Such has been the progress of ag-tech in California, where despite the adoption of drones, iPhone apps and satellite-driven sensors, the hand and knife still harvest the bulk of more than 200 crops.
Now, the $47-billion agriculture industry is trying to bring technological innovation up to warp speed before it runs out of low-wage immigrant workers.
California will have to remake its fields like it did its factories, with more machines and better-educated workers to labor beside them, or risk losing entire crops, economists say.
“California agriculture just isn’t going to look the same,” said Ed Taylor, a UC Davis rural economist. “You’re going to be hard-pressed to find crops grown as labor-intensively as they are now.”
Driscoll’s, which grows berries in nearly two dozen countries and is the world’s top berry grower, already is moving its berries to table-top troughs, where they are easier for both human and machines to pick, as it has done over the last decade in Australia and Europe.
“We don’t see — no matter what happens — that the labor problem will be solved,” said Soren Bjorn, president of Driscoll’s of the Americas.
That’s because immigrant farmworkers in California’s agricultural heartlands are getting older and not being replaced. After decades of crackdowns, the net flow across the U.S.-Mexico border reversed in 2005, a trend that has accelerated through 2014, according to a Pew Research Center study. And native-born Americans aren’t interested in the job, even at wages that have soared at higher than average rates.
“We’ve been masking this problem all these years with a system that basically allowed you to accept fraudulent documents as legal, and that’s what has been keeping this workforce going,” said Steve Scaroni, whose Fresh Harvest company is among the biggest recruiters of farm labor. “And now we find out we don’t have much of a labor force up here, at least a legal one.”
Stated bluntly, there aren’t enough new immigrants for the state’s nearly half-million farm labor jobs — especially as Mexico creates competing manufacturing jobs in its own cities, Taylor said. He has calculated that the pool of potential immigrants from rural Mexico shrinks every year by about 150,000 people.
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Excerpt. Read more at http://www.latimes.com/projects/la-fi-farm-mechanization/
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I wonder what the farm laborer's union thinks about that........
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(http://www.hortibiz.com/content/news_import/Robots_picking_fruit_and_driving_tractors.jpg)
Tom Servo Joad.
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Strawberries are tricky
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They should be replacing them with robots anyways. Cheaper in the long run, and robots don't unionize or strike.
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They should be replacing them with robots anyways. Cheaper in the long run, and robots don't unionize or strike.
It should happen with a lot more jobs.
For the human part of the equation, learn to adapt or you will suffer. I've been blue collar my whole life and now find myself working in an air conditioned medical facility wearing business casual. I lead little old ladies to their appointments, give directions and answer patient questions, walk Drs, nurses, techs, and receptionists to their cars after dark, keep an eye out for undesirables in the parking areas, run errands etc.