Hacker News Reader

Comment by maerF0x0 | Hacker News Reader

> "Over three billion dollars were lost in California alone [in 2017], because there's not enough people to actually do the operations in seeding or harvesting," Brandon Alexander, co-founder of Iron Ox Robotic Farms, told Engadget. "The average age of the farmer now is 58. And so one of the big issues just plaguing farming is that there's just not enough labor to go around. The problem is getting worse every year."[1]

I call BS. There is almost always enough labor at the correct price. That means the juice wasn't worth the squeeze (or the employers are making bad choices...) . If farm hands were making $100 an hour I'm sure you'd see a lot more farm hands. Of course they'd also probably be losing money, so that's why we dont see that.

[1]: https://www.engadget.com/2018/10/03/future-indoor-agricultur...

Edit: this quote was actually from an engadget article linked elsewhere in this post's comments

View on HN

That's not BS. That's you stating explicitly something people familiar with the issues see as implicit.

Both CEOs and journalists, as well as most readers of MIT's Technology Review, understand that you can get more labor by raising the price. The implicit understanding is that a) most Americans don't want to do back-breaking manual labor for a living, and b) most Americans also want food to be cheap. This is an ongoing problem in agriculture and has been for decades.

>Americans don't want to do back-breaking manual labor for a living

This makes me wonder...

Autonomy is the biggest hurdle for these technologies and manual labor is the reason they are needed. Why aren't we meeting halfway and using remote controlled robots instead of autonomous ones?

That way workers could do the job from anywhere in the world without having to break a sweat and you'd only need a fraction of the investment to get it running.

I assume the tech isn't there, but mechanical turk for manual labour sounds like a fun concept, in a black mirror sort of way. Can't wait for Uber to try to solve its self driving cars with this.

See: Kindred.ai

I'm not in either field, but I imagine that the issues with remote control are the same issues with full automation. Mostly gripping and locomotion.

I assume it's not very hard (for experts) to build an AI that would push the right buttons at the right times.

Have you ever watched any streams of somebody trying to play Job Simulator or other similar VR games? We have a long, long way to go with input tracking and control to get anything close to human dexterity over telepresence.

I haven't but I take your point. How do surgeons operating remotely overcome the problems?

A whole lot of training and VERY expensive robots

they use robots that cost millions of dollars

Robotic assisted surgery involves the surgeon using an expensive console in the same room as the operation. As others have said, the systems require a fair amount of training to become accustomed to. The training requirement is offset by the additional capabilities that the robot brings that humans do not possess. In particular robotic tools have a larger range of motion than conventional minimally invasive instruments do.

They don't really.

Telesurgery is a bit of a myth. It's been done a few dozen times.

It doesn't make that much sense economically. It's actually cheaper to fly a surgeon or a patient around for the few occasions when it really needs to be done.

Most surgery still isn't done with Da Vinci robots or whatever. Surgeons with their hands can do many more things. That's not to say those robots are not amazing, it's just that they don't do everything.

The military is the one area where it might make sense, but have a close look. They don't do it either. Instead the US military has an amazing extraction system where someone injured in battle in the middle east can be at Rammstein within hours.

The specific part I was calling BS on is

>there's not enough people to actually do ...

IMO there are plenty to do the work. There are not enough people who are sufficiently incentivized to do the work at the wages that farming pays. This is in comparison to other choices people have be it easier work or higher paying.

That's just shorthand for the market will not sustain those wages.

Unless you have a greater point or suggestion to make, why waste time on pedantry?

I think it’s worth pointing out. We see the same ‘we can’t find people to hire’ point being made by tech companies trying to find developers. The solution is the same for both: pay more. If you’re going to use shorthand it make it accurate. Just say ‘we can’t/don’t want to pay for the workers we need’.

> That's not BS.

It is BS.

> a) most Americans don't want to do back-breaking manual labor for a living

No. Most american don't want to do back-breaking manual labor for peanuts. As maerF0x0 said, raise the wages and watch how many americans love back-breaking manual labor. It's strange how the tar oil fields in south dakota are able to attract workers from all over the country.

> and b) most Americans also want food to be cheap.

Don't all humans?

> most Americans don't want to do back-breaking manual labor for a living

If it was just some cultural thing, then we'd have more than enough immigrants to correct for most Americans not wanting to do it. The problem is that there exists no cultural group that wants these jobs, native born or otherwise, at the pay and benefits offered. People switch to better jobs as soon as they find one.

> Americans also want food to be cheap

I assume everyone would prefer if everything is cheap? This is a problem that effects any business.

It's not as much about the fact that people don't want to do the work, it's about the quality of life said work allows. These cheap farm laborers need housing food schools medicine transportation goals a life.

What robots do is reduce all that ripple effect of societal load on all the other aspects of sustaining the labor force and their human needs.

Focusing on simply labor and it's price for the task at hand is stupidly myopic.

And reveals the greater impact autonomous robotic labor will really have.

Let's assume California's Central valley in 50 years time is vast swaths of robotic farms.

All other human infrastructure in these places die. Restaurants, stores, schools, housing, police fire etc fall back to early 1900s levels (or some smaller density level of the past)

Farm labor is a tiny fraction of the cost of retail food. It's not material and there is no dilemma.

It is extremely material to the narrow profit margins of farms, so you see a race to the bottom with importing slave labor, terrible practices, etc.

But enforcing labor standards and minimum wages wouldn't add much to the average American's food bill, even assuming farms couldn't avoid some of the hit by using less or more productive labor.

Those views are only in tension as long as labor is a significant fraction of the cost of farm output. But the most labor-intensive part the supply chain (per pound of apples) is picking it. This source [1] gives 1000-2000 lb/hour as a typical output rate. At $50/hour, that would only account for ~5 cents/lb.

Even if you had policies that firehose-flooded the labor market, that still only saves you a trivial amount on the price of farm output. (I'm guessing most of the cost of apples comes from the price of the land and capital.)

It just doesn't look like there's this huge tradeoff we're facing that could justify massively increasing the labor supply.

A better explanation would be that, if everyone else uses unauthorized[2] labor, then you have to do it yourself to keep up.

[1] https://www.thepennyhoarder.com/make-money/side-gigs/like-wo...

[2] "illegal" is apparently taboo now, but "undocumented" is Orwellian.

most Americans don't want to do back-breaking manual labor for a living

Nobody from any country wants to do back-breaking manual labor for a living.

But the whole "jobs Americans won't do" is nothing more than a political slogan/talking point.

The reality is that Americans will do any job, provided they are fairly compensated.

More than once, it's been in the news that a factory/food processing plant/etc... has been busted for having illegal workers, paying its workers below minimum wage, or both. A week later, the factory has to hire legal workers and Americans for the previously under-paid jobs, and there's a line around the block of people willing to now work for a fair rate of pay.

"More than once, it's been in the news that a factory/food processing plant/etc... has been busted for having illegal workers, paying its workers below minimum wage, or both. A week later, the factory has to hire legal workers and Americans for the previously under-paid jobs, and there's a line around the block of people willing to now work for a fair rate of pay."

I've never heard that, could you provide a couple of concrete examples?

Wish I could, but I get most of my news from traditional media.

I remember there was a meat packing plant in Colorado a few years ago. I tried Google News, but it's apparently incapable of showing anything but the most recent stories.

This appears to be the Colorado meat packing plant the parent mentioned.

https://www.denverpost.com/2013/01/14/fear-from-swift-plant-...

http://www.chicagotribune.com/g00/business/ct-biz-hostess-cl...

Yep, the “shortage of employees” meme comes from the same propaganda sources as the “jobs Americans just wont do” one. If you offer above-market wage, and the labor pool is not artificially constrained (like for doctors), then you will get a line of applicants out the door. This is true for any job.

> The reality is that Americans will do any job, provided they are fairly compensated.

To the extent this is true, I think it's tautological.

At some point, much of American labor was manual. People's notion of a fair wage for that was not high, and the work was accepted as normal. But now there are a lot of people who work in offices, and much manual labor is now way easier than agricultural work. There's also a broad (but not universal) societal expectation that people shouldn't have to destroy their bodies at work. So I think the perceived "fair" compensation for this has risen dramatically. And I think the number of people willing to spend 14 hours a day, 6 days a week [1] doing that work at any price is much smaller than before.

And honestly, I think that's great. We should find ways to turn every job that people don't want to do over to robots.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/08/nyregion/in-harvest-seaso...

Do they have to work for cheap though?

Are the margins that slim that the owners can't afford to pay their workers more?

> most Americans don't want to do back-breaking manual labor for a living, and b) most Americans also want food to be cheap.

Combine these and you're right. Most Americans don't want to do back-breaking labor for a pittance. Grocery checkers (union) make $18.50/hour. Bus drivers (union) make $29/hour. Journeyman (union) electricians make $50/hour.

Try paying more than $15/hour for farm labor and you'll have more applicants than you know what to do with.

That goes without saying. Anyone who thinks about it for even the least amount of time understands that you can get more labor if you pay a lot for it. "There is not enough labor to go around," means, "There is not enough labor to go around at prices such that we could competitively produce our goods and retain a desirable amount of profit," in essentially one hundred percent of cases. Your objection doesn't take anything away from the thesis that automation may be a way to become more competitive by cutting labor costs.

I actually agree that automation is a great way to become profitable. I would suggest your modified statement (not enough labor at profitable prices) is true for every extinct industry. We probably could have produced an extra $1B of hand produced typewriters this year, but no one wants to make them by hand for $1 an hour and no one wants to buy them.

Saying there is $3B of produce that could have been produced, ignores the fact that it would have been produced at a loss (after labor costs sufficient to incentivize workers) and there may not of even been a market for the over supply.

If there is an actual unmet market need the price curve will move upward meaning employers can pay workers more to fulfill the unmet need. To me this looks like a lack of a market for $3B of produce...

I don't really understand your reply. "A lack of a market for $3B of produce" is also equivalent to saying, "A lack of market for $3B of produce at the prices required to make production profitable." The claim about automation allowing the meeting of that need simply means that the speaker believes automation will reduce prices enough to make targeting this need profitable.

This 58 number has been debunked repeatedly. There is very little incentive to transfer ownership to your children while you still have your faculties. When you are too old or infirm to farm at all you sell it to your kid or they get power of attorney and take it.

The average age of the oldest member of farming families is 58.

You're not being fair to the OP The ERS data pertain to "principal farm operator".

See https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/beginning-disad...

That's kind of the parent poster's point - if a father and son are both working on a farm, they're both farmers, but the father is "principal farm operator"; the father's age is not representative of the age of those working there.

Kinda getting into the weeds here (a case for Roundup?) but I gently disagree. Son may qualify as the Principal Farm Operator. It depends.

For better or worse "Principal Farm Operator" is defined term (please see https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/farm-household-...) and just to make things more confusing the moniker is self-applied. In a perfect world the principal would be the most important or the most active Operator in a multiple Operator farm but perfection is going to elude us w/r/t the USDA.

Edited to note the upvote for your reasonable demeanor while disagreeing. An example I strive to follow.

Nothing to do with the USDA. You share a business with your parent, they're going to keep writing their name on things until you have a very uncomfortable conversation where you point out to them that really it's your business now and they work here.

Unless there is some sort of blowup, or an ER visit, you're not going to be in any kind of hurry to see the look on your mom/dad's face when they realize you're right. Or how angry they get if they refuse to see reason.

I also wonder how they define a farmer. Is a Mexican laborer who arrives in the spring and works through harvest time a farmer? Or is it only the people who own the farm?

>When you are too old or infirm to farm at all you sell it to your kid or they get power of attorney and take it.

When my grandfather retired from farming, he simply leased the land to the guy who owned the adjacent farm. After my grandfather passed away ownership transferred to my grandmother until her death at 101. The same lease arrangement continued for a nearly thirty years. What was the age of the farmers of those farms?

> The average age of the farmer now is 58. And so one of the big issues just plaguing farming is that there's just not enough labor to go around. The problem is getting worse every year.

If you keep making teen-aged labor more and more impractical, then you're going to have problems. A lot of the really labor intensive work in farming requires almost no skill, just a whole bunch of hands and bodies. The cycles of farming naturally have highs and lows; when it's time to plant or time to reap, it's all hands on deck to get it done before time and weather runs out, and the rest of the season you need considerably less labor.

I think they still take two weeks off school in the middle of the fall in Aroostook County, Maine, so the potato farmers can get their harvest in.

Most of the schools there voted to stop it because it was stupidly poor value. Incredibly few kids were needed to actually work the fields. Potatoes have not been a labor intensive crop since the sixties.

Yeah why did Alexander even toss in that bit about average farmer age and in the next sentence point out that there's not enough generic labor to go around at the price the average 58 year old farmer is willing to pay? Well-called BS it is.

It's funny. They can't find enough labour and I, as a farmer, can't find enough ground to expand my operation to utilize the full capacity of my labour and equipment. Seems like the obvious solution is to downsize their operation and let someone else fill the void. In my experience, people interested in farming would rather own their own business than work for someone else.

Weird. I distinctly remember reading an article 20 years ago that said the average age of a farmer is 58.

I grew up in a farming area.

Farm workers at harvest time are almost Olympic-level endurance athletes.

Most Americans who show up don't last a day in the fields.

So no, $100/hour won't inspire more than a few workers who have alternatives.

If farm workers were making $100 an hour and there was billions to be earned nation wide, we'd see "Farmer" be a valid H1B Visa job. More income means more taxes and the government, businesses involved and workers (foreign ones if US ones are too lazy) are all incentivized to make this production happen.

You are correct in that experienced pickers are amazing to behold..really amazing productivity. But at $100/hour you'd soon find plenty of Americans ready to get that experienced and efficient.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com