The Age of Robot Farmers
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
> “It’s very expensive,” Wishnatzki said of the process of getting visas for temporary agricultural workers—they are issued under a program called H-2A —because of all the red tape and the cost of housing. (“Expensive” is a relative term: H-2A workers are still among the lowest paid in the country.) “But at least it guarantees that we have workers, so we’re able to plant a crop,” he continued.
Farmers now have to actually house and pay their workers instead of giving them scraps under the table for back-breaking manual labor under the brutally hot Georgia summer sun? It's difficult to sympathize, to put it lightly.
I'm guessing pay rate is a big part of the prisoners lack of enthusiasm.
Clearly, being a farm worker isn't a career path for the prisoner so the prisoner has no motivation to learn the intricacies of the job. And farm work turns out to have many intricacies. So yeah, this project seems impossible.
> H-2A workers are still among the lowest paid in the country
Why don't they pay labour $100M?
Obviously, the farmers need to charge for the food/resource, but if they aren't able to turn a profit when properly hiring and paying staff/contractors to work for them, that's an issue. We don't know if the $100MM would cover the new cost or not.
I believe there is an issue where we've (the US) relied on such low-cost labor for farms far too long and we do not know how to balance out our supply chain with properly paid labor.
A huge positive to this, smaller family-run farms that don't hire immigrant labor would actually be able to compete with the larger industrial farms. We might even be able to reduce total miles food travels farm to table because it's simply not profitable to ship produce cross-country when local farmers can produce at a competitive price.
I'm still pretty shallow in my understanding of the Ag industry, but the last research I'd done showed that process optimization gaps driven by capital access disparity, and an increasing encroachment of vertically integrating distribution businesses were the major drivers of small farms out of the market.
The wage hits through access to capital to pay workers will also hit smaller operations harder in the sense the smaller you are the fewer people feel safe investing in you.
It'd be nice if it would sort itself in favor of the little guy, but I'm just not seeing it.
Smaller farms already exist, despite the unfavorable business conditions. If we're talking something like corn or soy beans, we're talking about massive direct subsidies as well. But if we're talking about thing such as berries or apples, there are lots of successful smaller, local producers.
Imagine how much more successful those smaller farms would be. And, it might re-invigorate complementary local businesses, such as small tractor dealerships, fertilizer, what have you.
the current low price of produce is subsidised by cheap illegal immigrant labour. Just like how the spartans spent their time being warriors while their slaves toiled the field.
Because they'll go bankrupt. Big AG can afford to take loans or to buy machinery or to pay extra to labor, most others can't.
Immigrant workers see $15/hr as riches beyond belief: back home they get about half of that per DAY. To us it looks bad, but to them it is much better than their life before.
https://www.latimes.com/projects/la-fi-farms-immigration/
And the job requires at least an hour commute, with 12 hour days. That should require a premium. It's not full-time work.
I don't see how immigrants are worth less after the paperwork. More expensive maybe, but it seems their worth is related to the work they can output and that isn't directly impacted by the paperwork.
And maybe they are happy to receive those wages, but let's not pretend that they aren't being taken advantage of if they really are being paid less than minimum wage, work 12+ hours, etc.
Of course I can only report on the farmers I know. They only employ legal workers (or at least that is all they will admit to...), illegal workers probably make much less.
I think we've been trained to assume cheap food is a goal. I think the goal should have been clearer: cheap enough but not too cheap
The economics here are complicated. It benefits me to have cheap food, but if the cost is ag workers with systematic health problems, low income, farmers going bust, prison labor being used, its actually not really an overall benefit.
The price of strawberries needs to reflect the real costs here which include paying pickers a living wage.
Replacing pickers by robots only masks the problem, the problem of low paid workers remains: if they aren't picking, what are these people doing, and whats the wider cost?
Here in Australia we have this problem. We exploit backpacker labour (visiting kids on restricted visa) to do picking, we exploit migrant labour from island communities (we actually used to predate them for virtual slaves. Wierd history. Read up on "blackbirding") to do picking. And, we have a duopoloy in the supermarket supply chain which abuses market power to avoid paying farmers a living income stream, sometimes arguing over 10c or 20c price differences.
its really not helping to drive the cost of food down all the time. It has to be a realistic price, or you can't have safe, strategically suitable, sustainable, locally grown food.
I don't want soylent.
In terms of sustainable locally grown food, most places are not going to be eating fresh produce year round.
For me, I prefer near, but I'll settle for in-state and ultimately in-country as "local"
Buying phillipine bananas and pineapples and thai rice, I want to understand why. We can grow all of these locally and very probably sustainably. If its food-as-aid purchase for regional trade, I can be there. But the assumption "because its cheaper" feels to me wrong. I suspect the reason the shops are selling imported bananas is not because of aid to emerging economies: its because they make more profit.
(to be clear, I'm in Australia. I believe that California (for instance) which was a food garden faces pretty intractable water issues. As do the various people who depend on the River Jordan. Australia has water issues too, but its more about equitable distribution than a complete lack of irrigation sources. We're not facing starvation due to lack of locally grown food in the 10-20 year horizon, climate change permitting. If you want to racionate to 'thats the bigger problem' I won't disagree)
There are big issues around distribution, water rights, allocation for farming vs urban areas, which crops to grow, and conflicts over distribution of water from (wetter) north to (drier) south and use of Colorado river water.
But it's not about to "face starvation due to lack of locally grown food", the situation is roughly comparable to Australia.
Replacing pickers by robots only masks the problem
What? If we had robot pickers then maybe we could get strawberries to be cheap enough that everyone could afford them, not just those who are wealthy enough to not worry about such jobs.
If we automate farm work equitably I'll be all in favour: the injury rates and low pay are horrendous. Equitably means we have to man up and address what happens to the farm workers.
For a start, who will create the tools? The manual labourers are the experts on what the tools need to be able to do? Secondly, if automation decreases the price of a product, it will often expand the market for it, and thus also related goods and services. But also, cheaper, automated products may make related products viable which previously weren't due to excessive cost.
IMHO, automation can increase economic activity sufficiently to absorb any labour excess, however it definitely needs the right planning and control. I think relying on the free market is too simplistic.
It is really what have made our current civilization possible.
Americans spend just 6.4% of their household income on food. It's the country spending the least on food in the world.
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/12/this-map-shows-how-mu...
Historically, the developed world was spending much more. People can afford strawberries, they choose to spend less money on food and more on other items.
This idea needs to die so fast. It's an incredible psychosis that people fear the utopia that is automation. Imagine telling people 1000 years ago that everything around them will be done by robots, but that the people of the future would fight it. Psychologists are going to study this for generations.
It's also pretty offensive. The only reason you (or I) are not picking the fruit is because we were born somewhere else. No one deserves to do that. Especially if we know how to avoid it. What kind of sick fuck would subject someone to that just because they had fewer options. What else can they do? Perhaps help fulfill humans' literally infinite wants? What about nothing? I would much prefer nothing than forced unnecessary labor.
> Another possible outcome is a large part of the population being unemployed or underemployed, without health care and trouble to keep housing and even put food on the table, while a small portion of the population that owns the robots lives in luxury
The whole point is that robots can make everything including more robots etc. We are talking of a world without scarcity. Why wouldn't everyone have health care? It would be virtually free. Everyone will have 10 or 20 robots. Who cares if someone has 40 or 100. Now that labor is solved people can focus on the fulfilling, interesting, human work of creating and inventing. The only job available will be to configure robots in interesting arrangements to make cooler stuff. But since we have so much stuff already, only a few people will do that as a hobby, for free, other people will make art or entertain or raise families or do nothing. Existence is inherently meaningless and filling time with worthless labor is only a distraction. That's the real issue to solve.
> It's understandable because that clearly would be "communism" and that's always bad
This is also brainwashing, communism is by no means "always bad", it just so happened that economies are too complex to centrally plan and that distributed computing through free individuals (aka capitalism) works better. But if, for example, computation got strong enough, it could potentially be more effecient to holistically and centrally plan an economy. Or in the case of automation, perhaps in a world of plenty, communism becomes the perfect system. I'm not advocating for communism, and I would never want it to encroach on freedoms, but these two cases are viable candidates for success.
The point is to be more mindful of the immediate effects of displaced labour due to automation. Is it a net social/economic gain to have prices slashed by say 10%, while at the same time seemingly externalizing both the social and economic costs of those who lost their jobs?
It makes sense to ask these questions to ensure such a paradigm shift goes smoothly for those affected by minimizing undue hardship.
If it was up to me we'd get UBI ASAP and as automation makes work more and more obsolete get closer and closer to communism. I think this also is desirable because it will allow us to follow our natural instincts and contribute to the commons rather than try to put them on our individual balance sheets at the expense of everyone else. (See this great discussion: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/future-thinkers-podcast/...)
I don't think it's "instead", but "until".
> opposition to progress because they are already happy with what they have and any improvement becomes an "us vs them" scenario where the new thing is demonized.
Find me a single worker who will say no when you tell them "you now own this robot, and can live from its output instead of working".
For whom?
Here is an article about it. Disclosure I wrote it. Only posting as relevant.
Https://agfundernews.com/inside-insect-farming.html
Utopia or feasible, that's what I am wondering.
If 90% of the town has a free house and free food, but the other 10% live in bigger, safer, cleaner houses and are eating better testing/healthier food, I don't think the 90% will be as excited.
I think most humans strive for the best available rather than being content with the minimum they really need. This probably isn't a great way to find happiness but it is a pretty powerful motivator.
I'm not saying that farm-robotics in general can't work or scale -- it's a something I'm convinced stands a good chance of tackling the enormous fossil-fuel subsidy that factory farming is so dependent upon -- but the Farmbot thing... /stiffles a giggle/.
Are you saying people wouldn't want to have an automated home garden in their back yard if they could afford it?
Never.
Real farming -- the modern, factory kind of thing -- the stuff that provides the overwhelming bulk of food (maize, soya, wheat) -- happens on a massive scale over hundreds to thousands of hectares, and the Farmbot concept -- essentially a 2-D plotter with various head attachments -- is just never going to begin to automate that sort of scale. (Downvote me all you want.) Very large mobile robots might work, though I wonder about how the power requirements are going to be met. To my mind swarms of smaller robots seem to be the best bet, but I haven't seen a lot of work going on in that space.
Lettuces and Beetroots are nice. I grow a hell of a lot of those myself. But they don't feed the planet.
My (distant and loose, to be sure) understanding of modern farm machinery is that they largely have, compared to just a few decades ago, though the robots still have operator seats and look very much the non-automated versions that preceded them.
My thinking is that a smaller-machine, swarm approach might allow us to eliminate the fossil-fuel subsidy. Big machinery is much harder to do without diesel. With small machines, many of them cooperating, renewable energy fueling is much more (I think) approachable. (I may be wrong.)
If we're going to win this climate thing, one of the elephants in the room is decarbonising agriculture.
The key to sustainable farming is a decentralized small scale. This is the only way to keep transportation, marketing and preservation of the goods low.
How is that true in the case of robotic berry pickers?
Environmentally this is also known as “mix vs sort” and is almost a physical rule. If your are very good in mixing (making things at large scale), your tend to be bad in sorting (distributing things).
Here is the book that talks about it in the 1930 https://soilandhealth.org/wp-content/uploads/0303critic/0303...
Farmers could rent the machine. So the machine can travel instead of the berries.
Also, robotics is in many industries not competitive against cheap labor from low-wage countries. However, for agriculture that might be different, precisely because of distribution costs (e.g., it's expensive to ship fruits and vegetables from China).
There are more benefits of thinking small. We are creating a big interdependent and fragile economy. It’s seems robust but a black swan event - as Nassin Taleb would name - can provoke global disaster. Small scale economies are less exposed to this.
The next thing then is, of course, that current costs externalize many hidden costs. Which is true, but look at efficiency gains of current gen freight ships, with sails made of solar panels and that sort of thing, and look at the economics of freight shipping - even at double the (shipping) cost, it would still be only a fraction of the retail cost.
Oh and marketing/sales costs for locally grown goods being low is straight up not true. Look at how hard it is for those small scale farmers to sell their wares, schlepping their old vans from farmers market to CSA collection point, and how much of their product goes to waste because of distribution inefficiencies...
So they patented the human hand, minus the functionality they don't need?
Some questionable assumptions there.
Or, more likely, produce another, lesser-known fruit or vegetable and market the hell out of it.
PS - if anyone reading this is a roboticist/mechanical engineer in the Bay Area and interested in working on something like this or even just talking more, let me know! My email is my username (at) stanford.edu
Although a Mexican friend of mine said strawberry harvesting is utterly brutal. He also said harvesting grapes is easy work compared to anything else.
Which are you working on now?
It's the same as for self-driving cars: on daylight and clear condition, they work fine, but in case of snow and in the darkness...well, no
If I wanted a burger, wouldn't it be more humane to have an automated system that takes in raw material and synthesizes it on demand instead of on using third-party human labor?
The key is that these collection of machines are also able to repair and maintain themselves. Some kind of hardware CRC.
Perhaps there were many positives as well as a few significant negatives.
> takes in raw material and synthesizes it on demand instead of on using third-party human labor?
Replicator tech isn't coming down the line. In the meantime yes in a bath of chemicals you can produce an overpriced engineered patty of cells. This is highly processed food and I can't wait to see what cost cutting and business optimization will do to this ethical food.
In the meantime automation most likely means more chemicals, more genetic engineering, more intensive agriculture.
Why can we get away with all of this? Well because it works. That's its claim to fame. For how long? No clue. But for now it works and feeds billions and generates profits, at least for the billion dollar corporations at the very top of the game... at what cost? We don't have to actually account for those, we'll just declare bankruptcy and the profits will already be doled out.
He did something like 3% and the Parti Socialiste is dead now, replaced by Macron's party.