I've mentioned those machines before. They're still prototypes, nowhere near rugged enough for field use.
Agrobot: [1] Too many parts, too many places that can catch dirt, too slow. If they can solve the sensor problem, they need to do a complete mechanical redesign to make it field-ready.
Abundant Robotics: [2] Too slow, too fragile. For comparison, here's a Festo vision-guided robot picking up randomly oriented objects. Agricultural robotics needs that kind of speed.
This is going to be solved soon, but probably not by those startups.
Don't know. Doing good mechanical design requires an organization that's good at making machinery. Not that many people are really good at mechanical design. I occasionally mention that I'm into restoring antique Teletype machines. All the good Teletype machines were designed by two people - Howard Krum and Ed Klienschmidt. Competitors mostly copied them, or produced unreliable machinery.
(I once worked at a hydraulics R&D facility for a big machinery company. They had that capability, and it took several acres of plant, with everything from overhead cranes to machine shops to scanning electron microscopes. It also took hundreds of people who've done it before. You need that kind of industrial backup. A laptop in a Starbucks is not enough. That gets you a design like Jucero, way overdesigned and overpriced.)
AVE (a youtube channel) pulled a Juicero apart and looked at it, and came to that same conclusion. Way overdesigned, but really nice guts in the thing.
He thought they were losing money on the hardware, fwiw.
It's a fun watch, if you're into that kind of thing. Warning, he probably uses NSFW language, he does frequently in most videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Cp-BGQfpHQ
I would have to disagree on that point; speed is vitally important for equipment like this. Speed and accuracy determine how many of these machines you would need during the short window of peak ripeness. Speed determines how long it will take to get a return (if any) on the capital investment required for the machine. There is a reason that agricultural equipment is so large and most of it has to do with the short window a farmer has available for harvest. A machine that harvests an acre an hour might be useful, a machine that harvests an acre a day is a tourist attraction.
I don't have any experience in the commercial farming space, but since we're talking about strawberry picking here, aren't they picked far before the time that they're ripe, and ripened after using ethylene? (This is the main reason strawberries don't taste as good as they used to)
That is entirely owing to the time between the farm and the customer's mouth, not the time it takes to pick. There's still a small window where the fruit is grown enough to be edible (and a desirable size) but not so ripe that it is overripe by the time you buy it.
Everything is picked before it's ripe otherwise you could only ship something like a day away. Most vegetables and fruits don't really need to ripen on the plant. But there is a fine line.
I picked some peppers from my garden yesterday. A few are not as ripe as I want so I put them into a bag with a banana. Bananas produce more ethylene and by tomorrow all peppers should be red. No taste impact.
It's a cost vs. speed trade off, if a machine can do the work of 2 people or 20 people is not the important bit. The important bit is if they can get more work done at lower costs. So, something that get's 1/4 as much work as a person done, but works unattended and only costs 1,000$ then that's a great investment.
But, if the crop has started to rot on the vine because the machine is only doing 1/4 the work, then doesn't the cost become meaningless? Plants are different than metal. A robot building a car can go slow and the metal will still be the same.
If it costs 1/4 of a person and you have to get 4 machines... then it still solves the problem of being unable to find willing workers.
Hell... if it costs more than employees you can't find... then to get the work done, it costs more... Then it's either market forces push prices up or companies close.
A large portion of the point of these "machines" is an answer to the labor shortage (and to a lesser extent, the rising cost of labor - IE fight for 15).
Many of these problems will be solved by market forces - higher demand, more people working to solve the issues, issues getting solved, machines going into mass production, economies of scale, rinse, repeat...
That's why speed is a "simple" problem. The mechanical design and detecting the fruits are real problems. A machine that tips over and picks leaves is useless no matter how fast it is.
Yes and no. Your machine can pick 24/7, but you need to move the picked produce from the machine hopper to trucks and then to sorting/packaging/etc. Picking the produce is the pointy end of the spear, but there is still a lot of logistics involved in harvest. How much disruption and reorg will this require for the rest of the harvest operation? For some of those giant cereal crop harvests in the US the combines actually do run almost 24/7 during the short window available, so it is obviously possible to do this but changing the tail of the process significantly imposes additional costs on this sort of a replacement.
Wouldn't the endurance of the machines play into that though? I imagine not needing breaks/sleep might offset the relatively slow picking speed, depending on how fast they recharge/discharge.
The internet is telling me that there are 17,424 feet of rows in an acre of plants if the rows are 30 inches apart (eg, corn).
The internet also tells me that the average California farm is about 400 acres (a little less than 2/3 of a square mile).
400 * 17424 ~= 7 million feet of row. Million. That's 1320 miles if you want to walk or ride the whole thing one row at a time. I think you're right about speed mattering a great deal.
Speed, cost, and product quality all matter. Harvesting mechanization has been a slow progression from easy crops (wheat) to medium difficulty crops (cotton) to moderately hard crops (grapes) [1]. Just about everything which can be picked by some clever combination of blades, blowers, brushes, shakers, springy tines, and vacuums has been done. The final frontier is the ones that need eye-hand coordination.
Today, you need a smartphone's worth of compute power, good vision and control software, and very good mechanical engineering. There are demos of machines picking almost everything; it's now a student project at ag schools. Here's an orange picker, built using an off-the-shelf robot arm. Too slow to be useful. [2] The electronics cost is no longer the problem; its the mechanical parts.
there are startups. The issue is rarely technological capability as much as it is adoption, reliability, and durability. Not impossible just hard. There is a lot of work in the space being done by John Deere and others...a LOT of farm analytics, but most of their parts are still cast iron for a reason.
A lot of the issues currently are related to the mechanical handling of the fruit. It's very important not to bruise or damage the product. Buyers generally have strict rules on exactly how the fruit is picked, e.g., how much stem is still attached to the fruit, for both weight and quality reasons.
Other issues arise if the orchard is on uneven ground, or their are irrigation lines in the way.
Certainly not insurmountable, but not easy. Then there's the distinct problem of adoption.
I think the first step would be to work in the area for a while and learn about the real issues. A lot of industries look really easy when you take a quick look from the outside but reality is a little more complex.
It is definitely worth considering but there is the other side. Do you want prices to continue to rise as labor costs and healthcare grow? Or would you prefer these prices actually drop even as your income grows? I'm not saying either is right or wrong. Maybe this is solved with UBI or some other approach. If the taxes are super high, the incentive to automate is diminished.
This idea is definitely NOT worth considering. With high margins, these robots actually get built, and the price will go down as other competitors catch up. In the end, everyone ends up better as it has been proven again and again in history.
I didn't realize this would prompt so much emotion. I only said it as a consideration. As a reminder this is a quote from Bill Gates ""If a human worker does $50,000 of work in a factory, that income is taxed," Gates said in an interview with Quartz. "If a robot comes in to do the same thing, you'd think we'd tax the robot at a similar level."
< Google it.
> If the robot's owner gets an extra $50k income from this, we're actually getting more in tax because their marginal income is higher.
If the robot is owned by an individual taxpayer paying personal income tax on the income, and if you ignore taxes other than income tax that levied on labor income, and if you ignore accounting tricks, etc., this is fairly obviously true from the way progressive tax rates work.
OTOH, it becomes less obviously true when you consider how the robots are likely to be owned in the real world, the full set of taxes on income in the real world, and the greater practical ability of the rich to avoid taxation in the current system.
Just to add a bit to the discussion - middle class wage earners generally pay a much higher over-all tax rate than the rich. The robot's labor would be almost certainly taxed like any other piece of equipment, with depreciation, etc... And the increased income would also be taxed at the same rate as the business. Both of these are, as far as I know, going to be much lower than the taxes that the original wage earner had paid.
Are you on drugs? If there are no margins nobody would even bother building a robot that actually can help with farm work.
You point is so delusional I really wonder how you can develop this kind of mindset and still end up in a technology/startup community like hacker news.
It's not that simple with farming, unfortunately. Worker pay is necessarily based on individual productivity, which can only increase so much [0]. Margins are razor thin for producers to begin with. The vast majority of profits are captured by the manufacturing and distribution. This is why the IRS taxes farm workers and farm employers differently from any other kind of commercial activity.
At least in theory, once the loss due to lack of sufficient number of workers exceeds the cost of raising the wages they should go up and at the cost of margins or increased prices. This should offer nobody a competitive advantage because every farm is likely facing the same issue.
Sadly employers behave like raising wages was not even an option. I guess that's human nature - money going from you pocket is a more tangible expense/loss than money not going into your pocket due to lost profits/opportunity.
Political lobbying and in the USA's case the way the agricultural sates have representation far in excess of their population when compared to the metro areas
Picking fruit and vegetables has always been peasant and serf work. The market has never once said, 'you should be paid more,' because there always is an underclass and even if you paid triple what you pay now it'd be the same class of people working the job. The problem is every American thinks he's too good to be at the bottom of the barrel these days.
I've never worked at a McDonalds, but I've done my time out in the hot sun and honestly when I look at these poor bastards standing in front of a pot of boiling grease all day I wonder if I wouldn't go back to the farm.
Unless the work was picking onions or strawberries or some other crop which involves spending all day in a terrible bent-over posture. If the pay was the same, though, I'd rather spend the day harvesting apples than spend it making burgers for assholes.
I'd rather pick fruit for minimum wage than operate an industrial dishwasher for minimum wage. It won't be 90-something degrees and 90-something percent humidity every day on the farm. It's a toss-up which is worse, the dish-room or the grill.
The worst case is about the same. The average day is better picking fruit.
Ive done both and i much prefer McDonalds, theres just more in common between McDonalds workers than the people working on farms who can be sketchy or not even speak English and the kind of work at McDonaldd doesnt mean you are constantly utilized whereas in farming u are pretty much physically exhausted by halfway
Statements like this, that allege some group is being victimized, makes scapegoats out of those with more resources.
Yes we're all "economically coerced", by the need to produce economic resources in order to consume economic resources.
It's like Bastiat said 160 years ago:
"Man recoils from trouble - from suffering; and yet he is condemned by nature to the suffering of privation, if he does not take the trouble to work. He has to choose, then, between these two evils. What means can he adopt to avoid both? There remains now, and there will remain, only one way, which is, to enjoy the labor of others."
That is just another factor of the desirability of the job that impacts how much one needs to pay to find enough employees. Other factors also involve where the jobs are located (if you are in the middle of nowhere, even with much cheaper costs of living, you may need to pay significantly more to convince someone with the desired skills to move to the middle of nowhere) and the long term potential (really good work that only lasts for a short time may not be worth moving for unless it pays significantly more).
They mention this in the article. The wages that the growers are willing to pay aren't capturing the interest of the locals or even the immigrant workers (since they have comparable jobs back home).
It's worth it to them to invest in tech rather than continue to pay higher wages.
They mention raising wages and paying benefits several times in the article.
@Dang--can you remove this user who doesn't read the articles and then makes inflammatory misinformed comments.
This would be the best thing. US farm subsidies mean that Mexican farmers can't compete with US farms. If we stopped stupidly subsidizing farming[0], the Mexican economy would be able to make use of more of their citizens. They'd get the tax revenue, and maybe there'd even be more incentive to clean up corruption.
[0] Food security might be worth some subsidization, but not the level that the US currently has.
> They could also, which is notably mentioned no where in the article, pay more?
From the article:
> And native-born Americans aren’t interested in the job, even at wages that have soared at higher than average rates.
> Not surprisingly, wages for crop production have climbed 13% from 2010 to 2015 — a higher rate than the state average, according to a Los Angeles Times analysis of Labor Department data.
> Growers who can afford it have begun offering savings and health plans more commonly found in white collar jobs.
Margins are thin, though, and the article makes it sound like it is more efficient to grow less labor-intensive crops and import the other crops.
> And native-born Americans aren’t interested in the job, even at wages that have soared at higher than average rates.
Conspicuously absent in every single article claiming that Americans "aren't interested" in farm work is exactly what constitutes "higher than average rates". You _will_ find Americans interested in this work at some rate, but it's going to be higher than what you think it "should" be. In a country where a $15 minimum wage is expected for relatively comfy fast food work, back-breaking outdoor labor is going to be significantly more expensive. But you will find takers at some price.
In another comment on this thread, a farmer said he couldn't hire people at $25 / hour. If a machine can do it, then a machine should do it. Especially work that's difficult and can be dangerous - like farm work.
Yes, but farm workers only work part of the year, and only work on each farm for a few weeks.. then move onto another farm.
So having 1 farm paying $25/hr, does not change much for the worker.. after they finish at that farm, they'll need to go to another that's paying near minimum wage (the average for a farm worker).. and the result is that they are still in poverty (the average farm worker lives below the poverty line).
The result is that no one is going to move from even a minimum wage job to farm work unless the pay is even higher and/or other farms get onboard with the higher wages.
> So farmers don't matter, just like other workers who lose their jobs to automation.
Nobody said that and I can't believe you would think anybody actually sees the world like that. I would hope that we can find more meaningful ways for people to spend their days than doing things that can be better accomplished via machinery. Otherwise we really are just paying one group to break windows so another group can be paid to fix them and that's not good for anybody.
Automating people's jobs away without meaningful replacements is how regions get decimated, and you end up with very large swaths of very angry people without much to lose.
Producers should be looking for ways to produce more efficiently. Governments should be working on the social problems. We all have a part to play in making our economy work well.
Farms are heavily dependent on immigrants, mostly illegal immigrants from mexico (90% are foreign born) for crop workers. They work on our farms for very little pay (but probably more than they would have in mexico), work here for 10 years or so saving as much as possible, then go back to mexico. They may travel from CA > WA through the season; or on the east: FL > OH > ME (this prolongs their work season). They're on average very poor, with little education (6th grade is the average).
With the more recent restrictions on the flow of illegal migrants, many are finding it's impossible to come back to the us (or they choose not to come back). Disrupting the flow of illegal migrants that the farms depend on.
That is the source of the labor shortage that the farms are now complaining about.
Essentially for years they have taken advantage of illegal immigrants to depress wages in their industry. And now they have been cut off, and theyre finding it difficult to adjust their wages to appropriate levels so they can compete in the domestic labor market.
Farmers deserve no sympathy for the labor shortage.. it's an exploitative arrangement. They should automate as much as possible, and for everything else they should pay market rates (whatever those may be... even if it's $100/hr or more (remember its short term hard labor, 2nd most dangerous work in the US)).
This shortage is actually a great thing, if it lasts. Whatever workers are left, might finally get paid a livable reasonable wage.
I realize that most farm workers up to now have been immigrants.
I was trying to find out how things would work if a legal worker alternated between working on farms and living on welfare somewhere out of any work season.
The UK is starting a similar shakeup, most seasonal agricultural work is done by workers from poorer countries in the EU who go back home once the work is done.
I feel that it will be hard to find the market rate for this kind of work in the short term.
Farm labor in other states earn $15-20 an hour [1], and will enjoy much higher purchasing power, and (almost certainly) a political climate they'll find less actively hostile than the one they'll find in California. Why would farm laborers want to come here?
I'm certain people will do the work for $1 million per hour. Thus it seems a valid conclusion that $25/hr in California for this work is not the market rate.
The market rate has to include the cost of doing the job with machines. If a person will do it for $1 million per hour but I can get a machine to do it for $1 / hour, then the market rate is $1 / hour.
At some point, the goods won't move unless they are inelastic goods (which individual foods aren't). There is no single food product which people can not live without.
13% over 5 years isn't exactly what I'd call soaring. That barely beats out inflation over that same time frame.[1] Doing the quick math it looks like that beats inflation by <3% for hard labor in a job with no career potential. What are the wages as well? If they are in the $10-$20/hr range then those increases are fractions of a dollar per hour more for seasonal work. That is unlikely to convince anyone to go pick up that job if they weren't doing it already
The rising wages is notably mentioned in the article, and it is the implied reason for automation - the industry is not going to replace cheap workers with expensive workers, it's going to restructure everything (including the crop species it grows) to ensure that cheap workers are replaced with machines.
If some industry is employing $10 million of labor and market wages go up 20%, the expected outcome is not spending $12m on labor, you should rather expect something like spending $9m on labor and $2m on machines that weren't worth it back when labor was cheap but are worth it now.
Many industries, including this one, employ humans only because (and only while) they can do it cheaper than the machines. Yet. As the technology matures and becomes cheaper, and people want to earn more, the result is going to be simply less jobs.
Tell that to the plethora of hotels that are constantly hiring contractors to clean their hotels because their staff either quit due to lack of pay or being overworked due to lack of staff.
The same for trucking companies that are haemorrhaging drivers.
The same for the construction industry.
Market efficiency implies the market is managed well. It's not half the time.
From a hotel accounting standpoint I honestly wonder which is more profitable for what I'd assume can be classified as a low-skill job:
1. Hire more employees and/or pay higher wages or other benefits to retain experienced (and thus presumably more efficient and effective staff)
2. Churn and burn with abandon because there will always be people desperate enough for any job to keep themselves off the street, even if it's just until they can find something marginally better
I'm not making any judgements on the morality of this...just raising the question since I have a guess that #2 is more profitable.
I suspect that number 2 is less profitable: the quality of work drops, your reputation drops, and the effective market rate you can charge drops.
But I think you can get trapped in a number 2 situation regardless -- eg, there's an economic downturn, so people spend less, the business "cost optimizes", which causes people to spend less, etc.
I think the second case is a sort of "survival" mode witnessed in fundamentally unhealthy economies where businesses are being squeezed because people in general are being squeezed.
I'd say the math is off, but your ideas are sound. If you can reduce a 10M labor market to capital investment with zero yearly wages, it would probably make sense to spend 80M on robots that will cost 20M over ~10 years (or something similar). Point being, if you plan on being in business for a few decades, getting rid of labor costs (especially there might be a race to get rid of labor costs) is likely going to be essential.
They could pay more. But since what we're really talking about here is the market, the real question is who would pick up the added costs. Are consumers willing to pay the "real cost" of food grown by employees who are paid a fair wage?
The Seattle experiment would have to be repeated for higher levels of minimum wage. I would suggest a basic income instead though, then people won't have to pick fruit to survive :)
Paying the top 1/2 of earners a basic income is hyper regressive and inefficient (you have to turn around and tax it back from them).
The current progressive income tax system paired with a higher income tax credit - instead of a counter productive higher minimum wage - is a vastly superior approach that has already been proven to work very well.
BI is a fantasy at best. At worst, it'll wreck any economy that attempts it - which is also why none has or will. There's no scenario under which BI works out financially.
Why would you have to introduce inefficiencies like taxing the payment from the government, or if you did do that, how is it any different from just increasing the income reported for the year that you get from work already? As for it being hyper regressive, one of the benefits of BI is that you have no means testing at all and can save on all of the bureaucratic overhead. You can still keep a progressive income tax on top of the BI payments.
I'd also like to see actual evidence that BI cant work out financially. You get X tax dollars out of your economy, you Pay out X/population to each person. How does that not work out?
Does anyone have numbers on this? What I hear anecdotally is that American farmers are having a hard time because of cheaper produce from South America. Produce consumers are extremely price sensitive. If people can save 5c buying imported produce, they will.
"Wages, salaries, and contract labor expenses represent roughly 17 percent of total variable farm costs and as much as 40 percent of costs in labor-intensive crops such as fruit, vegetables, and nursery products."
I would guess it's correlated to the rise of other manufacturing competitors like Japan, Taiwan, and later China. After World War II the US had an easier time as much of Asia and Europe's capacity was destroyed.
well you see... they pay near minimum wage for hard temporary labor that results in most of their workforce living below the poverty line. They've tried giving them a token wage increase, and it hasnt changed anything.. so clearly increasing wages doesnt work /s
For some reason they say they can't figure out.. people aren't jumping at the chance to live in poverty.
When they say they cant find people, and they're paying $7/hr or have increased it to $10/hr... it's a joke. They don't want to compete in the free market for labor.
>From about 4000 BC oxen are harnessed and put to work. They drag sledges and, somewhat later, ploughs and wheeled wagons (an almost simultaneous innovation in the Middle East and in Europe). The plough immeasurably increases the crop of wheat or rice. The wagon enables it to be brought home from more distant fields.
Necessity is also an agent of destruction... how many people here have projects that failed because the necessary resources (capital,resources,time) far exceeded what could be viably sourced?
That’s because immigrant farmworkers in California’s
agricultural heartlands are getting older and not being
replaced.
As others have mentioned it's all to do with the wages that the fruit growers are willing to pay, and Driscoll's (mentioned in the article) have been at the center of controversy about their wages for some time for their practices in Mexico and elsewhere: https://boycott-driscolls.org/
The Union of Independent, National and Democratic
Farmworkers (SINDJA) calls for all independent and
autonomous boycott committees to unite for a global
day of action on November 19th. We invite all families
to support the International Boycott against
Driscoll’s in solidarity with farmworkers in San
Quintín, Mexico. In the US, when you sit down at
your tables on Thanksgiving Day, we’re asking you
to please think of the farmworkers in San Quintín,
who work 12 to 15 hours a day for as little as 6
US dollars in take-home pay. Meanwhile, Driscoll’s
is making multiple millions in profits.
Robots for labor are coming, and when they do it is time to take agriculturally productive land away from the profiteers. They serve no rational function in the economy and are merely monopolizing a resource.
> Robots for labor are coming, and when they do it is time to take agriculturally productive land away from the profiteers. They serve no rational function in the economy and are merely monopolizing a resource.
This is one of the big questions we'll have to ask in the next 20 or so years, and it just isn't farms. We are going to have to deal with plenty of industries that will merely consume resources and produce without providing any other benefits to society.
I didn't agree with seizing them, just that we have to figure out what to do. A VAT could definitely help, but consumers will still need jobs to consume, and if they can't find any in production...well...can we live on doing services alone?
I don't know. Hopefully people smarter than me are thinking about this.
As has been confirmed in 95% of previous land reform efforts, farming is not "profiteering". When you take productive land from its owners and give it to the politically connected, you're left with unproductive land.
It would be a mistake to simply call this "land reform" and confuse it with (e.g. Zimbabwe) while ignoring positive examples (e.g. Ireland). It's a fundamentally different situation brought about by technological progress. The balance of benefits to society of having a risk-taking entrepreneur who is able to (often) produce a desired good and disperse some of the profit to employees is altered. A re-evaluation has become necessary. Ditto for many other industries.
You remember incorrectly. The famine was the result of laissez-faire capitalism (Wiki-1) combined with active discrimination against the majority Catholic population which explicitly interfered with the paternalist regulation of land in the interests of the majority.
And Ireland is not the only EU nation with a history of positive land reform movements in the late 19th and early 20th century.
Should tyrants really be praised for slightly moderating their tyranny? Ireland was happy and agriculturally productive for millennia before the Tudor Conquest. That the Plantation of Ulster was a slow-motion disaster, makes it no less a disaster.
Does anyone know of any groups or hacker like groups working on these types of problems? I own a small farm and for the life of me I cant find workers even at $25/hr. I have so far bought several tractors and implements and I am planning to semi-automate as much as possible. But that is not ready this year and I am basically by myself with a shovel... I would like to fully automate as much as possible, and I have zero skills in this area. To increase my chance of success I have bought several machines, such as 3d printers, a lathe, a milling machine, plasma cutter, welders (MIG and arc), and other tools, and I am building a shop right now. I have also worked with Ardunio, raspberry pi, ... basically I am going all out and want to go all the way to success. There are several machines I would like to build that I would like powered by the tractor´s PTO and hydraulic. The most important machine would be a planter that would plant solo-cup sized plant starts, and lay down drip irrigation. If I can build or buy that, that would save a lot of my time.
I can't magic you up any workers but here's a hint:
You'd be astonished at how quickly and accurately a large air compressor with a small amount of water added to the flow can dig a shallow trench or small hole.
I actually have a backhoe, but the diesel injector pump is broken. Its a rosa master rotary injection pump. They go for $800 on ebay rebuilt. Project for the winter in my new shop. Thanks for your advice on the water injector. Do you have any design for injecting the water into the air line? How much water like in GPM or CFS per PSI?
I spent a summer as "that guy who digs with the compressor" on a maintenance crew at a summer camp.
I discovered it when I accidebtly blew a hole in an asphalt parking lot trying to use the compressor to clear sand.
Compressor was a little 50hp Rand diesel tow behind. 120psi 180cfm. In soft soil no water is even needed. A little water (like 2-5 gpm makes everything nicer). I started by making a little brass siphon fitting and then upped it to a garden hose fitting by the end.
Layed miles of sprinkler pipes with it. Always figured it would make a fantastic automatic digger for something or other.
Well you might be on to something. An air compressor with a venturi device, which is a simple device. I have a few for gold dredging and another one a fertilizer mixer. One could be made fairly easy with a pipe bender, welder, and fittings could be made on a lathe. However, a 50 HP air compressor is huge. I don't know much about air compressors besides my pancake compressor (barely runs my CUT50 plasma cutter), but 50 HP is tremendous. A lathe I am looking at to buy runs on 30 amps 220, and its only 5hp. 50 HP would be 50 *750 37,500 or 37kw.. or 170 amps at 220v if my math is correct! However, one of my tractor has 19 HP PTO at 540 rpm (Ford 2N) and another tractor of mine (Ford 4000) has a 50 HP PTO that could power a air compressor that size. So yeah that could be powered by one of my tractors and fit on a 3 point hitch. I like your idea and will look for a large air compressor motor somewhere to see if I can retro fit it to a PTO and build a venturi to try your idea out.
The one I used was a little diesel powered thing that the camp bought for $1900 (used) to run a jack-hammer. (Ended up cheaper than renting) then it just sat around until I had the bright idea of blowing off the parking lots with it.
It looked like a tiny little trailer that you pulled behind a jeep or something. It ran all day on a few gallons of diesel.
Wow, that is an epic start! IMO, the best thing you could do, is to meticulously document your projects, for a blog / vlog. The shop build would be a great first project to kick off a Youtube channel, for example. This should put you in contact with others who have similar technical-farming projects. Lots of hacker types in the aquaponics field, as well.
If this was happening anywhere near me, I would be all over it. I am in the complementary situation; I have a ton of ideas about how I want to build up an experimental farm/nursery/farm-tech incubator, but inadequate space and funding. Hope we see your work here in the future.
I work for a Systems Integration firm, and while we haven't automated a farm, we work a lot in Automation. If you're interested, you can check us out at CorsoSystems.com we do some pretty cool work and we do a lot of tinkerings with Raspberry Pi's and more. We do a ton of backend work with building databases and getting the information in and out of them, connecting everything. Guessing you'd need hell with that at some point.
On a side note, I feel your pain, my wife grew up in a farming community (kids were late to school because the cows got out) and there is food rotting in the fields because the migrant workers haven't been there en mass the last couple of years. With the INS crackdowns, it's only gotten worse.
We love farm stands and join CSA's when we can find them, you guys are great. Keep fighting the good fight!
Yeah... then the flip: When will it be unethical to eat food harvested by companies that don't employ people?
You can spin it in both directions... on one side, those poor people who do back breaking labor... on the other side, those poor people who can't get jobs that are done by robots.
Theoretically yes. Practically, no. Homelessness in rich countries is largely
a result of substance abuse and underlying personality disorders (which are often the reason the substance abuse starts).
Modern governments don't have the political will to break the social taboos necessary to instill discipline and personal responsibility in the homeless population, especially when there are large interest groups in the public sector who stand to lose financially from any serious effort to address the underlying causes of homelessness, especially if that effort rejects their ideological assumptions about the causes of homelessness.
The awful conditions and pay and protections result in people not wanting to do the work, since it's not even a livable wage. Might as well be begging (or move to somewhere else to beg), which is the easier and ultimately healthier choice.
Relative to what? Humans have been farming for thousands of years under worse condition and worse pay, yet humans still did it. In fact, even more humans used to do it. So awful pay and conditions are not a showstopper.
Before the industrial revolution, most people worked in agriculture. If you look at life expectancy in those ages it's pretty grim. Usually no one would live to be 45.
> Stated bluntly, there aren’t enough new immigrants for the state’s nearly half-million farm labor jobs
That's why we need a "farmworker" visa system, which lets workers come when required and go back as needed. Millions of people work on such visas all over the world; I don't see why it won't work in the US.
>After decades of crackdowns, the net flow across the U.S.-Mexico border reversed in 2005, a trend that accelerated through 2014, according to a Pew Research Center study
Because they have no choice. It's so hard to cross the border, that once you're in, you have no choice but to stay in. They also bring their families in, because otherwise they would not see them.
Implement a farmworker visa that lets these workers go back and forth as needed, and suddenly they don't have to bring their families here; they can go back for events and festivals, maintaining a healthy social life. They can't be blackmailed by criminals, because they're here legally. You can even charge them a little bit for catastrophic health insurance.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 142 ms ] threadAgrobot: [1] Too many parts, too many places that can catch dirt, too slow. If they can solve the sensor problem, they need to do a complete mechanical redesign to make it field-ready.
Abundant Robotics: [2] Too slow, too fragile. For comparison, here's a Festo vision-guided robot picking up randomly oriented objects. Agricultural robotics needs that kind of speed.
This is going to be solved soon, but probably not by those startups.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKT351pQHfI [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mS0coCmXiYU [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aH_t_1-tl40
(I once worked at a hydraulics R&D facility for a big machinery company. They had that capability, and it took several acres of plant, with everything from overhead cranes to machine shops to scanning electron microscopes. It also took hundreds of people who've done it before. You need that kind of industrial backup. A laptop in a Starbucks is not enough. That gets you a design like Jucero, way overdesigned and overpriced.)
He thought they were losing money on the hardware, fwiw.
It's a fun watch, if you're into that kind of thing. Warning, he probably uses NSFW language, he does frequently in most videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Cp-BGQfpHQ
The hard parts are not damaging the crop and most importantly not doing the wrong thing.
I picked some peppers from my garden yesterday. A few are not as ripe as I want so I put them into a bag with a banana. Bananas produce more ethylene and by tomorrow all peppers should be red. No taste impact.
Hell... if it costs more than employees you can't find... then to get the work done, it costs more... Then it's either market forces push prices up or companies close.
A large portion of the point of these "machines" is an answer to the labor shortage (and to a lesser extent, the rising cost of labor - IE fight for 15).
Many of these problems will be solved by market forces - higher demand, more people working to solve the issues, issues getting solved, machines going into mass production, economies of scale, rinse, repeat...
The internet also tells me that the average California farm is about 400 acres (a little less than 2/3 of a square mile).
400 * 17424 ~= 7 million feet of row. Million. That's 1320 miles if you want to walk or ride the whole thing one row at a time. I think you're right about speed mattering a great deal.
Today, you need a smartphone's worth of compute power, good vision and control software, and very good mechanical engineering. There are demos of machines picking almost everything; it's now a student project at ag schools. Here's an orange picker, built using an off-the-shelf robot arm. Too slow to be useful. [2] The electronics cost is no longer the problem; its the mechanical parts.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDDVdBLHY7I [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qnQ94JFqYZY
What would be the first steps to doing a start up in this space? Anyone interested?
Other issues arise if the orchard is on uneven ground, or their are irrigation lines in the way.
Certainly not insurmountable, but not easy. Then there's the distinct problem of adoption.
I’m definitely interested in the farm/cv realm. It takes funding though.
If the robot is owned by an individual taxpayer paying personal income tax on the income, and if you ignore taxes other than income tax that levied on labor income, and if you ignore accounting tricks, etc., this is fairly obviously true from the way progressive tax rates work.
OTOH, it becomes less obviously true when you consider how the robots are likely to be owned in the real world, the full set of taxes on income in the real world, and the greater practical ability of the rich to avoid taxation in the current system.
You point is so delusional I really wonder how you can develop this kind of mindset and still end up in a technology/startup community like hacker news.
If you have a substantive point to make, make it thoughtfully; otherwise please don't comment until you do.
http://nfwm.org/education-center/farm-worker-issues/low-wage... [0]
Or robots, I guess.
Sadly employers behave like raising wages was not even an option. I guess that's human nature - money going from you pocket is a more tangible expense/loss than money not going into your pocket due to lost profits/opportunity.
This is the heart of the matter. Humans have to eat. It's fundamentally different than any other market.
(farm labor is overwhelmingly concentrated in harvesting produce)
Unless the work was picking onions or strawberries or some other crop which involves spending all day in a terrible bent-over posture. If the pay was the same, though, I'd rather spend the day harvesting apples than spend it making burgers for assholes.
The worst case is about the same. The average day is better picking fruit.
Also, one nice aspect of getting humans out of the fields is that large numbers of human workers (at least) won't be exposed to pesticides.
Is money worth being unable to use it except for painkillers.
Src:Done that, had that-this is only a option for people without choices.
Yes we're all "economically coerced", by the need to produce economic resources in order to consume economic resources.
It's like Bastiat said 160 years ago:
"Man recoils from trouble - from suffering; and yet he is condemned by nature to the suffering of privation, if he does not take the trouble to work. He has to choose, then, between these two evils. What means can he adopt to avoid both? There remains now, and there will remain, only one way, which is, to enjoy the labor of others."
It's worth it to them to invest in tech rather than continue to pay higher wages.
In a market driven economy...which companies want...employees have market power as well when their is a shortage.
[0] Food security might be worth some subsidization, but not the level that the US currently has.
And automated farm technology will (continue to) cross borders. These machines won't remain only in the US. They will be used in Mexico too.
From the article:
> And native-born Americans aren’t interested in the job, even at wages that have soared at higher than average rates.
> Not surprisingly, wages for crop production have climbed 13% from 2010 to 2015 — a higher rate than the state average, according to a Los Angeles Times analysis of Labor Department data.
> Growers who can afford it have begun offering savings and health plans more commonly found in white collar jobs.
Margins are thin, though, and the article makes it sound like it is more efficient to grow less labor-intensive crops and import the other crops.
Conspicuously absent in every single article claiming that Americans "aren't interested" in farm work is exactly what constitutes "higher than average rates". You _will_ find Americans interested in this work at some rate, but it's going to be higher than what you think it "should" be. In a country where a $15 minimum wage is expected for relatively comfy fast food work, back-breaking outdoor labor is going to be significantly more expensive. But you will find takers at some price.
So having 1 farm paying $25/hr, does not change much for the worker.. after they finish at that farm, they'll need to go to another that's paying near minimum wage (the average for a farm worker).. and the result is that they are still in poverty (the average farm worker lives below the poverty line).
The result is that no one is going to move from even a minimum wage job to farm work unless the pay is even higher and/or other farms get onboard with the higher wages.
Anyway, having people do work that could be automated feels like another version of the broken window fallacy.
* in California. So farmers don't matter, just like other workers who lose their jobs to automation. Got it, thanks for the help.
Nobody said that and I can't believe you would think anybody actually sees the world like that. I would hope that we can find more meaningful ways for people to spend their days than doing things that can be better accomplished via machinery. Otherwise we really are just paying one group to break windows so another group can be paid to fix them and that's not good for anybody.
Producers should be looking for ways to produce more efficiently. Governments should be working on the social problems. We all have a part to play in making our economy work well.
Or providing solutions, just automating their jobs away.
Ignore the social repercussions or try and shift responsibility for who should help them all you want, I suggest it is a very unwise thing to do.
How does welfare in the US cover housing costs ?
Farms are heavily dependent on immigrants, mostly illegal immigrants from mexico (90% are foreign born) for crop workers. They work on our farms for very little pay (but probably more than they would have in mexico), work here for 10 years or so saving as much as possible, then go back to mexico. They may travel from CA > WA through the season; or on the east: FL > OH > ME (this prolongs their work season). They're on average very poor, with little education (6th grade is the average).
With the more recent restrictions on the flow of illegal migrants, many are finding it's impossible to come back to the us (or they choose not to come back). Disrupting the flow of illegal migrants that the farms depend on.
That is the source of the labor shortage that the farms are now complaining about.
Essentially for years they have taken advantage of illegal immigrants to depress wages in their industry. And now they have been cut off, and theyre finding it difficult to adjust their wages to appropriate levels so they can compete in the domestic labor market.
Farmers deserve no sympathy for the labor shortage.. it's an exploitative arrangement. They should automate as much as possible, and for everything else they should pay market rates (whatever those may be... even if it's $100/hr or more (remember its short term hard labor, 2nd most dangerous work in the US)).
This shortage is actually a great thing, if it lasts. Whatever workers are left, might finally get paid a livable reasonable wage.
Edit: if your curious about their conditions, here's the National Agriculture Workers Survey that covers all of this: https://www.doleta.gov/agworker/pdf/NAWS_Research_Report_12_...
It's currently "offline for maintenance", so here's google's cache: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:HiRr7h...
I was trying to find out how things would work if a legal worker alternated between working on farms and living on welfare somewhere out of any work season.
The UK is starting a similar shakeup, most seasonal agricultural work is done by workers from poorer countries in the EU who go back home once the work is done.
I feel that it will be hard to find the market rate for this kind of work in the short term.
1. https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes452099.htm
At some point, the goods won't move unless they are inelastic goods (which individual foods aren't). There is no single food product which people can not live without.
[1]http://www.inflation.eu/inflation-rates/united-states/histor...
If some industry is employing $10 million of labor and market wages go up 20%, the expected outcome is not spending $12m on labor, you should rather expect something like spending $9m on labor and $2m on machines that weren't worth it back when labor was cheap but are worth it now.
Many industries, including this one, employ humans only because (and only while) they can do it cheaper than the machines. Yet. As the technology matures and becomes cheaper, and people want to earn more, the result is going to be simply less jobs.
The same for trucking companies that are haemorrhaging drivers.
The same for the construction industry.
Market efficiency implies the market is managed well. It's not half the time.
1. Hire more employees and/or pay higher wages or other benefits to retain experienced (and thus presumably more efficient and effective staff)
2. Churn and burn with abandon because there will always be people desperate enough for any job to keep themselves off the street, even if it's just until they can find something marginally better
I'm not making any judgements on the morality of this...just raising the question since I have a guess that #2 is more profitable.
But I think you can get trapped in a number 2 situation regardless -- eg, there's an economic downturn, so people spend less, the business "cost optimizes", which causes people to spend less, etc.
I think the second case is a sort of "survival" mode witnessed in fundamentally unhealthy economies where businesses are being squeezed because people in general are being squeezed.
i think the idea still needs some refinement before it can be rolled out at a Holiday Inn though
Therefore paying these workers more should not raise prices. It might make them rise to middle class though :)
The current progressive income tax system paired with a higher income tax credit - instead of a counter productive higher minimum wage - is a vastly superior approach that has already been proven to work very well.
BI is a fantasy at best. At worst, it'll wreck any economy that attempts it - which is also why none has or will. There's no scenario under which BI works out financially.
I'd also like to see actual evidence that BI cant work out financially. You get X tax dollars out of your economy, you Pay out X/population to each person. How does that not work out?
Subtracting two lines is hyper inefficient?
[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-06-26/seattle-s...
Source: https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/farm-labor.aspx
@Dang--can you remove this user who doesn't read the articles and then makes inflammatory misinformed comments.
For some reason they say they can't figure out.. people aren't jumping at the chance to live in poverty.
When they say they cant find people, and they're paying $7/hr or have increased it to $10/hr... it's a joke. They don't want to compete in the free market for labor.
They will only try paying a person $12 an hour if the robots don't work.
>From about 4000 BC oxen are harnessed and put to work. They drag sledges and, somewhat later, ploughs and wheeled wagons (an almost simultaneous innovation in the Middle East and in Europe). The plough immeasurably increases the crop of wheat or rice. The wagon enables it to be brought home from more distant fields.
One could add that development has been particularly rapid over the past 50 years or so.
This is one of the big questions we'll have to ask in the next 20 or so years, and it just isn't farms. We are going to have to deal with plenty of industries that will merely consume resources and produce without providing any other benefits to society.
I don't know. Hopefully people smarter than me are thinking about this.
It would be a mistake to simply call this "land reform" and confuse it with (e.g. Zimbabwe) while ignoring positive examples (e.g. Ireland). It's a fundamentally different situation brought about by technological progress. The balance of benefits to society of having a risk-taking entrepreneur who is able to (often) produce a desired good and disperse some of the profit to employees is altered. A re-evaluation has become necessary. Ditto for many other industries.
And Ireland is not the only EU nation with a history of positive land reform movements in the late 19th and early 20th century.
-- Refs: Wiki-1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)#Landlor...
You'd be astonished at how quickly and accurately a large air compressor with a small amount of water added to the flow can dig a shallow trench or small hole.
I discovered it when I accidebtly blew a hole in an asphalt parking lot trying to use the compressor to clear sand.
Compressor was a little 50hp Rand diesel tow behind. 120psi 180cfm. In soft soil no water is even needed. A little water (like 2-5 gpm makes everything nicer). I started by making a little brass siphon fitting and then upped it to a garden hose fitting by the end.
Layed miles of sprinkler pipes with it. Always figured it would make a fantastic automatic digger for something or other.
It looked like a tiny little trailer that you pulled behind a jeep or something. It ran all day on a few gallons of diesel.
If this was happening anywhere near me, I would be all over it. I am in the complementary situation; I have a ton of ideas about how I want to build up an experimental farm/nursery/farm-tech incubator, but inadequate space and funding. Hope we see your work here in the future.
On a side note, I feel your pain, my wife grew up in a farming community (kids were late to school because the cows got out) and there is food rotting in the fields because the migrant workers haven't been there en mass the last couple of years. With the INS crackdowns, it's only gotten worse. We love farm stands and join CSA's when we can find them, you guys are great. Keep fighting the good fight!
How is that possible? What part of the country are you in?
Is it that everyone willing to do the work lacks the necessary skills? Or just that no one is willing?
You can probably go to your local FedEx hub and find a bunch of guys who load trucks for less than $15/hr.
These will 99.999999% be McJobs.
You can spin it in both directions... on one side, those poor people who do back breaking labor... on the other side, those poor people who can't get jobs that are done by robots.
Interesting time we live in.
Modern governments don't have the political will to break the social taboos necessary to instill discipline and personal responsibility in the homeless population, especially when there are large interest groups in the public sector who stand to lose financially from any serious effort to address the underlying causes of homelessness, especially if that effort rejects their ideological assumptions about the causes of homelessness.
The awful conditions and pay and protections result in people not wanting to do the work, since it's not even a livable wage. Might as well be begging (or move to somewhere else to beg), which is the easier and ultimately healthier choice.
I can't vouch for the following, but it seems like something a reasonable person would write: http://www.sarahwoodbury.com/life-expectancy-in-the-middle-a...
That's why we need a "farmworker" visa system, which lets workers come when required and go back as needed. Millions of people work on such visas all over the world; I don't see why it won't work in the US.
The problem is, many people dont go back.
>After decades of crackdowns, the net flow across the U.S.-Mexico border reversed in 2005, a trend that accelerated through 2014, according to a Pew Research Center study
Implement a farmworker visa that lets these workers go back and forth as needed, and suddenly they don't have to bring their families here; they can go back for events and festivals, maintaining a healthy social life. They can't be blackmailed by criminals, because they're here legally. You can even charge them a little bit for catastrophic health insurance.
How can you claim this? Why not bring your family over and let them enjoy the good life.