New autonomous farm wants to produce food without human workers
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;xxAaKpRMOTw" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;xxAaKpRMOTw</a> : this is outdoor baby spring mix operation in California. I know whose this is...the grower, packer and distributor..they have perfected it to an art form. When I see social media photos of a young person leaning over a baby plant grown hydroponically with a pair of baby scissors, I have to wonder if they have a clue about the scale and economies of growing outdoors by the established growers.<p>Having said that, my position has always been that lettuce(and strawberries) should be moved indoors because they are ground huggers. Lettuce has been easy to automate indoors but strawberries have continuous fruit production and a canopy and keeps on going for a longer season. So it has proved to be meow difficult. Also needs a lot of targeted lighting because it has to fruit and flower.<p>Automation is a beautiful thing. It comes from a keen study of the repetitive movements that goes into the task at hand. But machines can never replace humans everywhere and for every crop, but it can certainly make farming better.<p>When I attended TechCrunch this year, in one of the panels, (robotics investment by VC) the moderator asked if replacing strawberry pickers with ‘roombas’ is unethical because the strawberry pickers won’t have jobs.<p>I was very upset and am pretty sure she hasn’t picked strawberries bent over or even seen the workers do this for hours and being paid by the clamshells and not by the hour. It is also this kind of thinking that is holding back technology and innovation.<p>Let’s find them other jobs. Better jobs. Make education accessible. Who knows..the strawberry picker could be a genius or a musician or just someone who wants a simpler less back breaking job. Who are these tech people and moderators and VCs go try and ‘save’ farmers and farm workers who desperately need tech to help them.<p>Instead these are the kind of concerns I heard at TechCrunch. It was very disheartening. I am not very hopeful. They are all throwing $$ down the drain and america’s crutch is cheap labour. Europe is far ahead because they don’t have cheap labour. Japan, Middle East and even down under, they are innovating because their pain points are ageing population, water availability in deserts and in Oz.nz, labour. China is making great strides and surpassing EU with their farm tech innovation and especially with robotics.<p>We are being left behind because we are allowing something so essential as food production, distribution to become fodder for politically correct faff talk.<p>I was thinking to myself..that it makes no sense. If you break down some of the concerns ‘tech folk’ who want to ‘help’ farming into words and meanings, it was just dead words...killed by the sword of ignorance and hubris. Unethical to replace strawberry pickers with robots? It was very painful to hear that kind of talk.