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More Robots Are Coming to Farms. How Does This Affect the Immigration Debate?
Yet another reason to marvel at the lack of attention to technological change during the election. Lots of talk about immigration, but overall a backward-looking debate. For instance: Bloomberg reports about the shortage of farm workers — “crop pickers” — as “immigration slows, deportations rise and the prospects of congressional reform look remote.”
Will the crops rot in the field? Will farmers do nothing in response? Turns out, not so much. Again, Bloomberg: “That’s forcing more growers to invest in machines that reduce human involvement in the production cycle.”
Yes, supply and demand still work! And right now that interplay is more and more beginning to favor machines or man in the field. More from Bloomberg reporters Alan Bjerga and Mario Parker:
Published in Economics, Science & TechnologyMechanical tomato-pickers began showing up in California in the late 1960s, after the end of a program that allowed temporary Mexican harvest workers into the U.S. In American dairies, which operate year-round and struggle to find workers under the government’s six-month H-2A farmworker visas, farmers have been shifting to robots that do everything from milking to feeding to cleaning the cows.
Even with all the technological advances, there are many crops that still require human hands, at least for now, said Wallace Huffman, an agricultural economist with Iowa State University in Ames. Machines typically work better for foods grown for processing rather than those sold in grocery stories, because many consumers demand an unblemished appearance, he said. “The soft fruits, the berries, the strawberries and blueberries are very delicate,” Huffman said. “They can easily be bruised and smashed, even by hand. Trying to move to mechanical picking is difficult.”
Still, with new devices being developed and Trump’s push to limit illegal immigration, the industry is accelerating its shift to automation. “Labor shortages are the main driver of the economics of what we’re doing,” said Charles Grinnell, the chief executive officer of Harvest Automation Inc. in Billerica, Massachusetts, which produces robots for $32,000 apiece designed to harvest plants in greenhouses. “It’s hard to know if it’s the election of Trump or something else. But there really is a sense from our customers that, ‘Hey, let’s get this done.’ ”
On inauguration night?
“The conventional harvesting method involves cutting the grapes off vines by the bunch with a knife, then laying them on paper trays and repeatedly turning them by hand for drying. In the late 1950s, grape farmers in Australia, faced with a labor shortage, came up with a more efficient way of producing raisins whereby the grapes dried naturally on the vine and were knocked into bins by a tractor-mounted harvester. Labor use was cut drastically and yields skyrocketed.
Did this new technique spread among raisin farmers in American? For the most part, no. The ready availability of cheap immigrant workers blunted the incentive to make the expenditure to switch to the more efficient method, with consequent long-term losses to both farmers and consumers.”
It will be a good thing for American farmers.
The American farmers probably have a different climate than the Australians, which might mitigate using the Australian method. Plus the quality might be different between the methods. Right now, we’re seeing a new worldwide focus on quality vs. quantity in food, with many consumers willing to pay much more for various (grass fed beef, free range chickens, etc.) special processing.
Not that I want illegal labor in agriculture.
Illegal immigration got its powerful start when liberals killed the braceros program. Pickers came in, followed the harvest then went home But they didn’t have proper middle class American facilities for their children, so liberals killed the program. Stopping illegal immigration, as always, is a separate issue. If you have a real problem, just follow it back. You’ll always find some exercised emotional special interest mobilized progressive mob behind it. Do you suppose we could learn?
Farms have needed more migrant labor when they switched from diversified farming to single-crop or otherwise less diversified farming where concentrated work is needed at certain seasons of the year and not year-round. Of course it’s easier and more efficient (in some respects) for a farm to concentrate on just one activity, and to become more like an industry and less like a farm. It’s a story that has been taking place in Europe and the U.S. for the past couple of centuries.
Dairy farming is a little different in that it requires work year round. In fact, in the 19th century it was difficult to convince farmers to go into dairy instead of mixed crops, because it requires the farmer to stick to the operation, year around. (I’ve watched this up close and personal for most of my life.) So the trend has been to hire foreign labor even though it’s everyday work and not seasonal, but also to install technology, namely robots. I was involved with one of the early robot installations on a dairy farm in Michigan in 2009. It wasn’t the first in Michigan, but was relatively new. We learned from similar robot installations in the Netherlands, New Zealand, and elsewhere. It’s gotten to be more common since then, and there is now a new generation of robots.
Technology has been replacing manual labor on farms for the past couple of centuries, migrant labor or not.
Why not? It’s a big relief to have it done with, but some of us aren’t going to the dance.
So we are replacing low paying, back breaking, boring and relatively dangerous jobs with machines, great sign me up. The only question is why did this not happen before.
It did happen before.
What kind of movie would Cedar House Rules have been with robots instead of migrating farm labor?
The Reticulator
Exactly. I saw a dairy in New Zealand where a man and his son ran over 200 milk cows by themselves. The cows came in from the field entered a carrousel stall on their own. The farmer sat and attached the milking machine as they went by, the son, also seated, unhooked them as they rolled in fully milked These things will happen, people figure it out if free to do so, economies adjust. Free ones adjust faster. New Zealand is freer than ours and it adjusted over night to being kicked out of their special relationship with Great Britain once they adopted market freeing reforms, a tax reform, education reform, and became a more open economy.
Cider House was an attempt to deconstruct the 10 commandments, they’d have just found a different setting.
I’m not really aimed at the specific crop ( although the climate in California where they grow grapes is pretty similar to Australia), just that having an endless supply of cheap ( to the farmers, NOT the rest of society, read VDH on this) labor retards automation. In the long run we will be better off without the steady flow of illegals.
That has been going on in dairy in this country since the Sixties. There wasn’t a carousel in the milk-house of my uncle’s farm. The cows came in single-file and had the milkers attached.
Dumb question from a city boy. How do you get the cows to come in all together?
You feed them. There is a feed bin inside the yokes. They stick their heads through and you close the yokes to keep them from wandering off. Then you open the yokes when your done and shoo them out.
With robots the cows come when they want to get milked, and get a treat then, too. They all wear electronic tags, so if they come too often they don’t get their treat and don’t get milked. Each cow’s program is individualized, including information on teat conformation, which helps the laser guided system attach the milking cups automatically.
I’m not saying all this automation is an unmitigated good, btw. But it happens.
That part is new. The cows congregated because it was milking time, and they are motivated to do something about that because carrying that milk around is undoubtedly annoying.
The tags don’t sound like that big (or expensive) a deal, but attaching the milkers would be more of a problem.
May be my favorite sentence on the Internet today…
I’m glad you liked it. Here is a PR video about our system when it was first installed:
(There is one statement at the end which I don’t buy, given what technology has historically done to agriculture.)
Here is another from New Zealand, using the same brand of robot, in which you can actually see the laser beam at work, if you know what you’re looking for. (The visible light is red.)
https://youtu.be/p1VjSbRm0VU
and here is another from Germany which gives you a view of the laser guidance in action:
I seem to remember reading that considerably more “immigrants” now work in construction and food preparation than farming. So, it may be that fewer “crop pickers” are available because they find other work pays better and is less seasonal.
I put the word “immigrants” in quotes, because I don’t really consider someone an immigrant unless they went through the long-established legal immigration process.
Why the lack of attention? Because if the problem is illegal immigrants, the problem is conceptually simple: build a wall. If the problem is automation, then we either have to figure out what people will do for a living when the machines take all their jobs (conceptually difficult) or become Luddites and smash the machines. Nobody is willing to go there. Yet.
It’s good, if and only if, there are no humans who are capable and willing to be more productive than the robots. If the robots are springing up because of minimum wage laws and because legal immigration is too difficult, it’s negative on the whole.
I’m a skeptic that robots can ever replace even a small minority of human labor unless we regulate humans out of the jobs, which is a distinct possibility. If we stick a robot in somewhere there’s probably something else that a human can do instead of that thing if for no other reason than there not really being an upper limit to the size of the economy.
There’s something else the human can do, but the social arrangements tend to be different, and usually not the kind that will sustain a free enterprise economy, politically.
Immigration is easier to deal with. We can control it if we choose to, But let’s not forget the overwhelming majority of the working age illegals find work very quickly and always have. We pay Americans not to work and some of the illegals’ families figure that system out rather quickly. We went from 90% farmers to 2 or 3% and from labor intensive job shops to factories, yet frequently faced labor shortages met by constant floods of immigrants. Now we’re saying that this time we won’t be able to employ those who lose their jobs because they lack the educational skills. They always lacked educational skills, that is why they quickly learned what they had to learn. Our problem isn’t technology or immigration it’s too much government control, too much bureaucratic sludge in government but also in the large corporations, large banks. What we’re losing is flexibility, an ability to adapt. Some say, well all of the advanced industrial countries face the same weak growth and unemployment. They are all following the same set of policies and when new countries enter the global market who are not yet encumbered by top down bureaucratic governance, they grow rapidly.
Your “many” is a very niche market.
I regret that I only have 1 Like to give to this comment!
You can’t pick apples and peaches and many other products by machine. May I recommend a book? I live in the Niagara area of upstate NY, in the microclimate blessed with glacial soils and Lake Effect temperatures that grow the finest apples in the world (come and try some before you disagree). Local reporter Tom Rivers decided to see if the farmers’ complaint that local people wouldn’t do the hard work of harvesting, so he went and tried it. The result was “Farm Hands,” and if you can read this without choking up you are hard hearted indeed. One of the many things that bless our area are the migrant workers who come, stay, get their citizenship, and add to our culture; and Tom tells their stories beautifully. I was proud to narrate “Farm Hands” for Audible two years ago, and if you would like to hear it, send me a message and I’ll send you a coupon code. If you prefer the hardcopy order it soon, because like many self-published books the print runs are limited, and it has sold very well. https://www.amazon.com/Farm-Hands-Lessons-Western-Fields/dp/B003VOTCFQ/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1485179425&sr=1-1&keywords=farm+hands
The problem is that there are some jobs it is just not worth doing in the US. People on the Upper West Side may love their premium apples, but the problem is they are making the rest of us pay dearly for it.
Only a small fraction of the costs of those immigrant workers is borne by the apple consumer. The rest of us pay all sorts of subsidies to the immigrants and their offspring and endure the disproportionately high crime rates of their offpring.
Given sufficient incentive a way will be found. Grapes, citrus, almonds, cherries among other already harvested by machine. Nothing that unique about apples or peaches.