There is a well-documented emerging shortage of farmworkers. Manifestations of mechanization already abound. Consider:
It begins in the sky — drones are no longer news, but the sensors are. For example, there are drone-mounted sensors that can tell your smartphone which plants are stressed (thirsty), how much they need to drink and where they are. There is a sensor being developed to inform a citrus grower of the “dread”, a deadly disease called Huanglongbing that turns fruit green.
A company called Blue River Technology of Mountain View is developing dirt-level robots that use algorithms (of course) and sensors to parse weeds from veggies and fruits, and remove the offenders.
Vegetables require intense, in-your-face maintenance, a.k.a. “thinning.” This allows the remaining plants to grow bigger faster and produce accordingly. There are robot thinners, which is amazing because the cutting blades must come within a quarter-inch of the main stem. Some of the devices actually remember where they planted each seedling.
A bit further up the food chain — in the trees — I have watched evolutionary harvesters that can, without harm, find and pick apples, olives, cherries and pears. Stone fruits, due to their delicate skins, are a bit in the future.
Researchers at (pick an ag school, any ag school + advanced private research centers like Paramount Farms) are designing trees and bushes to be mechanization friendly.
Picture these: olive trees growing like large grapevines, or espaliered cherry trees growing with near right-angle branches, nearly flat! They exist in nature, sort of. There also are hardy strawberries being built to absorb the fondling of metal fingers.
The problem is all this innovation ain’t cheap. A friend of mine who farms almonds, cherries, row crops and now olives near Firebaugh wrote a check for $300,000+ for the olive harvester. (This is after he planted several hundred acres of new, shorter olive “bushes.”) A sensor array that can plant each kernel of corn at the computer-instructed depth is $47,000 per tractor.
And all of this requires the associated engineering of the plants. Corn seeds are coated in insecticide and fungicide; inside, the DNA is structured with a protein to kill formidable insects.
But — you ag tech developers — it all pencils out or the farmers would not buy.
Here are a couple of recent articles on this topic to peruse:
http://www.vox.com/2014/7/2/5861274/americas-running-out-of-farmworkers-will-robots-help
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-07-03/gmo-factory-monsantos-high-tech-plans-to-feed-the-world#p1
This story was originally posted by TechWire.
