
The Age of Robot Farmers - pseudolus
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/15/the-age-of-robot-farmers
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brianpgordon
> In 2011, for example, Georgia enacted a strict immigration law that targeted
> undocumented workers and their employers. Later that year, the state
> reportedly lost eleven thousand crop workers. To fill the gap, officials
> established a program whereby nonviolent offenders nearing the end of their
> prison terms could do paid farmwork. The program had few takers, and many
> prisoners and probationers who did try it walked off the job, because the
> work was so hard. Georgia farmers lost more than a hundred and twenty
> million dollars.

> “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.

~~~
thinkloop
> Georgia farmers lost more than a hundred and twenty million dollars

> H-2A workers are still among the lowest paid in the country

Why don't they pay labour $100M?

~~~
swelz
I think a larger issue is that food/resource prices may be too low.

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.

~~~
linuxftw
Yes, the food market is heavily distorted. If giant ag businesses that employ
immigrants can't make a profit, it means there's too many farms in operation.
Farms will close, food prices will rise, and the market will stabilize.

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.

~~~
salawat
I'm not sure even that would overcome the hyperoptimization capital trap
advantage big industrial farms enjoy.

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.

~~~
linuxftw
> 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.

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ggm
I'm solely in the consumer camp: I don't produce food, I buy and eat it (I
don't buy and sell it either).

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.

~~~
thinkloop
> if they aren't picking, what are these people doing, and whats the wider
> cost?

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.

~~~
ajmurmann
It's obviously because of the way our economy is set up. One possible outcome
of more automation could be higher standard of living while doing less work
for everybody. 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. Which of the two alternatives
seems right now more realistic? We can't even agree on basic income guarantee
which obviously is a necessary step to move towards the desirable of the two
scenarios. It's understandable because that clearly would be "communism" and
that's always bad and we cannot have that as god fearing, compassionate
Americans.

~~~
thinkloop
Jobs are useless vestiges of the past. There is nothing honorable about jobs
and no one cares about them. By their very definition they are things we don't
want to do but have to for survival. This is all industrial work-centric
brainwashing. If we can get survival without jobs that would be a great win
for human kind.

> 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.

~~~
stevenhuang
You and GP likely agree on the same points, but are talking past one another
concerning time scale. Their concern is if we automate the pickers of their
jobs, what is their immediate recourse? Waiting years for society to establish
a better safety net is not an option. One can retrain, but options are
limited, and will be more so with greater automation.

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.

~~~
thinkloop
I agree with this. The transition will be tricky and potentially long. It
needs to be managed. And you're right that GP was hinting at that stuff too,
but I saw a little bit of the misguided mainstream talking-points creeping in
that I felt I needed to address.

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reality_inspctr
I used to run an ag tech automation startup, and we were working on how
fulfillment center robots could be repurposed for indoor agriculture. This
allows a complete change in economics. Strawberries are an important crop, but
on-demand nutrition for animal feed and other segments where robotics allows
complex alignment of supply chain and resources may be more lucrative in the
mid term. Like Walmart just in time delivery for commodities.

~~~
pugworthy
> ...a complete change in economics

For whom?

~~~
reality_inspctr
I would say the full stack of financing from individual farms to investment
funds of every type. Project finance funds in particular.

Here is an article about it. Disclosure I wrote it. Only posting as relevant.

Https://agfundernews.com/inside-insect-farming.html

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jhoechtl
I was wondering wheather a free supply of food enabled by robots doing the
job, and free basic housing could solve some of mankinds problems. Is there
literature on the topic, had anyone done the maths?

Utopia or feasible, that's what I am wondering.

~~~
thinkloop
The issue in the under-developed world is lack of capital, machines,
technology, etc. This is more of that. If that's the problem you were hinting
at, I don't think this would be the solution.

~~~
THE_PUN_STOPS
But container ships.

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jmathai
One of my favorite OSS projects is farmbot. I wish more people knew about it.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r0CiLBM1o8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r0CiLBM1o8)

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mikro2nd
Farmbot is a toy. A nice toy, to be sure, but a toy for rich urbanites who
want a little veggie garden and it'll never be anything more than that. It
goes nowhere _near_ addressing the scale of real-world farming and I see no
way it ever can. The concept won't even scale to small-scale market gardening
-- the 1- to 10-hectare scale.

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_ /.

~~~
jmathai
What makes you think that? These first few iterations are expensive (in the
thousands of dollars) and require assembly but those are not difficult
problems to address over time.

Are you saying people wouldn't want to have an automated home garden in their
back yard if they could afford it?

~~~
mikro2nd
No, I precisely said that it's a _nice thing to have_ an automated home-garden
for people that can afford it. I _like_ the Farmbot. But it is Never. Going.
To. Automate. Real. Large-scale. Farming.

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.

~~~
dragonwriter
> Very large mobile robots might work

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.

~~~
mikro2nd
Yes, that is pretty-much the current state of play - already existing
mechanical platforms that have had some more-or-less clever automation (mainly
guidance) added.

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.

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l_camacho84
Every time I read about farm mechanization I remember the Ralph Borsodi work
on the book "The Distribution Age". Every efficiency you gain in production
scale you tend to lose in distribution efficiency.

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.

~~~
roel_v
Those costs are tiny, compared to all other costs. 'Local' is not a goal in
itself (except for geopolitical reasons, but that's another topic). For fun,
try to do the back-of-a-napkin math on how many bananas you can fit in a
container, how many containers fit on a ship, and what percentage of the
retail price that makes. Or how much it costs to ship a truck of lettuce heads
from Spain to Northern Europe. Yes there are weird cases (flying roses from
Eastern Africa to Europe?) but all in all, the costs are tiny.

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...

~~~
l_camacho84
The costs are tiny because right now they not internalize pollution and social
injustice. Yes, “local” is not an end on itself but the same is true for
“global”. Right now the cost of sending a banana to the other side of the
world in a container is small because we are jeopardizing the future of the
planet by not putting a price on CO2 emissions. Local food need to spend
effort on Marketing because they are more expensive that monocultures, and the
reason for this is that monoculture prices benefit from subsidies and not
paying externalities. We need to fix this for the sake of future generations
and if we do this local goods would be much more competitive and so much more
effective in marketing.

~~~
roel_v
Well that's exactly what I preempted and refuted in my second paragraph, and
my third paragraph was about how, no, just making mass produced food
internalize all their costs won't fix all the marketing and sales issues of
'locally produced food', for a broad definition of everything that
encompasses...

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dosy
I'm old enough that this title recalls airbrushed illustrations of chrome-
plated rockets and robots on distant worlds, in the children's science and
technology picture books I read as a youngin.

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amelius
> Each of the robots was equipped with a patented “Pitzer wheel”—the appendage
> that does the actual picking. The wheel had six soft-rubber clawlike
> “obtainers” that are able to cup the berries and pivot, imitating the
> popping action that human pickers make with their wrists.

So they patented the human hand, minus the functionality they don't need?

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contingencies
_“Apples, citrus, strawberries, leafy greens, grapes”—those are the five big
enough to justify automation._

Some questionable assumptions there.

~~~
kolchinski
I'm working an an agricultural robotics startup and can confirm that if
anything, it's challenging to find robotics use cases in specialty crops that
have a large enough market to justify the R&D investment necessary to get the
product working in the first place. Corn and soy add up to hundreds of
billions of dollars of market value a year, while even a huge specialty crop
like strawberries is ~1/100 of that. There's an argument to be made for
building out a robotics platform in a crop with higher value per acre (i.e. a
specialty crop), then moving to the larger markets (i.e. row crops), but the
degree of specialization real world robotics requires is a counterpoint to
that - making the jump is often nontrivial.

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

~~~
Gibbon1
I've mostly been under the impression that the big wins for machine
intelligence in farming is weed and pest control.

Although a Mexican friend of mine said strawberry harvesting is utterly
brutal. He also said harvesting grapes is easy work compared to anything else.

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pragmaticlurker
I see Robot Farmers still a nice try but not a feasible solution. There are
many aspects which are still difficult (e.g. Olives, general Trees with
Fruits).

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

~~~
tim333
Nitpick - self driving cars have worked fairly well in snow and darkness but
still manage issues in good conditions eg. hitting fire trucks (Telsa) or not
being able to merge in heavy traffic (Waymo).

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davidw
Sounds like it could be useful to know the binary language of moisture
vaporators.

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choonway
The limiting factor of automation is still, the amount of human labor you
still need. Can it be reduced to zero? Why do you even need the farmers if
that's the case?

~~~
devoply
Considering how abusive the human relationship is with the land and the
animals, why don't we have an agricultural revolution and creates 10s of
millions of jobs for farmers? Modern human imagination is so constrained to
think that this is impossible. But really it's just political and as easy to
do as it is to automate millions of jobs away.

~~~
choonway
The green revolution eliminated a lot of farming jobs. It is a step forward in
the right direction.

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.

~~~
devoply
> It is a step forward in the right direction.

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.

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SubiculumCode
Sounds like yet another argument for why we might need Universal Basic Income
sooner rather than later, or some other innovative solution. Isn't there a
candidate for president whose campaign is based on that?

~~~
navaati
One French presidential candidate ran with that on the last elections. He was
the candidate for the Labour party (Parti Socialiste), one of the two major
party of France (equivalent more or less to the Democrats in importance), so
not a niche candidate either.

He did something like 3% and the Parti Socialiste is dead now, replaced by
Macron's party.

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starpilot
We need basic income now.

~~~
mc32
Lots of countries have an aging pop of farmers where young people are not very
attracted to that as a career. This satisfies that trend and allows those
regions to remain productive with even fewer people.

~~~
Sophistifunk
All we need is a robot to eat the people that are no longer needed in the
area.

~~~
mirimir
Don't need a robot for that. Pigs will eat anything.

