tl;dr
- Humans are 4 times better than the Harv robot
- one robotic apple-picker costs at least $300,000
- Americans won’t work as pickers even for $25 per hour and FREE housing #LAZY
- Trump’s anti-Mexican anti-immigration polices are cutting off workers who are willing to do the work that unemployed Americans won’t do #GOP #UNEMPLOYMENT #FoodStamps
- robots will replace human pickers — one day
The future of agricultural work has arrived here in Florida, promising to ease labor shortages and reduce the cost of food, or so says the team behind Harv, a nickname for the latest model from automation company Harvest CROO Robotics.
Harv is on the leading edge of a national push to automate the way we gather goods that bruise and squish, a challenge that has long flummoxed engineers.
Gary Wishnatzki, who created Harv with former Intel engineer Bob Pitzer, one of the minds behind the television hit “BattleBots,” has invested $3 million of his own money.
The Pitch
“The labor force keeps shrinking,” said Gary Wishnatzki, a third-generation strawberry farmer. “If we don’t solve this with automation, fresh fruits and veggies won’t be affordable or even available to the average person.”
The Reality
The electronic picker is still pretty clumsy.
During a test run last year, Harv gathered just 20 percent of strawberries on every plant without mishap. This year’s goal: Harvest half of the fruit without crushing or dropping any. The human success rate is closer to 80 percent, making Harv the underdog in this competition.
One Harv is programmed to do the work of 30 people. The machine hovers over a dozen rows of plants at the same time, picking five strawberries every second and covering eight acres a day.
one robotic apple-picker costs at least $300,000 — too much for most budgets.
Farm workers
Fewer seasonal laborers are coming from Mexico, the biggest supplier of U.S. farmworkers.
“Trump administration’s tighter immigration policies are squeezing off the supply of seasonal workers, as well as undocumented labor.”
Approximately half of the country’s 850,000 farmworkers are not in the United States legally, according to 2016 data from the Department of Labor, the most recent available.
“Fewer Americans want to bend over all day in a field, farmers say, even when offered higher wages, free housing and recruitment bonuses.”
“A machine cannot harvest delicate table grapes, strawberries or tree fruit without destroying the perfect presentation demanded by consumers and the retail food industry,” said Giev Kashkooli, political and legislative director for the United Farm Workers of America, which represents about 20,000 farmworkers across the country.
Unions don’t oppose technological advances though, Kashkooli added.
