The Robots are Coming!

Picking strawberries is hard work. Pickers spend a lot of time on their hands and knees peeking under leaves and straw to find and pick the ripe ones. I know first hand. A few years ago a small team of Master Gardeners at my local Demonstration Garden picked and donated over 500 pounds of strawberries to local food banks in a matter of about three weeks. We spent a couple of hours, three days a week, working our way down the rows. (The following year about half of the older rows were plowed under and not replaced with strawberries! It was too hard to find interested volunteers.)

Picking strawberries is also exacting work. Each picker must determine which strawberries are ready and which to wait on. Unlike bananas and many other fruits and vegetables, strawberries will not continue to ripen after harvesting. And if you don’t get them at the right time, they will rot on the plant. That’s why coming back day after day is necessary.

Besides being difficult and exacting, picking strawberries is delicate work. No one wants to eat a squished strawberry. People who buy them in the stores are usually even fussier than people getting them for free at a food bank.

Why all this discussion of strawberries? A robot is coming to do this difficult, exacting and delicate work and may be in limited operation on strawberry farms within three years. As the article points out “a robot that can pick strawberries may ease the industry’s labor problem and revolutionize the way crops are harvested.” It’s getting harder to find workers, and the ones that show up often move on to other crops before the job is complete.

Some machines are pictured in the article, but a search on “strawberry harvesting robot” yields a number of YouTube videos. Once in operation they will run for about 20 hours a day with the ability to pick up to 8.5 acres in that time. If there is an abundance of fruit, they automatically slow down to get them all. The robots will be able to do the job with more precision than humans; and will be able to pick at night, when cooler fruits are more resistant to bruising and when lower temperatures at picking time increase shelf life and reduce cooling costs. In addition, the “machine is going to know exactly where each plant is in the field” and “be able to have yield data at the plant level.”

Based on personal experience, I was fascinated by the idea of machines harvesting strawberries. Seeing pictures and videos of the huge robotic arms working in auto assembly where hard work and precision are so important is one thing, but having robots do the delicate work of harvesting fruit and vegetables adds another dimension. As one spokesperson for the robot designer says, “We’re not going to stop with strawberries.” 

Fewer jobs are safe anymore from automation. It’s something to keep in mind as the minimum wage debate rages on. As labor becomes more expensive, the option to substitute machines becomes more attractive – especially if they can do the job with more precision while simultaneously collecting meaningful data. Economic understanding reminds us that every day we are selling our skills in competition against others worldwide with those same skills, and more and more in competition against the threat of substitution by machines.

Kids can no longer bank on the idea of working the same low skill job as their parents and retiring after thirty years with a union pension and healthcare. More skilled robots are coming, and they are coming fast.