Robots To Replace Migrant Fruit Pickers 409
Vicissidude sends us to Wired for a look at a fruit-harvesting robot being developed in California. Its development has been funded entirely by agricultural associations, concerned by the uncertainty surrounding migrant immigrant labor. Quoting: "As if the debate over immigration and guest worker programs wasn't complicated enough, now a couple of robots are rolling into the middle of it. Vision Robotics, a San Diego company, is working on a pair of robots that would trundle through orchards plucking oranges, apples or other fruit from the trees. In a few years, troops of these machines could perform the tedious and labor-intensive task of fruit picking that currently employs thousands of migrant workers each season."
Re:MOD PARENT UP (Score:4, Informative)
You see picking cotton just wasn't as profitable as growing other things, until the cotton gin made it more profitable.
Sure it saved some work, but it created much more.
Liberal students were one reason (Score:3, Informative)
You see, students were concerned about the impact on the Farm Workers back then, and didn't want to jeoparize their jobs. It might be a little hard to fathom now, but it was a different time back then. The grape boycott by the Farm Workers Union was still a fresh topic, and people were more radical about liberal causes then.
Plus, believe it or not, at least some Farm Workers considered themselves Middle Class. I once saw this statement in a local newspaper, because the Farm Worker being interviewed could actually own a home.
Oh yes, I was one of those students that shared that belief, though I wasn't vocal about it.
Today is a completely different world. The number of illegal workers in this country have pretty much destroyed any hope of being "Middle Class" for the farm workers. And a good number of students from then have had to shift their job asperations (or are thinking about it), due to the unmitigated number of H1-B's that are flooding the market. That's if they actually have a job (and I know many in this age group who either don't, or are underemployed).
It's been done, with tree shakers (Score:5, Informative)
"Tree shakers" [aol.com] have been used since the 1960s. A big net in two section is clamped around the tree, a big arm reaches out and grabs the tree trunk, and a vibrator shakes the tree while the fruit falls off. Some early versions damaged trees, but that was fixed. (Linear shaking good, orbital shaking bad.)
Tomato harvesting was partly mechanized back in the 1960s. A tougher tomato plus appropriate machinery did the job. This was controversial at the time. Today, it's established technology. Check out the Pik-Rite 190 Tomato Harvester. [pikrite.com] 30 tons of tomatoes an hour. And that's the small model. This still doesn't work all that well for the softer varieties of tomatoes intended for sale whole, but Roma and cherry tomatoes are routinely picked by machine now.
Picking machines are getting smarter. The newer ones have cameras, computers, and air jets [odenberg.com] to sort produce by size and color.
Re:Their will be an outcry.... (Score:2, Informative)
Because I can guarantee you, every single Republican who voted for that Amnesty bill committed Political Suicide. Their approval ratings (from Republican voters) have plummeted faster then a greased up slip-n-slide.
Here's some nice tidbits:
And the kicker:
Yes . . Three Percent, out of everybody in America, there's only THREE percent that want that Shamnesty Bill. I think this is a topic that most Republicans and Democrats can agree on.
Re:Jumping the gun (Score:3, Informative)
This [ucdavis.edu] sums it up:
"Mechanical harvesting is also cheaper, especially as yields increase: most estimates say that hand harvesting costs $125 to $150 a ton, while machine harvesting costs $65 to $85 a ton. Four hand harvesters can pick about one acre of grapes a day; a mechanical harvester, which uses a crew of five to harvest around the clock, can harvest 10 to 20 acres a day."
Re:Really? (Score:5, Informative)
Unfortunately, the people you DON'T know, treat them as slaves, and their kids as more slaves. They don't get medications, are exposed to pesticides, and if they complain, they're threatened with "la migra" (Immigration). Those cases are quite documented down here in Mexico.
Re:Really? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Cheaper than wage slavery? (Score:3, Informative)
Once and for all the American Cvil War was NOT about slavery. It was about the economic leverage slave owners tried to weld against the indentured servant labor force of the north
And now, for a brief history lesson.
(Disclaimer: I am speaking abstractly of the slave trade and of the historical fact regarding it. While this may seem cold and even racist, by no means should my assessment of the slave trade itself be construed to imply some approval or condoning of the ownership and/or trade in human beings. I am merely trying to relay facts about what was, not what should have been.)
What most people do not realize is that only about 2% of the entire African slave trade reached American shores. The US outlawed the importation of slaves in 1808, over half a century before the Civil War. Thus, what slave trade existed in the US was an internal and self-sustaining one.
Slaves were listed as assets on slave owners books in much the same way as any other asset. In fact, in Georgia, the expected lifetime output of a slave was factored into the Return on Investment (ROI) of his/her purchase, and leveraged accordingly in any bank loan or finance maneuver on the part of the slave owner seeking to expand his operation.
This became more prominent as the 19th century wore on and northern states relied on cheap immigrant labor or an indentured servant to fuel industrialization while the south continued its reliance on the internal slave trade. The fact slaves reproduced at far lower rates than imported indentured servants led to a premium on the slave him/herself. Supply and demand created a workforce shortage for the south and surplus for the north.
This, in turn, lead the politicians of the north to turn the moral issue of slavery into a political one in order to enforce an economic advantage, such as when they did the same against the Mormons in the Utah territories.
What resulted was the retaliation of southern slave owners to protect what they viewed as legitimate assets, leveraged against mortgages they had taken out from northern banks in order to compete with European textile mills, from which the northern states had been importing from more than the southern states.
The American Civil War wasn't about slavery or even states' rights. It was about economics. The northern states had the lion's share of the GDP of the young US and, thus, had a greater attention from the Federal government. Factor in the hot-button moral issue of slavery and the northern states had a sure-fire win from a political standpoint.
The true shame is that all this resulted in actual warfare, with the southern states refusing to budge on the obvious moral bankruptcy of the internal slave-trade and insisting, blindly, that the issue was about states' rights.
Re:MOD PARENT UP (Score:4, Informative)
People of any nationality should be given a legal and reasonable path of immigration to the US, as long as they are willing to work, and attempt to integrate into the society. Considering the poor (by American standards) conditions that most illegals put up with to live and work in the US, it's pretty clear that there are a TON of people who WANT to be part of our society. Denying them that right is nothing short of inhumane. Considering that most illegals are already able to find employment that pays enough for them to subsist, it's not exactly like the US is going to turn into a refugee camp, and, if anything, will help the US economy by preventing the outsourcing of manufacturing and agriculture to other countries. It's also not exactly like the US is overcrowded -- we have more good land down south, and out west than we know what to do with.
The problem is, that, unlike yourself, many many Americans ARE bigots towards Latin Americans (and overwhelmingly so). The current immigration restrictions are more likely than not a result of this sort of person.
My local newspaper's website offers a comments section, much like most blogs offer. Whenever a story about immigration is posted, it is immediately flooded with some of the most potent and passionate bigotry I've ever seen (outside of documentaries on the civil rights movement). The newspaper now disables comments for these stories. It dealt a serious blow to my faith in humanity.
The locale of this newspaper? New Jersey. I would say that it's not unreasonable to peg over 50% of Jersey's population as being direct decendants of Ellis Island immigrants from the 19th and 20th centuries.
Re:FALSE (Score:3, Informative)
See, people that ramble on about "bigotry" and "racism" and all the other excuses they use to justify illegal immigration on a massive scale do so to obscure this fact: allowing foreign people into your country (whatever country that may be) and possibly naturalizing said people isn't about helping them. It's just not, and anyone that says so is full of hooey. It's about choosing people that that will be good citizens and will be of long-term benefit to your country. That, by the way, is a process, one that takes time and is not fulfilled by simply arriving here in the back of a semitrailer! National governments have the right and the obligation to be selective about those to whom they grant citizenship, because their primary responsibility is to the citizens of their own country. Period. Regarding legal immigration, as the parent poster pointed out America is already pretty damn generous.
So that's what immigration is supposed to be about: it's not about handing out free jobs as yet another disguised form of foreign aid (and speaking of "more than the entire rest of the world combined
Re:Really? (Score:2, Informative)
Robotic Nation (Score:2, Informative)
Marshall Brain, the founder of http://howstuffworks.com/ [howstuffworks.com], has written a fictional account of what a future of advanced robots might look like.
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm [marshallbrain.com]
He also maintains a blog to keep track of developments related to a future robotic society.
http://roboticnation.blogspot.com/ [blogspot.com]
"It could be good and it could be bad, but I don't know for sure" - Husker Du