Man Finally Makes the Weed-Removing Robot 258
Roland Piquepaille writes "According to the Ludington Daily News, Michigan, Danish agricultural engineers have built a robot to help farmers with weeds. The Hortibot is about 3-foot-by-3-foot, is self-propelled, and uses global positioning system (GPS). It can recognize 25 different kinds of weeds and eliminate them by using its weed-removing attachments. It's also very environmentally friendly because it can reduce herbicide usage by 75 percent. But so far, it's only a prototype and the Danish engineers need to find a manufacturer for distribution."
Jokes are cool, But let's talk about farm robots. (Score:4, Interesting)
I would appear that the farmers expect to have severe labor problems if the federal government succeeds in preventing hundreds of thousands of Mexicans from entering the US without documentation. Farmers depend on lots of low-cost seasonal labor to get their harvest picked. Not so much for grains, but for fruits, berries, and vegetables.
Presently, as I understand the situation, thousands of migrant laborers follow the harvest and provide the long, hard bend-pick-stoop labor needed to get the produce off the ground and onto inspection belts and shipping boxes. Most (I believe, and I may be wrong) of these migrant labors are Mexicans and Central Americans living in the USA without immigration papers. This situation has been like this for about 100 years, since the mechanization of farm planting equipment led to much larger harvests. Using low-cost labor has been the only way to harvest the food. And low-cost has come to mean illegal immigrants. These people have been ruthlessly exploited and little had been done to improve their situation until Cesar Chavez energized the United Farm Workers union in the late 1960's. However the massive overpopulation of Mexico has led to the need for Mexico to send millions of their people to the USA. Stoop labor during harvest season has been the main source of employment for these people, so the cycle of exploitation begins anew.
The introduction of high-technology into a field dominated by serf labor clearly upsets the standard order of things. The robotic technology has always been too expensive and the serf labor too cheap for the any high-tech developments in food harvesting. But if the cost of labor goes up (due to effective immigration law enforcement, a really big if ) at the same time that technological costs go down, then this will lead to the displacement of hundreds of thousands of migrant workers.
Maybe, and not all at once. For the robots cost a lot of money. A migrant worker can pick a lot of food for the cost of the robot at $70,000. And immigration laws are never seriously enforced after a certain period of 'clamping down on illegals', a period which we are going through now. There simply is no other option to getting the food picked. This situation isn't going to change. Expect all the high-technology in farm work to take place in Europe where they don't have the masses of undocumented and untrackable migrant farm workers to pick the food.
In reality, there is a real need for harvest robots. But it is not in harvesting food; it is in harvesting land mines. No one is going to just walk out into a mine field and just pick up the bombs by hand (regardless of how many little plastic 'keys to heaven' the mullahs give them). And do it day in, day out, for very little money. Even if for some insane reason they actually wanted to, they would eventually all get blown up. This is true robot work. The harvest robot manufacturers should get some NGO to finance all their R&D in return for donating thousands of robot units to clear the vast minefields. Unfortunately, there is no one like Princess Diana around anymore to champion this cause. Shit, maybe we could get Paris Hilton to rally the cause. Good luck!
That's nice, but... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:The liberal dilemma (Score:3, Interesting)
But I'm beginning to wonder if the reason that our neighbors live so poorly is not due to a 'disfunctional' culture. The migrants that I've met or have read interviews with often have many more children that they could ever hope to provide minimum subsistence for. They think that I'm weird because I have no children, and I can't believe that they don't see anything unusual about having ten children and a sub-minimum wage job as an illegal immigrant 2000 miles away from their family.
But in the end, I get by and they either starve or depend on the kindness of strangers. Regardless of how hard that they work. Because the work that they do can't support ten kids in another country. And people will call me cruel and heartless because I allow this starvation to happen.
If we were dealing with millions of feral cats and dogs, then my very liberal friends would have no problem taking active steps to control their reproduction patterns. But we're dealing with humans, and the situation is different. It's a subject that no one will talk about. But if and when a 'die-off' occurs, the best that the good people will say if they say anything at all about the subject, is that it was the result of a 'disfunctional culture'. Followed by an embarrassed silence, and a quick change of subject to the new wine at Trader Joe's.
Re:Jokes are cool, But let's talk about farm robot (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:What does this thing look like? (Score:3, Interesting)