----- 3 stars ----- The Age of Robot Farmers / New Yorker A wide-ranging, fascinating piece on the present and future of agriculture: Picking a strawberry properly, and doing it fast enough to earn a living wage, requires speed, dexterity, and stamina. On a typical plant, only some of the berries will be ripe; the pickers must identify them by working their hands through the thick canopy of leaves with little fruit-seeking movements of their fingers, catching the stem of the ripe berries in the webbing of their fingers, and cupping the fruit. Then, with a wristy twist that prevents bruising around the calyx, they pluck the berry from the vine the way you might pop a frosty can of beer from a six-pack. [...] Summarizing the potential, Slaughter said, “For the first time, farmers can know what’s going on in their fields on the level of the individual plant. The idea is that you can run a farm with the same intimate care you would use on a back-yard garden, where you know each plant individually.” Farmers could irrigate and fertilize only those plants that needed it, and not waste resources on the current one-size-fits-all approach. Agriculture accounts for seventy per cent of fresh-water consumption worldwide, and, in the U.S. alone, farms use more than a billion pounds of pesticide each year; strawberry farms are especially heavy users. “Precision agriculture,” the name given to this slowly unfolding revolution, could dramatically reduce such wasteful and chemical-dependent practices. [...] He described the labor situation in the U.K. as a crisis. The strawberry pickers are mostly from Bulgaria and Romania, two of the poorest countries in the European Union. “And now we’ve got the situation where we’re trying to leave the E.U. but we haven’t done it yet, and that’s made it even more difficult to recruit workers,” he said. He wasn’t sure how growers were going to get the berries picked this season. “The British don’t work in the fields?” I asked. Harnden laughed. “Not any longer.” Wishnatzki, who had been listening, said, “Every developed country in the world, it’s the immigrants doing the hard work.” “Absolutely,” Harnden agreed. “Wherever you go, it’s somebody else’s population that’s doing the agricultural work.” In Costa Rica, Nicaraguans work on the coffee farms. In Malaysia, Indonesians harvest bananas. Like all growers who use H-2A workers, Wish Farms must advertise its jobs to American workers first. Mike Carlton, the labor-relations director of the Florida Fruit & Vegetable Association, told me that he did not know of any growers in the state of Florida who got a response to their ads this past season.
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----- 3 stars ----- The Age of Robot Farmers / New Yorker A wide-ranging, fascinating piece on the present and future of agriculture: Picking a strawberry properly, and doing it fast enough to earn a living wage, requires speed, dexterity, and stamina. On a typical plant, only some of the berries will be ripe; the pickers must identify them by working their hands through the thick canopy of leaves with little fruit-seeking movements of their fingers, catching the stem of the ripe berries in the webbing of their fingers, and cupping the fruit. Then, with a wristy twist that prevents bruising around the calyx, they pluck the berry from the vine the way you might pop a frosty can of beer from a six-pack. [...] Summarizing the potential, Slaughter said, “For the first time, farmers can know what’s going on in their fields on the level of the individual plant. The idea is that you can run a farm with the same intimate care you would use on a back-yard garden, where you know each plant individually.” Farmers could irrigate and fertilize only those plants that needed it, and not waste resources on the current one-size-fits-all approach. Agriculture accounts for seventy per cent of fresh-water consumption worldwide, and, in the U.S. alone, farms use more than a billion pounds of pesticide each year; strawberry farms are especially heavy users. “Precision agriculture,” the name given to this slowly unfolding revolution, could dramatically reduce such wasteful and chemical-dependent practices. [...] He described the labor situation in the U.K. as a crisis. The strawberry pickers are mostly from Bulgaria and Romania, two of the poorest countries in the European Union. “And now we’ve got the situation where we’re trying to leave the E.U. but we haven’t done it yet, and that’s made it even more difficult to recruit workers,” he said. He wasn’t sure how growers were going to get the berries picked this season. “The British don’t work in the fields?” I asked. Harnden laughed. “Not any longer.” Wishnatzki, who had been listening, said, “Every developed country in the world, it’s the immigrants doing the hard work.” “Absolutely,” Harnden agreed. “Wherever you go, it’s somebody else’s population that’s doing the agricultural work.” In Costa Rica, Nicaraguans work on the coffee farms. In Malaysia, Indonesians harvest bananas. Like all growers who use H-2A workers, Wish Farms must advertise its jobs to American workers first. Mike Carlton, the labor-relations director of the Florida Fruit & Vegetable Association, told me that he did not know of any growers in the state of Florida who got a response to their ads this past season.