Machines replace migrants as Maine blueberry harvest blooms

http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/national/article34266051.html

by prostoalex • 11 years ago

60 52 11 years ago

hiou2• 11 years ago

In other news Excel has replaced 1,000s of programmers. So sick of this lame tech worker bias with these "poors" jobs. These posts on HN really reinforce every stereotype toward tech culture. Please stop posting and upvoting this crap.

ISL• 11 years ago

It's news of change; the article didn't seem like it had too much of a slant.

hiou2• 11 years ago

Its not. It's the posting of this crap like only the poors will be replaced

ghshephard4• 11 years ago

I read the article carefully, and I didn't see any of the slant you did. It was just an interesting article on how automation is moving deeply into a new field. And, as pmarca has constantly reminded us, once you've got automation, you've got software - and so this is yet another place in which software is eating the world.

raldi2• 11 years ago

This story is the latest confirmation of a worldchanging trend that YC companies (and their ilk) should be thinking about a lot.

Your Excel analogy is apt -- just as a tech investor or startup founder in 1990 needed to be aware of the revolutionary impact programs like Excel were having on the world of business, or one in 2010 needed to be aware of the ways software is eating the world, in 2015 they need to be in touch with the ways mechanization et al are on their way to changing everything.

afarrell2• 11 years ago

I wonder if there is some sort of more incremental way to introduce basic minimum income that won't get legislative pushback and will scale with automation.

ars• 11 years ago

It should be funded by pollution taxes (all types of pollution, let's not myopically focus on CO2).

The same people who pay the taxes (i.e. everyone) will also get the money, only distributed differently.

The biggest problem will be accounting for pollution embedded in imports, and refunding taxes for exports. Otherwise you will have what's going in on in Germany where they export all their pollution to China.

generic_user5• 11 years ago

This story says nothing about your "minimum income" can you at least try to explain how it relates to the story your commenting on. It looks fairly copypasta.

blazespin3• 11 years ago

This is already happening in the form of welfare, food stamps, tax credits, etc. lots of different programs.

afarrell2• 11 years ago

The whole point of BMI is to eliminate those programs and the perverse incentives that come with them (ex: people on CA-TANF are not allowed to have more than $2500 in savings or something.) and replace it with just cutting a cheque.

3Pi• 11 years ago

Despite the impact it has on the availability of unskilled manual labour jobs, I think it's great that machines are finally turning to harvesting - having worked on a similar project to do with grapes (specifically, pruning), it's not always the easiest of things.

It does highlight to me that we are getting closer to the point of needing to rethink labour distribution, because the non-technical jobs are the easiest to replace with machines.

generic_user5• 11 years ago

Hasn't that been the case for all of human history? Mass Migration has been a thing for thousands of years. Populations grow and shrink to meet needs of the workforce. The United States was settled by mass immigration mostly manual laborers who had 8 or 9 children per family. Now field labour is a rarity. and family size is 2 to 3 children.

The minuet you think Central planning can override natural market forces you run into much bigger problems that usually end in catastrophe for the people you were trying to 'help'.

eru5• 11 years ago

The minuet you think Central planning can override natural market forces you run into much bigger problems that usually end in catastrophe for the people you were trying to 'help'.

Corporations are central planning. Just on a smaller scale. (Though, companies like the old IBM were bigger then some small countries.)

brc4• 11 years ago

Even the people who get replaced get some benefit in that they get access to cheaper food. Not enough to replace their income, but the point is that automation is good for humanity.

Only the Luddites want to smash machines and keep a shirt costing a days wages.

toomuchtodo• 11 years ago

Even the people who get replaced get some benefit in that they get access to cheaper food.

As long as that food is not then exported to consumers who are willing to pay more for it than the poor are able.

brudgers• 11 years ago

The article describes [anecdotally] that mechanization makes the remaining labourers' work assignments more physically demanding. All the easy pickings go to machines, not humans and people with an already hard workday for low pay has gotten harder as a result of mechanization. The give in the system for low wage workers is systematically being removed in the age of the unlimited time off meme.

A_COMPUTER• 11 years ago

Before the machines, just as many humans still had to do that crappy work, they were just a smaller percentage of all the workers. That part didn't make any sense to me. I know this is naive, but maybe with the net cost savings of using machines, the farmers could avoid planting the places that machines can't reach easily.

ghshephard4• 11 years ago

It's particularly import for people who are legislating minimum wage laws to read articles like this. Most of the legislation I've seen drafted, always has an exception for farm labor - and here is an example why. If you didn't have that exception, then it would quickly become the case that automation/machinery ends up being cheaper (or soon will), and those jobs will vanish pretty quickly.

Now, that might not be entirely undesirable, from the perspective of the legislator (I.E. Move people up the feeding chain to more productive, better paying jobs, and automate the drudge work like raking berries) - but at the very least, they need to be aware of the impact of what they are doing.

venomsnake• 11 years ago

Basic income is coming. Like it or not. Better if created with debt free fiat money. This way we can have nice inflation - 2-4% yearly.

blazespin3• 11 years ago

Basic income is a bad idea. Idle hands do the devils work. People need to do something or they go crazy. Let's pay people to go to school. Better educated citizens means fewer Donald trumps. Add a consumption tax as well to discourage consumption so our economy can shift away from bullshit jobs.

brc4• 11 years ago

My local McDonalds is experimenting with touch screen menus. I guess automated kitchens won't be far behind.

It will be a shame when such an entry level job is no longer available to teenagers to learn about doing a job and working in a team.

blazespin3• 11 years ago

No, it won't. The sooner we shift from labor to education as our source of social dignity the better. Let's pay people to go to school rather than to flip burgers.

CmonDev• 11 years ago

No messed up orders, no attitude. I'd rather have teenagers learn something else somewhere else.

danieltillett2• 11 years ago

Well no. The reason you and I are wealthy enough to pontificate on HN is because we as a society have mechanized most of agriculture. The sooner 100% of the back breaking labor involved in growing food is replaced with machines the better [1].

1. I am not counting home gardens as these are a fun hobby (I miss having a garden).

generic_user5• 11 years ago

How anyone can lament the disappearance of back breaking unskilled field work is beyond me. Mechanisation and destruction of repetitive unskilled work is the driving force for the improvement of living standards and the advancement of civilization since the beginning of recorded history. The invention of agrarian civilization itself displaced hunter-gatherer tribes, should we lament the disappearance of nomads also? This romanticism seems a tad silly.

mc323• 11 years ago

It's because the major proportion of those laborers have little to offer beside manual labor. Therefore as a labor force at a disadvantage, the publication takes the side of the plight of the disadvantaged. Of course a lot of the blame can be placed on the societies who value education too little to educate their population. On the other hand many of the laborers are unprivileged in their home countries as well. So it's also a double whammy for them.

This particular issue is of less concern to American workers and if anything it's a good thing in that no one has to do backbreaking labor. It's like decrying the loss of coal mining --yes, it's a loss for the people losing those jobs, but society as a whole and the labor force as a whole is better off without those kinds of thankless and really hard jobs.

The sad part is that we have unskilled people willing to do these jobs.

generic_user5• 11 years ago

I share your concern for the people effected but the notion that these people have little to offer and can not, or will not move up the labor chain does far more harm then good. Most westerners great grand parents were either farm laborers or did some form of back breaking manual labour. The literacy rate was horrible and so forth. I doubt very much these farm workers could not transition into some from of service jobs with very little training. Or some lateral move into other manual labor positions in other parts of the economy.

I hired someone from Mexico on a visa into a 6 figure a year job who's father was literally a farm laborer. He was quite capable to do his job. Expecting nothing from people is a self fulfilling prophecy.

eru5• 11 years ago

Actually, the invention of agriculture was a great tragedy in terms of back breaking unskilled field work. Agriculture did feed more people, but the survivors were worse off.

We are only now recovering from agriculture.

Animats• 11 years ago

There have been automated picking machines for almost everything for years, mostly with purely mechanical systems. All the big field crops were mechanized decades ago. Blueberry picking machines have been around for decades. They require flat ground and neat plant rows, though.

Automated strawberry picking is still hard, but Agrobot makes a robotic strawberry picking machine.[1] This is an vision-guided multi-arm robot system, which is rare in agriculture. These more complex machines are still marginal economically, but the electronics can only get cheaper.

[1] http://www.wsj.com/video/agrobot-automates-the-work-of-berry...

danieltillett2• 11 years ago

Good as strawberry picking has to be one of the worst jobs in agriculture.

I think bananas are one of the hardest to automate, but I can't find the old reference I had on this.

Machines replace migrants as Maine blueberry harvest blooms

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