Going to be expensive but wages are making it affordable although we will suffer for it. From The Seattle Times:
A robot that picks apples? Washington state’s orchards could see a ‘game-changer’
Harvesting Washington state’s vast fruit orchards each year requires thousands of farmworkers, and many of them work illegally in the United States.
That system eventually could change dramatically as at least two companies are rushing to get robotic fruit-picking machines to market.
The robotic pickers don’t get tired and can work 24 hours a day.
“Human pickers are getting scarce,” said Gad Kober, a co-founder of Israel-based FFRobotics. “Young people do not want to work in farms, and elderly pickers are slowly retiring.”
Same thing as what happened when Cesar Chavez unionised the grape pickers and the farmers discovered that they could automate the processs for much cheaper. Consumers lost out as the farmers only grew grapes that could physically withstand the picking process. As I wrote:
this basically put a whole bunch of pickers out of business, changed the way that grapes are grown, forced us to adopt a mono-culture and prevented us from commercialy harvesting heirloom grapes (the ones with real flavor) and made a couple of people (the inventors of the grape picking machines) very rich. A perfect case of unintended consequences - what Chavez was saying sounded good to the progressives in New York, Boston, San Francisco, etc... but it did not work in actuality and wreaked havoc with the system.
We already have a visa process for agricultural workers from other nations - we need to use that instead of relying on illegal immigrants.
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