The recent New Yorker Magazine has a thorough story about automated agriculture, with strawberry picking getting particular attention. The magazine does like its articles long and rambling, so the reader learns about assorted agro-facts like grower complaints about the H-2A visa, the manual skills required to pick delicate strawberries (“a wristy twist that prevents bruising around the calyx”) and even some background on the general history of modern farming:

The Age of Robot Farmers, The New Yorker, April 15, 2019 Picking strawberries takes speed, stamina, and skill. Can a robot do it? [. . .] At the beginning of the twentieth century, about a third of the U.S. population lived on farms; today, less than one per cent does. Mechanization brought tractors and combine harvesters, which were initially used for grains, such as wheat, rye, oats, and barley. They automated the manual labor formerly done by small armies of threshers and bundlers. Mechanical harvesters made industrial farming possible, and led to the consolidation of small family acreages into the megafarms that dominate U.S. agriculture today.

The author opines that the hundreds of thousands of new illegal aliens from Central America won’t be interested in doing farm work because they have better things in mind. Good luck with that:

Migrants coming more recently from Central America, many of them also looking for better jobs and opportunities for their families, and often fleeing violence in their home countries, haven’t traditionally entered the crop-farm workforce in enough numbers to compensate for the loss of those Mexican workers—they’ve instead found jobs at meatpacking plants and in the service industries.

However, this article examines automation, and the farmers want smart machines that will reliably do the jobs so they needn’t worry about finding foreign workers when crops need picking. In fact, the strawberry grower featured, Gary Wishnatzki, helped raise investment money to develop the machines that will free him from depending on humans, and other growers have joined him. The technology people are happy to oblige — it’s a win-win for both.

The tech keeps improving, as suggested by a look at the new gadgets coming online. The upshot is that low-skilled workers will be replaced by robots when the machines become cheaper to use than humans. So it is crazy for Washington to continue admitting a hundred thousand menial laborers per month from Central America — the United States is not the welfare office for the Third World; it is the home of citizens.

And anyway, the US needs skilled workers, not backward rustics.

Continuing with a slice of the article: