Transcript

[Announcer] This is the old way of harvesting lettuce.

It's tedious and unbelievably back-breaking.

And this is the new way.

Meet the automatic lettuce harvester.

Hear that?

That's the sound of water knives,

ultra high-pressured blasts that cut through the plant,

which is then escorted up to workers who trim and sort it.

You're using less effort because you don't cut,

you don't bend over, it's really much easier.

[Announcer] More and more,

the machines are assuming control over our food production.

After all, humanity has to feed its ballooning population

using the same amount of land.

Here in the Salinas Valley, about an hour and a half

south of San Francisco,

farmers and tech types are joining forces to turn this place

into a kind of Silicon Valley for agriculture.

Their quest is to make farming more productive

and more efficient, not just for the Salinas Valley,

but for the world.

That means more automation and even a special variety

of lettuce that's easier for the machines to cut.

So essentially what we're doing is we're changing

agriculture to meet the labor need on the harvest side.

[Announcer] So yeah, about that labor.

This machine requires half of the workers

you'd need to harvest the old fashioned way.

Which means somebody's going to lose their job, right?

Not in California.

It's got itself a labor shortage.

Here in California, we've got an aging work force.

We're not getting that younger population into the job.

[Announcer] Not only that, but the number of immigrant

workers has plummeted.

While automation will no doubt put people out of work

in other industries, for California's farmers at least,

it may be the only way they can make it

in the changing economy.

Planning ahead for the future, it's important

that we're ready to have fewer workers.

[Announcer] So for now, the answer in Salinas

is more robots.

In a Taylor Farms processing plant,

it's the machines that do the heavy lifting.

This gadget does quality control,

automatically detecting crummy lettuce and blasting it out

of the system with a jet of air.

A robot even does the packaging,

far quicker than a human could ever manage.

Okay, so they're not perfect,

but all in all, from picking to boxing,

a human hardly ever touches the product.

That's good for both food safety and efficiency.

We still need people.

I think we're always moving down that automation track.

I don't know if you get to full automation,

there's a science around agriculture,

but there's a bit of an art to it, as well.

But I think in terms of getting rid of the hardest part

of the jobs, I see that continuing.

[Announcer] And over in downtown Salinas,

the Western Growers Center for Innovation and Technology

nurtures start-ups that increasingly mechanize

and digitize agriculture.

At the end of the day, a lot of the traditional work

that's being done in the fields,

fewer and fewer people want to do that.

So parts of those functions

simply are going to be automated.

And that's not necessarily anything new.

[Announcer] In agriculture these days,

technology isn't just filling jobs

humans aren't around to do,

but jobs humans can't do.

Take this doo-hickey from a company called AgriData.

It uses machine data to eyeball plants.

Drive this thing through your trees,

and it automatically detects fruits to predict yield.

Have a human try to do the same, and a month later,

you'll have broken their mind.

This new green revolution is all about data.

Anything farmers can get that will make their operations

more efficient.

Especially here in California, which just pulled through

a crushing drought.

So in the hills overlooking Salinas Valley,

Hahn Family Wines has teamed up with Verizon

to test a sophisticated water monitoring system.

With our soil sensors, we're measuring how far down

that moisture is going.

If it's gone out the bottom of the soil,

then we know we put on too much water, so we can cut back.

[Announcer] With climate change messing with rainfall

all over the world, farmers have to get smarter

about their water use.

Looking at all the tools that are out there,

is gonna help us be more efficient all the way through.

[Announcer] And it's not just here.

Ag tech is exploding all around the world.

Because the old way of doing things,

just won't cut it anymore.

(electronic music)