Robots To Slash Farm Labor Use

Robots are going to transform farming. Will robots make human farm workers obsolete in a decade? In Salinas Valley California the Mountain View start-up Blue River Technologies is testing their Lettuce Bot which can replace 20 farm manual laborers.

The Blue River Tech Lettuce Bot dispenses fertilizer and removes excess lettuce sprouts. The developers expect to support weed removal in a future rev.

Automation of vegetable farming will cut costs of producing the most beneficial kinds of foods. Automated weed removal will reduce pesticide exposure and raise yields.

Solar-powered robotic weed detector as a step toward "full scale robotic automation".

Harvey the robotic plant mover.

Automation of greenhouses and of planting could open the door to more growing cycles per season. In late winter and early spring plants could be sprouted and grown at high density in greenhouses and then, once the risk of frost has past, robots will move the sprouts to fields and plant them. This could cut weeks out of the time a field grows a crop. That saved time will be available to plant and harvest another crop later in the season.

Automation will also speed both the planting and the harvesting. Robots can run 24 hours per day and operate faster than humans. Plus, their costs will fall to the point where they can be deployed in large numbers to plant or harvest a field in a very short period of time. That means earlier average planting and shorter harvests. This means even more time to start an additional growing cycle in a season.

Robots are going to continue to cut the demand for less skilled workers. Highly repetitive manual labor can be automated by better algorithms for computer vision, machine learning systems, better sensors, and faster and cheaper microprocessors.

Rather than start out indoors and then shift outdoors some companies are growing vegetables near cities using pure indoor farming in vertical stacks. FarmedHere LLC goes vertical with indoor farming of organic local produce.

Indoors manual labor very amenable to automation. Imagine industrial parks full of robots growing deep stacks of greens. I think this is a matter of when, not if.

One company in the indoor vertical farming industry claims advantages such as less water usage, no pesticides, no agricultural run-off, year-round growing, and invulnerability to weather.

An even more radical vision of indoor farming:

The energy costs of indoor farming are probably too high for grains. But for expensive and short shelf life vegetables the advantages of indoor farming are much greater.

I am expecting continued decline in the demand for manual laborers as machine vision, robotic arms, and machine learning systems become more refined, reliable, accurate, and cheaper.