Thread: As Immigrant Farmworkers Become More Scarce, Robots Replace Humans

As Immigrant Farmworkers Become More Scarce, Robots Replace Humans


November 20, 2018



An automated harvesting machine at Taylor Farms in Salinas, Calif., uses a high pressure water stream to cut romaine lettuce heads. It replaces a crew of many farmworkers.CreditJim Wilson/The New York Times












An automated harvesting machine at Taylor Farms in Salinas, Calif., uses a high pressure water stream to cut romaine lettuce heads. It replaces a crew of many farmworkers.CreditCreditJim Wilson/The New York Times

By Miriam Jordan

November 20, 2018


SALINAS, Calif. — As a boy, Abel Montoya remembers his father arriving home from the lettuce fields each evening, the picture of exhaustion, mud caked knee-high on his trousers. “Dad wanted me to stay away from manual labor. He was keen for me to stick to the books,” Mr. Montoya said. So he did, and went to college.


Yet Mr. Montoya, a 28-year-old immigrant’s son, recently took a job at a lettuce-packing facility, where it is wet, loud, freezing — and much of the work is physically taxing, even mind-numbing.


Now, though, he can delegate some of the worst work to robots.


Mr. Montoya is among a new generation of farmworkers here at Taylor Farms, one of the world’s largest producers and sellers of fresh-cut vegetables, which recently unveiled a fleet of robots designed to replace humans — one of the agriculture industry’s latest answers to a diminishing supply of immigrant labor.


The smart machines can assemble 60 to 80 salad bags a minute, double the output of a worker.


Enlisting robots made sound economic sense, Taylor Farms officials said, for a company seeking to capitalize on Americans’ insatiable appetite for healthy fare at a time when it cannot recruit enough people to work in the fields or the factory.


https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/20/u....co/NTCNdoph6A

Shut down ALL immigration.

We are going to robots and automation!

These people need to be sent home...get on birth control... and fix their own countries.

WE DO NOT WANT A BILLION PEOPLE BREEDING, LIVING IN FILTH IN OUR STREETS WITH NO MEANS TO FEED OR TAKE CARE OF THEMSELVES.

SHUT IT ALL DOWN!

DO YOU WANT TO TURN THIS PLACE INTO THE CESSPOOLS THEY CREATED AND THEY LEFT? HELL NO!

BOOT THEM OUT!