When I was growing up our family had a fairly sizeable strawberry patch. My Dad enjoyed gardening, and for a few years my parents canned the produce we produced. Strawberry preserves were a treat I didn't realize until I was an adult.

The strawberry patched served dual purpose. Kids too rowdy? Go weed the strawberries. Strawberry picking can be a little tricky. Strawberries like to grow all over the plant, both in plain sight on the periphery, and nestled in among the leaves by the stems. Strawberry plants grow "runners" and spread out of their own accord making walking among them a challenge of not stepping on nascent runners.

Strawberries aren't always right for eating though. Sometimes a turtle would take a bite, sometimes it would be to moist and rot on the stem. Sometimes they'd become a projectile to stain a siblings face or clothes.

Today my father is 81 and still tending his strawberries. He gets excercise and keeps busy, and we bring them home to eat during the growing months. Sometimes a little, sometimes a lot depending on the year.

One of the interesting (but little-discussed) aspects of the minimum wage debate is how it interacts with automation.

Historically, the cost of building a robot to do someone's job was in most cases effectively infinite (i.e. it could not be done no matter how much money you throw at the problem). Now, it seems like it's potentially in the $20-50/hour range for many industries, by which I mean not currently cost-competitive with existing labor, but getting close.

It would be a fairly significant unintended consequence if setting the national minimum wage to $15 were to actually eliminate entire job categories like fruit picker and burger flipper, due to pushing the minimum cost of labor above the cost of automating the role.

It's very interesting to watch developments like those described in the OP, since they will probably see sigmoid-like adoption; pretty much zero, until someone gets a model that's cost-competitive, and then I'd imagine quite wide adoption within a couple years. I don't think a minimum wage is going to solve the social unrest that this kind of technological change will bring.

Slightly off topic, but stories like this remind me of the Aeolipile[0] from Ancient Rome.

It was a simple steam engine invented in 250BC, but the Romans never applied it to anything because there was no economic impetus. No one in antiquity seriously questioned slavery, and there was no major industry or constructions that couldn't be accomplished by throwing bodies at the problem until it was finished.

In modern times, we done the same thing with a lot of industries, like agriculture. Fruit harvesting robots are totally feasible, but we have political and economic policies that make it easier to use migrant labor than it is to invest in innovation.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile

I hope robots lead to smaller, tasty strawberries (i.e. the normal ones).

The strawberries I find in the US are all enormous and have no taste. I have always assumed it's because these are easier to harvest.

Faster per strawberry or faster per day? If per day, a robot can move slower and run 24/7. I could see advantages to this for pest control for some types of produce as well, as some pests are nocturnal.

This may be a little taboo to speak of, but I should add that the field workers in my neck of the woods were paid by volume and discouraged from using the portable restrooms. The people running the strawberry fields saved money by not having the septic truck come out as often, too. I am not sure how common this is.

Another year, another strawberry harvesting robot.

I've worked on agri projects that looked into the feasibility of this, though we never attempted to pick anything. The reason strawberries are always the fruit of choice is because they're a high value crop. They're also a relatively easy fruit to identify based on colour, and the way they're grown makes them relatively easy to segment against the surrounding foliage.

The main issue is cost. Several projects died in the UK (see http://ict-agri.eu/node/36238) because the end-users i.e. big growers didn't see there being value for money. So no, cheaper is not happening. And this is in a country with Brexit looming and a heavy dependence on season labour; though I don't know if we have a shortage, only that British people don't want to do it.

https://www.southeastfarmer.net/section/fruit/robots-arent-r...

From the article:

> The robot rarely hurts the produce. But as of today, one robotic apple-picker costs at least $300,000 — too much for most budgets.

In the UK the money is in high value glasshouse crops like berries and tomatoes. One issue is you would have to design the entire glasshouse to optimise for robotics. Ever tried to drive a robot in a glasshouse? The floor is often bare dirt or covered with polyethene sheeting which gets caught in whatever wheels you choose. Outdoors is another matter. A lot of harvesting robots just rip up everything which is.. one way to do it. Bear in mind that indoor agri is usually fairly automated already, certainly with regard to climate control. Europe, particularly the Netherlands, has this down - absolutely enormous installations.

There are lots of strawberry startups. Agrobot (http://agrobot.com/), a Spanish company, looks the most promising and I think you can actually buy it. Their technique is also very simple and avoids complications with robotic arms. There's also Dogtooth, Octinion, and more..

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-43816207 (Harvest CROO is also mentioned)

Better and faster? Maybe. Cheaper? Definitely.

Approximately $20k per low-skilled immigrant household per year in taxpayer funded benefits. 57% of immigrant households (legal and illegal) use welfare. And 25% of our federal prison population are in the country illegally.

So the real price of strawberries would likely go down, considering the high cost the nation bares for the immediate gratification of cheap fruit.

Given that phones comes with FaceID for cheap 3D scanning, and the level of object recognition that comes with deep neural networks these days, I'm curious what major obstacles remain?

Surely pads on robot fingers can ensure soft and distributed enough pressure? Is it something to do with holding the stem with one robot grip while pulling the strawberry? Is it pulling apart parts of the plant systematically to find the strawberries in the first place? Or the fact that the plant isn't rigid like a tree, but that the location of the strawberries depends on how it's being held or pulled apart in the first place?

Also curious what the break-even point is, where even if it collects less strawberries than people do, it still winds up being cheaper.

Kind of bummed the article doesn't go any details at all except for avoiding the half-eaten ones.

I picked strawberries as a kid (we'd go to the local orchard) and it was so much fun, but I can't really remember the mechanics of it.

Ah, as a kid/teenager I picked strawberries a whole summer holiday to earn the cash for a C64. Back breaking stuff but the reward made it all so worth it!

I think this push i to robotic farming is a very good thing. Working on farms is very dangerous[1] work, and it forces people to contend with these dangers for not very much pay. Of course that begs the question: Should we push for the removal of humans from the equation, or force farms to be safer?

[1]. https://publicintegrity.org/workers-rights/worker-health-and...

Interesting that the picture captioned: "Bob Pitzer, co-founder of Harvest Croo Robotics, holds a fresh strawberry picked from the fields" shows an unripe strawberry.

That sort of strawberry is why I don't bother with out of season strawberries and just buy them here (Norway) when the local ones are in season. Smaller, sweeter, ripe all the way through, and usually much better flavour than most of the imported stuff.

> At the least, social media trains us to stay within the lane of our “brand”.

Even with a very small following, I've noticed this on Instagram. Whenever I post something outside of my niche, my likes take a dive, even if I think it's a pretty nice picture. Though the more I think about it, it's only really training you to stay in your lane if maximum likes and follows are what you're after.

> “If we don’t solve this with automation, fresh fruits and veggies won’t be affordable or even available to the average person.”

I think this mistakenly assumes that the average person resides in a highly urbanised environment with no access to soil, and/or no time to tend even a small garden, and/or the current systems for harvesting all fruit and vegetables can't work in the future.

Henry Kissinger once noted: “Control oil and you control nations; control food and you control the people.”

I've been working on a model for a free food distribution system[1]. From the article, Harv is on the way to satisfying step 4. We've seen step 6 addressed with services like FoodDash[2]. The cannabis industry will drive innovation for step 3. Step 8 is being worked on and companies such as Big Wheel Burger[3] are helping. Once nuclear fusion is in place[4], the most difficult part of the model is to accomplish step 5, self-maintenance.

[1]: https://i.imgur.com/MX68gg7.png

[2]: https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/3/18166660/gm-cruise-doordas...

[3]: https://bigwheelburger.com/sustainability/

[4]: https://www.cfs.energy/

It made sense for a long time that picking robots are coming, whats more interesting for me is the timing: it seems like they will mature at the same time as self driving cars

The reason industry wants robots instead of people is because the robots cannot organise themselves into a union (well, until some AI kicks in in a future upgrade).

Why does it need to be an AND? If it is much cheaper and faster but 5% worse, why not?

I wonder if there's a middle ground between fully automated robotics farming and smart lo-tech tooling for humans.

I know some people down vote TL;DRs but I do want to save people's time.

The answer is the robot didn't perform well during the demo.

I bet it can eat it faster too!

> The future of agricultural work has arrived here in Florida, promising to ease labor shortages and reduce the cost of food

There is no labor shortage. There's a bunch of growers whining about having to raise wages to attract workers. Even 25$/hour isn't that great if you factor in the opportunity cost of seasonal work.

Raising prices and going out of business are valid options for entrepreneurs. That's how the market allocates resources. Unprofitable work is inefficient.

> He pays his workers between $10 and $14 hourly. They’re mostly local folks.

> “A lot of Americans have become lazy,” Carrigan said. “They want a paycheck. They don’t want a job.”

More like a lot of Americans have better things to do than doing seasonal work for 10$ to 14$ an hour. Good for them!

Betteridge's Law of Headlines expanded - if the answer isn't "No," it's "Not yet."

I think I'd focus on manufacturing strawberries rather than growing them in the ground.