Sarah Taber is a crop scientist based in Fayetteville, North Carolina, and she says the great recession scrambled the familiar labor paradigm, in which migrant workers would arrive in the US looking for work on farms. Increasingly, potential foreign workers are staying put in their home countries to work in places like call centers. And Sarah points out that the children of immigrants who came to the US and went into agriculture are not following suit. [...]
After a decade of testing, Walker finally found a machine that showed promise called the Moses 1000. But even after discovering her dream harvester, Stephanie’s work still wasn’t over. Finding the machine was actually the easy part. Walker also had to deal with a larger problem, one inherent to agriculture that, despite the successful automations of the past, still makes many crops — including asparagus, cherries, apples, saffron, and chocolate — difficult to harvest with a machine. [...]
This means if you want to automate a harvest, you can’t just find a great machine. You have to make your plants more standardized, like cars. So for the past five years, most of Stephanie’s work has been about breeding a whole new plant, one that is designed specifically to be picked by a machine.
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