Agribot
companies will be small, although not necessarily so.
They will be innovative, definitely. And, they will move
aggressively into territory where the modern versions of
plantation owners are busy fooling others . . . as well
as themselves.
Historically, people invented
labor saving devices to do work they didn't want to
do. But that costs more (initially) than
forcing slaves to do the work...or bringing in
illegal aliens, dumping part of their costs on the
taxpayer.
When
plantation/agribusiness owners claim that they need
immigrants to do work Americans “won't do,” they
are really saying that they won't invest the resources
to develop machines to do the jobs that Americans
“won’t” do. There is no agricultural job that a
machine cannot be developed to handle.
Wild? I
don't think so. No wilder than the transition from the
little store in Arkansas to the supermarket in our town
(as well as in thousands of other towns). Or from the 4K
memory on the
"mainframe" I worked on in the 1950’s to the
megabit memories on personal computers that I work with
now.
Development of small, inexpensive robots for agriculture
is already underway. (One example:
Tony Grift, University of Illinois is developing
small agricultural robots—he calls them
“agrobots”—which may in time morph into
something useful.)
Agribots:
small, smart, fast, flexible—S2F2. The market is there.
As plantation owners seek cheap labor and
large machines, small farmers will turn to
inexpensive agribots.
This
technology has many potential benefits for small farms:
And the
ultimate benefit: how should we counter the immigration
problem? Not by trying to shut off the
supply of slave labor (that is reminiscent of
shutting off alcohol during Prohibition). We should
publicly fund mechanization research that develops
machines to do the work.
Why fund
it publicly? Because we will all benefit from the
development. We seem to lack the long range viewpoint of
the
Japanese, who developed
hybrid vehicles and are now reaping the benefits.
Let the competition begin.
Harold
Brewer [Email him] was born in Wichita and raised on a farm in
central Kansas. He served in the U.S. Air Force during
the
Berlin Airlift and the
Korean War. After leaving military service, he attended
the University of California and received degrees in
agricultural engineering from Berkeley and Davis. He has
done research at the university and federal government
levels on advanced agricultural systems. He is the
author of
Fig Leaves and Masks.
