[rgbrenner]

GP seems to lean more towards the "human labor is bad" side.

Actually no. But farmers have created a special problem for themselves:

In a normal industry, wages increase and over a period of time, technology and techniques are developed to reduce the use of labor.. increasing labor productivity and controlling costs. This increased productivity is what allows firms to pay high wages.

In the farm industry, this hasn't occurred. Instead of increasing wages (and stimulating demand for new technology in their industry), they would simply hire more migrants to do the work instead. And so farmworkers are now almost entirely migrants. They've been doing this so long, that they've lost decades of small increases in labor productivity that would have normally occurred (and has occurred in virtually every other industry.. which they are competing with for labor).

So while part of the answer is to increase wages to attract US workers... increasing labor productivity is also required. I think farms would find it quite difficult to compete in the US labor market, while depending on practices that have not been modernized.

We know farm productivity can be increased.. where there's a real cost (the farmers themselves), plenty of tools have been created. But in the specific area of picking, migrants have been used instead.

[logfromblammo]

They have a choice now.

They can try to soak up the shrinking pool of human laborers as new entrants avoid entering the field, because they don't want to compete with robots.

Or they can start building the robots.

If they don't seek productivity gains, a well-capitalized startup can eat their lunch by shoving productivity gains from other industries down the throats of agribusinesses. We already have robots that can differentiate between weeds and crops in a flat in the lab and kill the weeds by pounding them into the dirt.

It's going to start with rail-bound robots tending to niche specialty vegetables and pharmaceutical feedstock plants in hydroponic containers. It's going to end with cereal crop farmers committing suicide as the capital requirements for operating a competitive farm rise beyond their means.

[elago]

"It's going to end with cereal crop farmers committing suicide"

Do you think cereal crop farmers are paying migrant workers with scythe's to harvest their grain?

"Or they can start building the robots."

What do you think a combine is?

"well-capitalized startup "

Is an angel investor going to compete with government subsidies?

[logfromblammo]

Some pivot irrigators are also robots.

A combine is already well beyond the ability of an individual grain farmer to replicate. The best they can do is buy commoditized combines. And those are only commoditized now because of the vast area devoted to cereal crops. The robots required for more specialized crops will be more expensive at first, until some patents expire, and even then the number of potential competitors will be limited by area under cultivation.

You cannot start a new cereal-crop farm without a hefty investment in capital. You just can't. At best, you would be renting other people's robots, and that might be costly enough to prevent you from ever buying your own.

An onion farmer may yet be able to build a better onion robot. If they do not, someone could invent one, and either eat up existing farmers' margins with rental fees, or simply start a new farm and undercut those existing farmers from lower labor costs. But that startup would need to have the robots.

A trunk-shaker harvester robot might be cheaper than human pickers, but they can damage trees and may cause damage to the harvested fruit. A robot equipped with a camera and a vacuum-assisted hand might outperform it for apples, but be useless for olives. The olive farmer might need a robot with flailing rods. It is still possible for an individual farmer to innovate their own robots specialized to a particular niche crop.

We're already seeing farmers in India committing suicide because they can't keep pace with the gene-edited seeds and robotic combines from industrialized farms. It seems inevitable to me that companies like Monsanto and John Deere will be able to squeeze individual farmers on a technology-yield treadmill such that if they ever miss a step, they fall off. And once they fall off, they can never find a way to get back on. Because they are not the people building the robots. They get left behind just as fast as everyone else not building newer technology.