[busterarm]

Not everything can be harvested with big machines. Pretty much all tree fruits, asparagus, peppers, etc are harvested by hand. If you want blueberries or strawberries that look nice enough to be sold to consumers whole, those are hand-harvested every time.

[shrubble]

There are some things that are harvested by hand; even in those cases, you can watch a typical process and determine the small labor component.

Asparagus for example is harvested in less than 20 seconds per bunch. Even at $50/hour that is a cost of less than 30 cents per bunch; which sells for how much in the store?

1000s of workers harvest over 9 billion pounds of apples every year-again the labor component is smaller than you’d think.

[busterarm]

Oh I agree with you. I'm not saying the labor component is necessarily expensive, I'm just stating the obvious that for many crops they are still human labor intensive.

Asparagus harvesting may be fast, but you have to do it every day. You have to keep people employed throughout the entire season. There isn't just a few-week harvesting period.

You can't just mechanize everything.

[allannienhuis]

That last statement isn’t true. I know people with a blueberry farm that machine processes (with extra human qa step) blueberries packaged for retail sale.

[busterarm]

You can do some casual searching and find that I'm right about this in most cases. If your prices are high enough you can tolerate a lot of waste, but for most farms the economics favor hand harvesting. We're talking about at least 20% waste when you're machine-harvesting and even then a significant amount of what ships to retail has internal bruising.

Maybe that farm is selling in an area where consumers are less choosey? I certainly prefer hand-harvested blueberries (and can tell the difference)...

Certainly machine harvesting is an increasing share of the market, but it is still predominantly hand-harvested.