USA TODAY International Edition
President’s policy may boost ag tech
As workforce thins, farms seek new ways to get crops picked
MENLO PARK, CALIF. President Trump’s executive order on immigration has much of the tech world rallying against it. But for one small corner, agricultural technology, it represents an opportunity.
Farmers have been facing an increasingly tight labor market for years. Members of the immigrant workforce that has long picked and packed the nation’s fruits and vegetables move to better jobs as soon as they can, replaced by new immigrants.
Because of a strong Mexican economy that’s created more opportunity there, as well as increased border enforcement, the number of people to replenish the workforce has dropped significantly, said Eric Nicholson, a national vice president with the United Farmworkers of America.
Robotic, sensor and other companies are striving to fill a hole left by that dwindling human workforce. The technology, from a Lettuce Bot to crop drones to robotic strawberry pickers, is still in its infancy. But agricultural-tech companies say any policies that further keep out immigrants are likely to increase demand.
Of particular concern is the requirement in an early version of the proposed executive order to expand E- Verify, an Internetbased system for businesses to confirm worker eligibility. California has an estimated 330,000 farmworkers, according to the U. S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Manuel Cunha, president of the Fresno- based Nisei Farmers League, said he believes as many as 80% might be undocumented.
Should more stringent immigration rules go into effect, those workers will flee, Cunha said.
“They’re worried about having their families busted, so they’re going to leave,” he said.
Trump’s immigration policies “are going to force us to solve our labor problems faster,” said Bruce Taylor, CEO of Taylor Farms in Salinas, Calif., one of the nation’s largest fresh- cut fruit and vegetable suppliers. Taylor spoke at the THRIVE AgTech Innovation Forum in the Silicon Valley town of Menlo Park on Wednesday.
“I have growers who have had to leave crops in the field to rot because they can’t get pickers,” said Karen Caplan, president and CEO of Frieda’s, a specialty produce company based near Los Angeles.
In contrast to large commodity crops such as soybeans, fruits and vegetables are mostly still worked and harvested by hand because of their specialty nature.
According to the National Agricultural Workers Survey, 78% of farm workers are foreign- born, the majority from Mexico.
The labor shortage is especially acute in California, which grows one- third of the nation’s vegetables and two- thirds of its fruits and nuts, according to the state’s Department of Food and Agriculture.
“Our customers want more berries, and we could grow them — but we can’t pick and pack them,” said Kevin Murphy, CEO of Driscoll’s in Watsonville, Calif., the nation’s largest producer of berries.
“We’re in a constant search for new technology because of the pressures on labor,” said Hank Giclas, vice president for science and technology at Western Growers, a consortium of fresh produce growers and packers. It opened a Center for Innovation and Technology in Salinas in 2015 specifically to encourage startups to tackle the problems agriculture faces.
Like many companies, Taylor Farms is experimenting with multiple tech solutions — dozens, in fact. That led Taylor to work with Blue River Technology in Sunnyvale, Calif., which makes the Lettuce Bot, a machine that can thin 5,000 plants per minute in quarter- inch spacing while running at 4 miles per hour.
To get the workforce it needs, Driscoll’s Murphy says the company is having to rethink everything about how it grows the berries it sells. That includes growing outdoors on raised tables and on trellises to make picking more efficient and easier for a workforce that’s not interested in backbreaking labor.
He said he thinks if suppliers can make farm work more appealing by judiciously using technology, they’ll be able to get the workers they need.
“We’ve got to get aggressive in how we think about this, so we make the work easier and more efficient. There are people who will want to do it — there are lots of people who like to work outside, who don’t want to sit in an office all day,” he said. The UFW agrees. “Right now, it’s a job of desperation. We want to see it become more attractive, a viable profession,” Nicholson said.
Driscoll’s is working on a robotic strawberry picker with Spain- based AgroBot, but it’s several years away from being fieldready, Murphy said. Like a human picker, the machine must be able to determine with a single glance if a strawberry is fully ripe, properly shaped and worth picking.
“It uses optical recognition, taking pictures of the berry from multiple different angles and then crunching the data in real time,” Murphy said.
The Spanish company sees more potential given the current political climate in the United States.
“In the past, the solution was to move the crops to Mexico, where labor was cheaper, but with Trump that’s getting more complicated, so now maybe only technology will be the solution,” said Juan Bravo, founder of AgroBot.