Robots in the salad bowl
manding positions like packing boxes.
“Typically it’s impacted the manufacturing plants less than field work,” says Stoffel of the labor shortage. “That’s not the case today. It’s impacted us tremendously.”
While fieldworkers have to deal with sun and heat, plant workers have the opposite problem because the plant is kept between 34 and 38 degrees Fahrenheit. Workers wear scarves under their hard hats to cover their ears and bulky parkas under their work coats. They put on a pair of thin gloves under their blue latex ones to keep their hands from going stiff.
In one large room, produce gets washed and then run through huge salad spinners the size of an industrial washing machine, but with an opening on top. Workers attach the inner spinner holding the broccoli or greens to a line that pulls it over to a veggie elevator that takes it to another part of the plant.
In a smaller room devoted to a product line called Chef Crafted Salads, a robot weighs greens and then deposits them into clam-shell containers. As the filled containers come swiftly down the conveyor belt, workers add precise handfuls of beet strips, snow peas and shaved radishes more quickly than seems humanly possible.
With the robot, they can assemble 60 to 80 salads a minute, double the output when humans weighed and packed the greens. Stoffel says the other assembly work is lighter, and now laborers who aren’t packing greens have the option of being trained for better-paying jobs in quality control or machine operation.
The same goes in the field, says Rotticci. For more than eight years, the company has used automatic harvesters with water jets that cut and harvest romaine lettuce; two years ago it started to use one with steel blades that cut heads of celery from the ground.
Since automation, a typical romaine crew has dropped from around 30 workers to 16. Productivity has increased from 400 pounds per hour to 700 or 800 pounds per hour, says Rotticci, who emphasizes that the jobs have improved and that the pay is higher.
In the past, “You’d have cutters bending over several thousand times a day, eight to nine hours. It’s brutal, brutal work,” he says. Now, they stand on a platform and inspect, trim and pack the romaine.
His dream project is to do the same for iceberg, but it’s more of a challenge. It lies on the ground at odd angles, making it hard to automate cutting, and it’s more delicate.
“If we tried to utilize the technology we have for cabbage, we would destroy the iceberg,” Rotticci says.
Robotics could eventually use optics and sensory detectors to select heads and then harvest the iceberg. That prospect has become more lucrative as the price of robotics has dropped to around one-tenth of its initial roll-out, which was as much as $1 million an arm, Rotticci says.
Farmworker advocate Lara is concerned at the rate that mechanization has displaced ag jobs in Salinas Valley, where agricultural workers earn an average of $28,000 a year.
“The job of us in the labor union is to help the workers that are left behind to earn as much money as possible,” he says.
Lara has seen peaks and valleys in the labor force many times before. In the 1980s, the valley used to have jobs in canneries, which have since all shut down.
“We have to figure out how we pivot from this industry needing less workers to something new,” he says.
“It’s creating a sustainable solution for 10 years down the road. People are not consuming less salad; they’re consuming more.” Chris Rotticci, director of automated harvest equipment at Taylor Farms