As Immigrant Farmworkers Become More Scarce, Robots Replace Humans
As Immigrant Farmworkers Become More Scarce, Robots
Replace Humans
By Miriam Jordan Nov. 20, 2018
SALINAS, Calif. — As a boy, Abel Montoya remembers his
father arriving home from the lettuce fields each evening, the picture of
exhaustion, mud caked knee-high on his trousers. “Dad wanted me to stay away
from manual labor. He was keen for me to stick to the books,” Mr. Montoya said.
So he did, and went to college.
Yet Mr. Montoya, a 28-year-old immigrant’s son, recently
took a job at a lettuce-packing facility, where it is wet, loud, freezing — and
much of the work is physically taxing, even mind-numbing.
Now, though, he can delegate some of the worst work to
robots.
Mr. Montoya is among a new generation of farmworkers here
at Taylor Farms, one of the world’s largest producers and sellers of fresh-cut
vegetables, which recently unveiled a fleet of robots designed to replace
humans — one of the agriculture industry’s latest answers to a diminishing
supply of immigrant labor.
The smart machines can assemble 60 to 80 salad bags a
minute, double the output of a worker.
Enlisting robots made sound economic sense, Taylor Farms
officials said, for a company seeking to capitalize on Americans’ insatiable
appetite for healthy fare at a time when it cannot recruit enough people to
work in the fields or the factory.
A decade ago, people lined up by the hundreds for jobs at
packing houses in California and Arizona during the lettuce season. No more.
“Our work force is getting older,” said Mark Borman,
chief operating officer of Taylor Farms. “We aren’t attracting young people to
our industry. We aren’t getting an influx of immigrants. How do we deal with
that? Innovation.”
Moving up the technology ladder creates higher-skilled
positions that can attract young people like Mr. Montoya, who is finishing a
computer science degree, and bolster retention of veteran employees who receive
new training to advance their careers.
“We are making better jobs that we hope appeal to a
broader range of people,” Mr. Borman said.
In a 2017 survey of farmers by the California Farm Bureau
Federation, 55 percent reported labor shortages, and the figure was nearly 70
percent for those who depend on seasonal workers. Wage increases in recent
years have not compensated for the shortfall, growers said.
Strawberry operations in California, apple orchards in
Washington and dairy farms across the country are struggling with the
consequences of a shrinking, aging, foreign-born work force; a crackdown at the
border; and the failure of Congress to agree on an immigration overhaul that
could provide a more steady source of immigrant labor.
Farmhands who benefited from the last immigration
amnesty, in 1986, are now in their 50s and represent just a fraction of today’s
field workers. As fewer new immigrants have arrived to work in agriculture, the
average age of farmworkers has climbed — to 38 in 2016, according to government
data, compared with 31 in 2000.
Still, about three-fourths of crop workers in the country
were born abroad, and they are overwhelmingly undocumented. Beefed up border
enforcement has rendered “follow-the-crop” migration within the United States a
“relative rarity,” according to the United States Department of Agriculture.
Growers in many states, like Florida, a citrus behemoth,
have turned to the H-2A guest worker program to import labor from Mexico. But
they complain of government red tape that delays arrivals and of unpredictable
weather patterns that can prompt fruit to ripen prematurely, before workers are
scheduled to show up — which both result in losses.
Taylor Farms brings in about 200 workers a year on the
visas, about 10 percent of its seasonal labor force. “The program is not always
dependable and our items are perishable,” said Chris Rotticci, who runs the
harvest automation division of Taylor Farms, which is also looking for ways to
replace humans. “But we have to do it. We don’t have enough people.”
Ideally, growers say, Congress would pass a bill to
legalize undocumented farmworkers who are already here and encourage them to
stay in the fields, as well as include provisions to ensure a steady flow of
seasonal workers who could come and go with relative ease.
California’s $54 billion agricultural industry cannot
afford to wait. As the country’s epicenter of both technology and agriculture,
the state is leading the move to automate in the fields and packing plants.
Driscoll’s, the berry titan based in Watsonville, Calif.,
has invested in several robotic strawberry harvesting start-ups, including
Agrobot, which uses imaging technology to assess a berry’s ripeness before it
is harvested. It is currently in test phase.
Last spring, Christopher Ranch, a giant in garlic, began
using a 30-foot-tall robot to insert garlic buds into sleeves, the nets into
which they are bundled for sale in supermarkets.
“It’s a real workhorse,” said Ken Christopher, executive
vice president of the company, whose headquarters are in Gilroy, Calif. “We can
do more in a half shift than we could do in a full shift.”
Bartley Walker, whose family business rents and sells
tractors, now offers a robotic hoeing machine with a detection camera capable
of identifying the pesky weeds that sprout between row crops like broccoli and
cauliflower.
“The weeder is not as precise as a human with a hoe,” Mr.
Walker said, “but it extracts 90 percent of the weeds.” What is more, one
machine replaces 11 workers.
About 60 percent of the romaine lettuce and half of all
cabbage and celery produced by Taylor Farms are harvested with automated
systems. The company has partnered with an innovation firm, which previously
focused on automated vehicle assembly, to develop a machine to begin harvesting
broccoli and iceberg lettuce within two years.
All told, the company plans to double the number of
automated harvesters, which cost about $750,000 each, in the fields each year —
until nearly everything can be machine-picked.
On a recent morning, a machine that employs water-knife
technology severed romaine heads as it moved through row after row of a lettuce
field that stretched as far as the eye could see. The lettuce traveled on a
belt to the machine’s platform, where 12 men and women inspected, trimmed and
boxed it.
Their shift had started at 2 a.m. under a torrential
downpour. The workers wore face scarves to guard against the cold, as well as
hairnets, aprons and gloves midway up their arms.
In the distance, a crew of 24 harvested the old-fashioned
way, standing in the muck, knife in hand, and stooping over again and again to
cut lettuce. Every one of the workers was Hispanic.
Guadalupe, 55, who described herself as the “foreman,”
watched over them. Not one of her six children, all adults, works in
agriculture. “They did this during vacation when they were teenagers. Now they
have office jobs,” said the Mexican immigrant, who would only give her first
name.
Wheat, soybean and cotton crops have long used
automation. Delicate fruit, like peaches, plums and raspberries, as well as
vegetables like asparagus and fennel, will remain labor intensive for the
foreseeable future.
It is difficult to replace the human eye and hand — and
technology is still in its infancy.
“It’s going to take years to develop technology that can
recognize when it’s the right time to harvest our produce and do it without
bruising the produce,” said Tom Nassif, president of Western Growers, a large
association that represents agricultural concerns in Arizona, California,
Colorado and New Mexico.
But given work force challenges, “it’s a long-term
solution that must be pursued with vigor,” said Mr. Nassif, whose association
opened an innovation center in Salinas two years ago to nurture agricultural
technology start-ups.
Labor challenges are the main reason Taylor Farms is
building a second plant in Mexico, due to open early next year. “If we can’t
find workers here, it is a logical place to grow,” said Mr. Borman, the
executive.
Inside the processing plant in Salinas, where the
temperature hovers around 33 degrees Fahrenheit, workers don heavy coats under
their work smocks and headbands under their hard hats to keep their ears warm.
On their hands, they wear two layers of gloves.
On a recent afternoon, forklift drivers scurried about
delivering bins of lettuce to machines inside the plant, where it was cut
according to specification, and washed. Dozens of workers ran spinners the size
of industrial dryers that removed excess water from the greens.
At several stations, a pair of robots with yellow arms
that end with a round suction head gripped five-pound packages of shredded
lettuce, one by one, and placed them into boxes moving on a belt. Nearby,
larger robots did the backbreaking, repetitive work of lifting and stacking
filled-up cartons.
Maria Guadalupe, 43, a recent graduate of the
company-sponsored technology course, has gone from packing bagged salads into
boxes to setting up and monitoring robots that do her old job. “This is much
better work,” she said above the din of the production floor.
Currently, nine robots are in use at the Salinas plant;
most labor is still performed predominantly by humans.
“We are still at prototype phase,” said Marissa
Gutierrez, the human resources manager. “We’ll get more robots. But we are
always going to depend on human labor, even as we automate.”
At the training center next door, Mr. Montoya and 15
other employees learned about programming, engineering and the operation of
equipment. An interpreter translated the instructor’s explanation from English
into Spanish for some of the workers.
Mr. Montoya, who was raised in Yuma, Ariz., where the
bulk of greens consumed by Americans in the winter are grown, applied to work
at Taylor Farms after reading about the on-site technology course it offers
employees.
“Advanced technology in agriculture is going to be huge,”
he said, marveling at the precision and dexterity of the robots. “It’ll open up
opportunities for me.”
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