Rosie The Robot Won't Serve Your Food, But She'll Pick It
From manufacturing to cupcake sales, companies are finding that machines can often do the job just as well, or better, than humans. But some tasks – like picking and tending to fruit and vegetable crops – have remained the territory of low-wage laborers.
But labor-starved growers are now eying machines with increasing interest.
Some 90 percent of the strawberries and 80 percent of the salad greens grown in the U.S. come from California. These crops and a lot of others have always been picked by hand because they don't ripen all at once and can bruise easily.
As NPR's Kirk Siegler reported in April, immigration policies and enforcement along the border between the U.S. and Mexico lately have meant that growers in California can't find enough workers to pick these crops.
"Over the last 10 years, there's been a new effort to restart mechanization," says Phil Martin, an agricultural economist at the University of California, Davis and curator of Migration News.
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