As Immigrant Farmworkers Become More Scarce, Robots Replace Humans

NEW YORK TIMES / BATTLE FOR WORLD – November 20, 2018: The article highlights the story about Abel Montoya, who as a boy remembers his father arriving home from the lettuce fields each evening, exhausted, 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,” said Mr. Montoya, who listened to his father 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 with much of the work physically taxing, even mind-numbing and believes some of the work can be delegated to robots.

Among a new generation of farmworkers here at Taylor Farms, one of the world’s largest producers and sellers of fresh-cut vegetables, 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-robot machines can assemble 60 to 80 salad bags a minute, doubling 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.

The article noted that a decade ago, people lined up by the hundreds for jobs at packing houses in California and Arizona during the lettuce season, but this is no more.

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