Wesley johnsen wrote:will robots replace farmers? will the corporations hog all farmland and use robots and that the family farm will die? what do you think will happen with all the displaced workers? robot tax? i wonder is the push for robots is due to the corporations trying to rid their problem of not wanting to pay for workers. some people love working hard.
No, I do not think so. That is more of emotion based upon fear than in reality from what I can see. In fact it is actually the opposite where I live. The farms that utilize robots here are actually doing quite well, and the ones that have not embraced the technology have ended up going bankrupt. Since robotic farming takes many forms, a surprising number of small, family farms have gone to robotics with great success.
Here
dairy farming rules, and one of the fastest growing robotic systems is with calf tenders. These robots
feed the calves the specified amount of
milk replacer, a job that used to be done by hand. It still takes people to keep the robotics filled with milk replacer, but long gone is the guesswork at which they fed the calves. With robots, they read the approaching calves ear tag, then based on exact age, give the proper amount of milk replacer. If the calf comes over too early, the robot squirts
water in the calf's face deterring it until it is time to feed again. While not taking anyone's job, because it does its job with so much precision, that mortality of farms that use robotic calf feeders have dropped to almost nothing. In that way their pay back time is reduced to only a few months.
It really is an amazing system that has enabled a lot of small family dairy farms to be profitable in a competitive dairy industry.
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