On Man and Machine

I belong to a network of growers from throughout the state and beyond who can post questions, via email, for the group as a whole. Last week the topic of automation on small farms came up and it produced an interesting exchange. Because the minimum wage will be rising to 15 dollars per hour over the next five years and overtime will now kick in after 40 hours a week, instead of 60, automation is a hot topic among the farm community.

 Already, on the large farms around us and in the Salinas Valley, chemical thinning machines are being used in lettuce crops which leave plants at a desired spacing, while precisely killing the unwanted plants with herbicide. Large “Robo-Cultivators” are also being implemented, which use cameras to identify the crop plants and kill all the weeds around them with mechanical knives. Tractors with GPS guided, automatic steering systems are already commonly used to list up beds, and those that won’t need a driver at all are right around the corner.

Where small, diverse, organic growers like us fit in this rush-to-automate remains to be seen. We are a small group, and here in the United States there has never been much interest among Ag-tech companies in serving us. Instead, most of the new developments are aimed at operations that grow on thousands of acres and are way beyond the reach of small farms like ours.

Even the few technologies that may be within our reach, like automated irrigation systems, present problems on diverse farms like ours. These systems are capable of using sensors that can determine when a crop needs water and send a signal to automatically turn on the pump to ensure they get irrigated when they actually need it. Now although the idea of having my farm irrigate itself while I am lounging on the beach sounds great, in reality, it is hard to imagine it working on our farm.

For one thing, I have never found an irrigation system that I would feel safe leaving unattended. Every time we irrigate our strawberries or squash or any crop we do on drip, we have to make the rounds repairing damage done by rodents, over-eager weeding crews, or even insects (Jerusalem crickets). And when it comes to overhead/sprinkler irrigation — it’s another matter entirely. No matter how carefully they are assembled, the aluminum hook and latch pipes that we use are prone to “blow-outs” on occasion where they separate, sometimes hours into an irrigation set. Although I am sure it would be possible to design a system that would sense the change in pressure and shut itself down, I would love to see the robot that could wade out into the muddy field, latch the pipes back together again, and turn the pump back on. This is just one example of the sorts of difficulties you would encounter in trying to automate anything in a complex farming system.

At this point the future is murky, and about the only thing that is certain is that farming around here is going to look very different in the next 10-20 years.