With a shortage of farmworker labor and growing concerns about food safety, one of the largest produce companies in the Salinas Valley of California is turning to mechanized harvesting and robotic processing of its vegetables, forever replacing the workers who once performed these jobs, says the San Francisco Chronicle.
The company, Taylor Farms, offers up 120 million servings per week of salads, vegetable snack trays, stir-fry kits, and other products, ranking as one of North America’s largest producers of fresh-cut fruits and vegetables, the paper says.
“Two major factors have driven technology in the region,” says the article. “One is food safety, a major priority ever since the deadly 2006 e. coli outbreak that was traced back to locally grown spinach. Robotic arms are less likely to transmit pathogens than humans are, decreasing food safety risk. The bigger and more recent push for ag tech, however, has come from rising wages coupled with a labor shortage.”
Experts project that automation and robotics will only increase in the next five to 10 years, with California’s minimum wage due to rise to $15 per hour by 2023, the paper says. The passage of California’s AB1066, which calls for stricter overtime pay rules for agricultural workers, is also a factor, the report says.
Aside from mechanized harvesting, robots in processing plants assemble “60 to 80 salads a minute, double the output when humans weighed and packed the greens,” the article says.