Automation of US Agriculture

Hey all. Peter Ryan here coming in from Colorado today. We are taking a question from the Patreon page. And it’s specifically it’s about automation, specifically the automation of agriculture. And the question is with the way the technology is evolving, can it solve some of our personnel and worker problems because we’re facing a shortage in pretty much every sector of the economy right now, with agriculture arguably one of the 2 or 3 subsectors that is most affected. 

And answer is kind of, first back story. I would argue that today agriculture is already the most automated industry, in the United States. If you think back to as recently as the year 1900, well over 90% of the American population was involved in agriculture in some way. But then we started to industrialize and urbanize and people moved from the farm into the cities. 

And today it’s only about 1% of the American population that lives on the farm and the ranch. That means that we’ve had to expand our agricultural output against the backdrop of ever shrinking labor forces. And so when you think about what happens in a modern Ro crop, farm these days, whether that’s corn or soy or whatever, it’s already mostly automated. 

I mean, the very concept of mechanical planters and especially combines for putting the the seed down and then harvesting the end result, that’s largely automated. And what we’ve seen in the last decade, roughly, is even those things don’t need to be driven anymore. If you step into a modern combine, you’re going to feel like you’re on a the deck of a Star Destroyer and Star Wars. 

You’ve got readouts everywhere. It’s GPS run and the farmers there for when things go wrong. I don’t mean to suggest that they’re just taking a nap behind the wheel, but a lot of the work is already programed in. Once you harvest it, you get it into your, truck. You then deliver it to an elevator where it’s loaded automatically. 

Hasn’t been done by shovel for a very long time, and eventually ends up on a truck going somewhere or in a railcar where it goes into, say, a flour mill where the wheat is turned into flour automatically. They don’t even bother turning the lights on. You then go into something like a a bread factory, a bakery. Most of that is automated too. 

So there are there are tight spots in agriculture, but there aren’t very many of them. Those happen primarily when you’re talking about higher value added products, specifically meats and fruits and vegetables. So with meats, you have individual critters that are running around. They need to be managed, whether by horseback or on the back of an ATV. That is something we haven’t figured out to automate. 

And if you remember back to your early civilization lessons, the reason why man’s best friend is dog is is dogs are pretty good at managing herds, and we have yet to come up with a something that’s better than a canine. When you’re talking about processing, you’re also dealing with something where eyes and fingers are what we need. When you take a carcass and you process, you’re doing one at a time and each carcass is a little bit different. 

So we have found out that there are certain types of automation that we can include to look for occlusions or gross and things like that that you don’t want in your ground beef. And we have figured out how to move the carcasses through the facility, but you still need people hacking things apart. We made a bit of an advance during Covid when for health reasons, we couldn’t have people on the line, but it really probably only shaved a 5 to 15% off of the manpower necessary to make it all function. 

It’s difficult for me to see the technology in its current form having a significant breakthrough in the next 20 years. I love to be surprised, but I don’t see it. Then you’re talking about fruits and vegetables here. It’s an issue of a combination of identification and delicacy. Things like apples bruise pretty easily. Things like arugula have to be cut, or asparagus had to be cut at the right rate. 

And the visual recognition is getting better. And if we’re going to have improvements in visual recognition, then, you know, maybe we’re talking about something, but there’s three steps to it. You have to identify what needs to be cut and wear. Number two, you have to have a physical arm that can go out and grass and sever it. And then three, you have to be able to relocate that recently harvested whatever it is into the rest of the processing system. 

Here’s the problem. When you do this on a line for manufacturing, you have a moving conveyor. Often times that moves the product through in its intermediate form and then your automated system is doing the same thing to every item. And you have humans and machines to a degree, working in parallel with the humans, either maintaining the machines or going back and forth on the line doing the things that require a brain and fingers. 

The machines, even with AI, are pretty dumb. They might be able to do an individual step better than human, but they can really only do that individual step through tens of thousands of individual steps. You can have machines doing a lot of that, but the product has to be brought to them. These facilities are not mobile. These machines are not mobile. 

When you’re doing with agriculture, I’m sorry, but the apple tree is not going to rotate so that the fruit is facing the direction it needs to. You have to bring the machine to what you’re harvesting, and that requires a degree of locomotion and energy intensity and programing that we just don’t have yet. So incremental gains. Sure. I would say probably apple harvesting is coming along the fastest in this regard. 

It’s a relatively high capital industry, and as a rule, the apples are a different color from the tree when they’re ready to be harvested. That provides a lot more visual cue. And when you have them laying down, they separate from the leaf bundles a little bit. But if you want to do this for spinach, sorry, you need Guatemalans for that. 

And one of the things we’re going to be seen over the remainder of this year is a separation in terms of pricing between the parts of agriculture where maybe a degree of automation can help and those where it really can’t. And unfortunately, the sectors within the United States that are most reliant on the irregular immigration, that has become a political hot potato in this country are the ones that are actually least capable of being automated. 

So if you’re in an area that imports its fruits and vegetables from elsewhere in the country, you’re going to notice that at the grocery store. That’s unavoidable at this point.