If future farming is largely automated by robots, what produce would still require human farmers?

Question

In a story set in the near future where robots perform the majority of farming (due to population growth and agribusiness efficiencies), what might still be farmed by humans? Assume no radical AI breakthroughs. The produce could be niche -- something that becomes a luxury since supply is limited compared to mass-produced products.

While many rightly point out the main value in human-farmed produce may be as a premium product, I am interested in something that could not be efficiently farmed by robots. The society depicted in the narrative will be efficiency-focused and lacking creativity, so it seems less likely they'll care about "hand picked". In fact, they may distrust it.

Answer 1

There won't be anything that can't be farmed by robots.

However, there may be some things that are not simply because some people are luddites.

Automate Everything

The the most recent holdouts preventing complete automation of farming were the fruits and vegetables that were meant to go to the grocery store rather than processed. The ones that had to look pretty.

The automation of farming has been progressing rapidly in the last couple of decades and the only thing keeping humans from actually doing the work on farms is the availability of inexpensive labor and the relative infancy of the technology. All the bugs aren't worked out yet, so the robots need babysitters.

Any remaining food items that aren't automated with either have their growing process altered (grow indoors with grow lights in controlled settings) or will use more humanoid robots to duplicate the tasks of humans. Though I can't think of or find any such holdouts.

The Luddites

There will always be a selection of foods that will continue to be farmed exclusively by humans, and they'll advertise it too, similar to "hand crafted" items which can be easily mass produced. Humans may maintain a sense of quality for food farmed by another human.

Banning the Luddites

The human farmed food fad in the age of automation may quickly fade or even become illegal as it becomes clear that the only remaining source of produce related salmonella outbreaks comes from human run farms. Robots don't have to poop^{[Citation Needed]}, but if they did, they would be programmed to always wash their manipulating appendages before handling the food.

Answer 2

Much like the 'organic' and 'locally sourced' movement of today, there may be a market for human-farmed produce in such a future. I can see trendy eateries bragging that they feature the highest quality, freshest hand-picked organic produce in the city. Or perhaps supermarkets significantly marking up hand-picked produce, turning it into something of a conspicuous consumption item for wealthy urbanites.

Answer 3

Robotic farm machinery will probably be complimented by genetically engineered plants which ripen at predictable intervals, have fruit or edible portions which are relatively uniform in size and texture and are robust enough to survive mechanized handling.

While cheap and nutritious, it is also about as appealing as Spam to eat.

Human farmers will have the important job of raising the ancestral crops which contain the original germ lines used to build the genetically engineered plants. The heritage farmers and farms also provide "boutique" food items for the wealthy, who would rather eat an "Empire" apple than a "Gamma-5" apple, and their heritage crops are regularly sampled to change up the genetically engineered fruit and vegetables so tastes and textures will also change in the market from time to time.

Answer 4

Machinery is already used for farming, as noted by other answers. But, as pointed out by this answer, some things are too delicate, such as:

• Saffron, which consists of the stigmas (only) from the flowers of a certain type of crocus. You might be able to automate that, but it's a delicate operation -- saffron threads are small, thin, and delicate.

• Grapes for ice wine, which today have to be harvested by hand and quickly. I asked about this on a winery tour some years back, and was told that automated pickers ruin too many of the grapes and you're already dealing with a small, volatile crop so you can't afford to waste any.

Both saffron and ice wine are relative luxuries, so your idea of niche markets isn't far off.

Answer 5

Most farming today is done with human-operated machinery. At least in western countries it is.

What isn't is probably going too delicate or fragile to be mechanically handled - requiring human finesse to handle properly.

Robotification(a word I've just invented) still requires a lot of mechanical handling. That's a good starting point for what can - and can't - replaced with robot farmers.

Examples:

• Florists will still be in business. Nobody likes smashed or bruised flowers. There's also the aesthetic aspect to it; machine-learning techniques are good at generalising and producing things that people consider pleasing but arranging a bouquet of flowers might be beyond a computer.
• Farming in mountainous areas like parts of the Middle-East where it's impossible to get machinery (robotic or otherwise) in. This is really only applicable to farming livestock; goats, etc.

Answer 6

I have a hard time imagining a produce plant that wouldn't be better farmed by a robot, given the time and resources to engineer a robot suited for that specific purpose.

So either there'd have to be a crop so rare yet also challenging to harvest that designing a specific robot wouldn't be worth the time and money. Ultra-fresh cinnamon shavings?

Or the alternative is a marketing angle, where people in the future valued human-hand harvested products over "mass produced" robot-harvested products. Say, the wealthy go to the future Whole Foods and buy "Human Artisinal" oranges picked by flesh, not metal.

Answer 7

I know it's not produce, but I think vanilla would still be harvested by humans. The cultivation of vanilla is fairly labor intensive since it requires hand-pollination and, considering how it is so widely used today, I think any potentially game-changing AI advancements on the horizon would already be known.

Answer 8

My first guess was vanilla, but since that one is already covered, here are some other ideas:

Illegal plants (like marijuana)

I'm sure that when you think about illegal activities you'd think that robots are your best friends, but there are a couple of reasons why it might not be true:

1. Robots will want power, and you will already be draining more than your fair share from the network. The more power you use, the more you stand out, so someone may come by and start asking questions. It already happens: http://www.postandcourier.com/article/20120129/PC1602/301299979 and the more robots you have, the bigger the risk

2. You have to get them somewhere. You also need someone to maintain them in good condition. It would be probably be easy for government goons to follow all transactions involving new robots, and most transactions involving second-hand robots. Buying several such robots without having anything bigger than a garden (officially, of course) will once again draw attention to yourself.

3. NSA spying. How hard would it be for spy agencies to secretly install some tracking device in every robot ever produced? Probably easy, assuming they don't do that already. Your new friend will lead the police right to your doorstep.

4. Records. Everything the robot will do, probably is going to be recorded (openly or secretly). In both cases you probably won't be able to ensure, that the machine won't be a walking pile of evidence against you.

5. Robots don't have feelings. The can't be bought, bullied, reasoned or negotiated with. They just want to do what they programming tells them to do. You can make a human shut up one way or the other (dead men tell no tales), but with a robot you can never be sure.

Yes, it's hard to find humans who can be trusted, but with robots it's outright impossible.

Amish food

I think this is obvious - everything the Amish eat, will be produced by humans.

Also we can add to this category all the people, who believe, that nothing tastes like a fruit from a tree watered with your own blood, sweat and tears, from your own garden.

Decorative plants

Many plants have dual purpose - they both produce food and look pretty. Cherry tree is a good example. They will need a lot of human attention during their entire lifetime.

For the first couple of years they will be grown on a farm. Surely, some automation will help, but unless there will be a human to oversee whether they look pretty, it will be hard to sell them.

Once they are sold and planted in someone's garden, there will probably be little to no automation - robots are expensive and without economics of scale there will be no reason to buy them. Especially, that you need a meatbag anyway to make sure, that it still looks pretty.

And yes, it counts as food - as stated above, some people just prefer things they grew themselves.

Answer 9

As population grows, jobs have to be found for all those people. Either that, or there is a permant welfare transfer to unemployed masses. More healthy for the society to give them jobs.

That is where comparative advantage comes in (see also my answer to this question).

• Assume that there is an almost infinite amount of work which can be done. New smartphones for everybody, streets with fewer potholes, more teachers in school, rehabilitation of endangered biotopes, and also food production.
• Then decide how this amount of work is divided between people and robots. The idea is that people are only paid to do nothing as a last resort. Would you have people in the factories and robots in the fields, or robots in the factories and people in the fields? With near-future technology, the superiority of robots in a factory will be greater than the superiority in the fields, because the factory is a more predictable workplace. (Comparative advantage doesn't ask who is better at any one job, compares who is "more better" where.)
• If wages are dictated purely by marked mechanisms, humans won't earn much. Not in the factories and not in the fields.
• Of course farm work in the hot sun is hard and boring. Many people would rather work in a climate-controlled factory. But there are others who prefer to be outdoors.

Now to your question. You wrote that automated agribusiness, coupled with overpopulation, has put farmers out of work. Assume that they refuse to conveniently die as they're frozen out of mainstream economy, and that they don't get enough dole to make a comfortable living.

Some of those unemployed might start urban farming to supplement their diet. They are much less effective than agrirobots, but they don't have the option to sell their work and buy industrial food, and they have plenty of time on their hands.

Answer 10

In short:

ROBOTS

Farmers (people that knows a lot about farming) will be needed to supervise and define the production/programming of these 'farming robots'. They will be also needed to value their work and check the crops (well, even that could be passed to robots...).

Answer 11

We are already using robots to farm. John Deere has self driving combines, and other machinery that effectively automate the production of corn, wheat and other crops that man operated machinery already cultivate/harvest. The remaining crops and practices are grove harvesting and picking of fruits and vegetables that are hand picked. When vision/recognition and coordination 'skills' are properly adapted to picking then the question only becomes one of economics. That point is only years if only months away. Another aspect of farming is the adaption of robotics to the pollination of plants in the event that the honey bee becomes extinct.

Answer 12

In addition to Thucydides' answer about heritage crops and premium products, and Darth Hunterix's about illegal activities, humans, while not necessarily handling the whole process by themselves, would always be the best experts on what is appealing to humans.
So, beyond maintaining a shadow of that idea in the robots' programming and specialized hardware, only we would be suitable for the task of maintaining/selecting desirable traits. The unique scent of a certain apple cultivar, the balance of sweetness and bitterness, the effect of hydroponics on subtle qualities too difficult to quantify.

Of course, being a software engineer, I can imagine any of these things, quantifiable or not, being taught to a machine via neural networks, etc. Even trends could be predicted, while introducing no new technologies - merely making existing ones, like spectroscopy, more affordable due to mass production.
And yet, we should never allow the process to be fully automated. I wouldn't trust a machine to judge an change it wasn't programmed to assess as desirable or not.

Answer 13

Today semi automatic farms already exists where systems take care of the plant and humans are only needed to harvest the vegetable and plant new seeds.

We already have the technology to do both of those things automatically, and maybe some people already have such a system in their gardens but it's not something that will take over the world anytime soon.

Simply because food and agriculture are like religions, they are incredibly resistant to change even when the dogmantic belief is old and inefficient.

Although some modern farms have started opening their minds and using fully automated vehicles in their farms, they still need people.

But you can see it everywhere that people praise tradition and "genuinity" over efficiency.

Answer 14

I predict that wassabi would still be harvested by humans, because it grows along natural mountain streams and cannot be grown in fields or hydroponics labs. Creating an robot and AI that could climb through that enviroment and search for wassabi would fail any cost benefit analysis. Continuing to send people to collect it manually would be way easier since there was never that much of it in the first place.

Generally speaking, other rare and boutique ingredients like that might still be harvested by hand. They would also be extremely valuable, given that the population has grown, but the natural environment that can viably produce them has actually decreased.

Answer 15

I imagine that fruit-picking (or berry-picking) would still be done by humans. Without a radical advance in AI, our farming machines may not be able to adequately handle the complex tasks of spotting fruits hidden amongst leaves and branches, and picking or cutting off those fruits while minimizing damage to the rest of the plant.