Your Ad Here 2009 November 14 Saturday Farm Automation Replacing Humans Why let in low skilled immigrants to do manual

labor on farms when we are at the transition point where lots of farm jobs are going to get taken over by compute r automation. That automated equipment doesn't need taxpayer subsidized health c are, unemployment benefits, or schooling for children. It was 1903 when Robert Blair s great-grandfather began farming the dry ridge ov erlooking the Clearwater River near Lewiston, Idaho. In 2001, when Blair took th e reins, the farm s books were still kept by hand. Now, he has deployed a set of Dar pa-like technologies, including unmanned aerial vehicles and self-steering tract ors. In six years, I went from just having a cell phone to my tractor driving itself , and having a small airplane flying and landing itself on a farm, Blair said. The new precision farmers are hacking together a way of making food in which the virtual and physical worlds are so tightly bound that having his tractor st eered by GPS-guidance with inch-level accuracy is ho-hum. Autosteering of farm m achinery has exploded over the past several years, according to an annual survey by Purdue University s Center for Food and Agricultural Business. In 2004, just 5 p ercent of agricultural retail outlets offered autosteering. In 2008, more than h alf did. Autosteering of farm equipment is a lot easier than autosteering of cars because lots of tractors move around in fields that contain no humans aside from the gu y in the cab. The big benefits include the ability to put rows closer together a nd even vary application of fertilizer and pesticides by area of each field base d on historical yields per area. Also, the tractor operator can do other tasks ( e.g. surf the internet or do accounting tasks on a laptop during periods when th e autosteering is in operation). Further maturation of this technology will elim inate the need for humans in control cabs. Picture huge fields with robotic comb ines sweeping across, with no human in sight, harvesting wheat and corn crops. The biggest labor-saving advances will probably come with better automated picki ng equipment that removes most of the existing use of manual labor for picking v egetables. Share | By Randall Parker at 2009 November 14 12:59 PM Immigration Econ omics http://www.parapundit.com/archives/006713.html