Will Robots Soon Replace Farm Workers?

Will Robots Soon Replace Farm Workers?

The COVID-19 pandemic is “ratchet[ing] up the pressure” to automate harvesting processes, Civil Eats reported. Alongside the rising cost of labor and the increasingly dangerous conditions caused by wildfires, more and more farmers are considering this move to automate their harvests with robots replacing up to half the farmworkers currently needed.

Why This Matters: As Twilight Greenaway wrote for Civil Eats, “If the people doing the work on farms are getting sick, the logic goes, why not just replace them with machines?”

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Farmworkers Lack Adequate Legal and Public Health Protections During Pandemic

Farmworkers Lack Adequate Legal and Public Health Protections During Pandemic

by Julia Fine, ODP Contributing Writer As Arun Gupta and Michelle Fawcett reported last week, coronavirus is “exploding” in populations of farmworkers across America. In their report, they noted that on a single farm in Tennessee, all 200 workers tested positive for the disease while in Immokalee, Florida, results indicated that over 1,000 migrant workers […]

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