Coming soon: Tomato-picking robots
By Susan Mernit 
posted Dec 2nd 2004 1:30PM
posted Dec 2nd 2004 1:30PM
Would you stop worrying about white collar jobs being offshored
to India for a sec? This is serious news: scientists are working on a robot that will ensure we don't need
tomato-pickers anymore, too. Under a grant from NASA, Peter Ling, a researcher at Ohio State, is developing a robotic
tomato-picking machine to harvest crops grown in space (at space stations, of course). While we didn't realize picking
low-hanging fruit was all that hard (compared to say, tree-borne fruit), growers around the country have expressed
interest in the machines for obvious reason.
[Via Near Near Future]
With scant little extra work someone could add
image recognition to the program and allow only
those tomatoes to be picked which are perfectly
ripe allowing the remainder to ripen nicely for
a later picking. Although I'm sure this is being
done.
This is not the first time that the development of a machine has threatened jobs in Agriculture (particularly those of tomato pickers). In the 1990's the tomato-picking machine developed at the University of California not only contributed to the loss of thousands of farmworker jobs but also decreased the quality control of the tomato industry. Part of the goal was to centralize the tomato industry under a large corporate structure to increase output and drive prices down. Too bad they didn't consider that the supermarket conglomerates would levy the prices anyway. So all they managed to do was kill off the local tomato farmer (who couldn't afford and had no use for a tomato-picker) AND decrease the quality of the average tomato. HOW did they do that you ask?
Well... because the machine kept crushing the tomato's they had to come up with a tomato that had a firmer skin... and so they bred stronger, more mealy, less tasty, and all around generic tomato.
I wonder what tommy the tomato picking robot will contribute...