Tuesday, March 19, 2024
Year : 2, Issue : 12
The fruits and vegetables you eat may soon be cultivated and processed by an army of drones and robots, some powered by artificial intelligence. In fact, it’s already happening on farms across America.
Hylio, a Houston-based tech company, was granted an exemption from the Federal Aviation Administration in February for a single pilot to operate swarms of heavy drones over farms. Three battery-powered drones, some weighing as much as 400 pounds each, can now be used at one time to spray fertilizer and pesticides on fields of produce. That task is typically handled by farm workers or crop-dusting planes.
Before the FAA decision, deploying this kind of drone swarm would have required a team of licensed operators, which makes the process more complicated and expensive. Using a swarm of three drones at one time, one operator can spray 150 acres every hour.
Crop-dusting drones were among the many high-tech agricultural tools on display at the February 2024 World Agriculture Expo in Tulare, in the heart of California’s Central Valley.
More than 1,250 exhibitors appeared at this year’s Expo, which drew more than 100,000 visitors.
Paul Mikesell, CEO and founder of Carbon Robotics, showed off his company’s Laser Weeder, which uses powerful infrared lasers and high-speed cameras to identify and blast weeds to oblivion in a matter of seconds.
Developers of these high-tech tools said their inventions could help ease the decadeslong labor shortage that’s been impacting the U.S. agricultural industry. Between 1950 and 2000, the number of hired farm laborers declined by more than 50%, according to data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Hiring has continued to be a challenge for farm owners into the 2020s.
The U.S. Department of Labor is also monitoring the issue. A spokesperson told, next month the department will send President Biden a list of recommendations for an aid program that could help farm workers who have been displaced by AI. Any new aid package would require congressional approval. It could also be folded into a new Executive Order that would follow one from October 2023.
It’s unclear whether such an aid program would benefit the hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants who work on American farms.
Source: CBS News
