 Banner is a little over 75 years old. We had our collaboration a year or two ago. It has the name on the clients. I had our whole term end of resources that it's quite a lot. We cover really food, air culture, production systems, but also the end of resources, or so soil, water, forestry. So it's quite diverse committee. It's a joy to work because it is so diverse and there's so many synergies and sometimes conflict between topics. We've, for those that aren't aware and listening to Zoom and that, we've had several reports. You can go online and look at those, but we've had these webinars that we've done the last couple of years on different topics, from ag production systems to robotics, soil, water. And then we had an earlier session last year on labor and now we're having this workshop webinar this morning. Again, on the issue of labor and automation and how it affects sustainability and social sustainability of our food ag systems. And that came apparent two years ago when COVID hit and there was disruption in the supply chains in particularly the animal industry, meat industry, as well as some of the vegetable production systems. So this is extremely important topic and it really holds well within our purview of the National Academy. So I guess I'm supposed to introduce the administrators. Kurt, where you go? Oh, there you go. So it was actually a joy to be back here because there's some colleagues I've known for some cases 20 years. So you're going to hear from President Kirk Schultz who is from our president of Washington State University who was my president at Kansas State University a few years ago. And we've connected a few times and we follow each other. And then Dr. Wendy Powers is the new, I guess you can still say that two weeks or so Dean of the College of Agriculture. And I've known her again about 20 years. We're on a national air quality task force. She was at Iowa State University and Michigan State University which I came from Michigan State. So we've had several kind of connections there. You were at UC Davis? System. System. Okay. Before coming here at Washington State so she'll make some comments. And then Chris Keene, I don't know you. But he's the VPR Vice Provost for Research at in the Washington State University system. So they're going to have an opening remark. So Kirk, you want to, are you leading? Okay. Good morning everybody and welcome. It's great to see so many of the board members that were there last night. I had the opportunity thanks Jill to have dinner. And it's great to see some of our WSU colleagues and others from around the country. You're on one of the five physical campuses of Washington State University. We are spread throughout the state of Washington our historic flagship campuses in Pullman. We're here in the Tri-Cities. And this has an interesting history in itself that was really set up as a graduate center cooperatively between the University of Washington, Oregon State University and Washington State University. So I showed a couple of people walking in but out in the hallway, if you look to the right by where the trash cans are, there was a graphic artist that decided that this needed a mascot here. So he combined a beaver, Oregon State, a husky for UW, and a cougar for WSU into one animal. So it looks a little odd, but that never quite caught on. But it's an interesting piece of art. We also have a campus in Spokane, Washington, where our health sciences are centered. We started a medical school during my first year or so. That was a passion project for President Elson Floyd before he passed away. We've not graduated several years of medical students, and that's been an interesting challenge that's best told over a glass of wine, getting that up and going and things like that. But that's really the center of our health sciences. The nursing pharmacy and medicine is in Spokane. Our newest campus is in Everett, Washington, and that was started about seven, eight years ago, and that was really to serve the manufacturing, STEM related industry in Boeing in particular. And then we have a campus in Vancouver, Washington that really works in the Portland, Vancouver area. So we were excited to be here, to serve as Washington's land grant university, and we certainly welcome all of you today. As I was thinking over just a couple of things to talk about this morning, I thought about some of the challenges that we have ahead of us, particularly as land grant universities. And I really have three things that I think are important that are relevant, I think, to some of the discussions you have today. I think one thing that's incumbent upon land grants is really bridging and leading the bridging of the urban world divide. We see it in legislatures across the country. We see it in a lot of the communities that as land grant universities, we have supported for decades how this seeming divide has occurred. We like to talk about all these stories when I'm in Washington. Folks that have spent a bunch of years in Seattle, and I was at an event recently, I talked to this particular person, been in Seattle 10 years, and I said, have you ever been to Eastern Washington? He said, oh, yes, I've been, I've been to Clay Ellen. For those of you in Washington, you realize that's just on the opposite side of the mountain right before you've really seen two thirds of three quarters of the state. I say that because sometimes in the urban settings, people have a really stilted view of what life is like in these rural areas. And I think it's up to us, that the land grant presidents to help lead the way. The second is we talked a lot last night just at our end of the table around enrollment and enrollment challenges in traditional agricultural programs. And I think that's something that we're seeing in a lot of universities, and that's certainly a challenge and something that I think all of us will work to address. And I think the other part of this is not just enrollment overall, but how are we making sure that we are attracting first generation and students of color into some of these programs that traditionally maybe have not been where a lot of those enrollments are. So I think those are all things and these are not for somebody else to figure out. It's all of us working together. And as the leaders around the country and thinking about agricultural issues, policy issues, the land grant universities, I think this is something that I certainly encourage all of you to spend some time on. Well, it's also some opportunities for us and I think I look upon these as positives moving ahead. First land grant universities are uniquely positioned because we have extension. And I can tell you, my colleagues at the University of Washington would love to have a presence in every county in the state of Washington in the same applies regardless of where you are. That is a strength that land grant universities offer. One of the interesting things I remember when I was in Kansas is we'd be out talking to people and they would talk about their extension agent and that thing there. And sometimes I didn't even associate it with the university. We need to make sure that people understand that Washington state is out there. Your particular universities are out there in these rural areas making a difference and in the urban areas making a difference as well. The second is I think there is an outstanding interest in food. People are interested in food and where it comes from and we need to translate that interest in where I go to eat, where I get my produce, where I get all this stuff with an interest. If you're interested in that, you should go to a land grant university. You should be in agriculture. That's where you're going to learn how to do a lot of this well and to really take that interest and take it to the next level. I'd never heard of the term farm to table until a couple of years ago that now is this really popular term certainly on the west coast and I think this is our opportunity to capitalize on that. Interestingly, so many of the farm to table places I wind up going, restaurants, things like that, I will always meet some alumni there. It's interesting the number of Washington state universities, folks that are involved in the wine part, where people source their food, the hospitality, beverage combination, all of those kind of things. It turns out many, many times we've got our alumni there. So how do we take people coming into a restaurant that want to do farm to table and say you need to be involved more strategically in agriculture in our state. And then finally, I think if we talk about this at the end of the table quite a bit last night, I think it's incumbent upon us as leaders to bridge some of the political divides. One of our challenges in the state of Washington is we are a very blue state with very blue politics except for certain areas that tend to be more red. How do we make sure that we've got both sides of the aisle supporting agriculture and supporting production agriculture. I'll talk with folks that maybe lean a little left and some of their ideas about agriculture where they get their information. You just say hey we need to kind of work on this a little bit and we need some people on both sides of that aisle bridging that gap and supporting really our ability to produce safe food for the world from the United States. So thanks for having me. I love dinner. It's great to catch back up with Chuck a little bit after spending seven years working together at K-State. And I just also want to thank Jill for her leadership and pulling all this together. Those of you who've ever been a department chair or school director know that you don't have anything to do. You just kind of sit around looking for projects. So just a round of applause for Jill and her work. Thank you. With that I took up all the time for welcoming remarks so my colleagues have nothing to say anyway. So I don't know who's next Chris. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, thanks Kirk for that. Good morning, everyone. Great to see you. I'm Chris Keene, vice president for research at WC and also vice chancellor for research at our Pullman campus. I'm a physicist by background, worked in plasma physics, fusion energy, national security, and Lawrence Livermore. So Wendy, we're just talking about our experiences with the UC system. Of course I have that. So anyway, it's great to be here and welcome you. So Kirk gave you a little overview of some of the campuses also are doing research on a tour. I'll just make a few remarks about that. So first, you know, starting here in Tri-City, you know, this is one of WSU six campuses. That's 1600 students, you know, and the student body here is about 35% Hispanic and 44% first gen. And that kind of really demonstrates our commitment to serving the students of all backgrounds here at WSU, right? It's really part of our laying grand mission, you know, that Kirk alluded to. And Tri-City plays a very important role in our research enterprise as well. It's home to one of our three institutes with the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, the Bio Products Institute. There's a major facility here. We also have two other institutes with PNNL and grid and nuclear science, as well as a graduate degree program, which now has over 40 students and alumni. And we have 50 joint appointees with the lab. That is actually their largest number where their largest research partner. So a lot of research going on here. This is also an emerging focus area for energy systems work here. You may have heard about there's going to be two small modular nuclear reactors going in over the next five to closer to 10 most likely over at the Hanford site. And there's also the new scale system, which is also going on over at Idaho. So a lot of work here, the energy, very exciting. So, you know, moving around the clock, if you will, if you go to Vancouver, Kirk mentioned, that's actually also a very research active campus that is growing. There's some great work there in neuroscience, coastal ecology, you might imagine being near the coast. And there's a brand new life sciences going on there, which will really multiply the opportunities of that campus. Then you come to Spokane, which Kirk already alluded to, about 1500 students there all together as well. The colleges of medicine, pharmacy and nursing there together compose about 15, 15, 18% of our $280 million a year in awards, right? So that gives you a sense of the skill of that campus. You know, with respect to the entire system. So then we come down down to the flagship campus and pulling continuing around the clock, right? We have about 20,000 students. That's where the bulk of our enterprise is. And our enterprise is about $360 million a year research expenditures. I'll talk about that. We have numerous centers of excellence in there. And they range from this thing called the Institute of Shock Physics near and dear to my heart as a physicist, but it is actually probably the world's leading university center in the study of matter at ultra high pressures, millions of atmosphere pressure where phases change. And basically have no understanding of material with those conditions. For example, at the center of Earth core, that's about four million atmospheres. And we really don't have very little understanding at all of what the iron core there is actually like. So that's that study of WSU. So we do research from that rate, also ranging to things like digital humanities, right? We have a very active program in digital humanities, both the curation and study of these artifacts. So essentially we record them digitally, make them broadly available for study there by really increasing strong activity in this area. So, you know, that's a that's an ultra quick tour. As I said earlier, our expenditures are about $360 million a year. That's sort of top 11% in the U.S. by the Herb Rankings that you all know. But also it would be number one in 25 states actually. We have a very large other research university in this state which Kirk talked about. So, but we also we actually do work quite closely together. I speak regularly with my colleague at the University of Washington dealing with three things like right now, research security, things of that sort, which always in the news is part of the life of the feedback. Because we don't have enough projects either Kirk, just just in case you're looking for some help. Anyway, I'd just like to thank you all again for attending. Really look forward to hearing the talks today. It's really important subject and I also just like to close by acknowledging the recent induction of two of our faculty in the Academy. John Brouser needs to do by when you talk more about this. John Brouser biological chemistry and Tim Cole and anthropology. I didn't say much Wendy back on this because I knew you would cover our largest research. Okay, so thank you all. Well, good morning. I'm Wendy Powers. As Kirk mentioned, I am I've finished my third week on the job as the new dean of the College of Agricultural Human and Natural Resource Sciences. And I want to tell you a little bit about Connors and I, and I know Chris touched on a couple of things. I will say I'm really glad Chris didn't go any deeper into physics because he was already losing me when we were talking about poor atmospheres. But I want to share a little bit about Connors and some of the things that really drew me to Washington State. Connors or the college has one of the largest presences of the entire WSU system with faculty distributed on all the campuses that Chris talked about and Kirk mentioned as well. The faculty support 13 schools and departments, three extension program units, four research and extension centers, and I know you're going to get a chance to visit one of them tomorrow, I believe during the tour. And as Kirk mentioned, we've got an extension presence in 39 counties. One thing that was new for me that I haven't experienced in my other institutions is that we also have an extension presence on the confederated tribes of the Coville reservation. And so I'm really excited to see what that program looks like and how we can build those programs across the state. The scale of Connors and its impact is really reflected in the academic programs. Within Connors we offered 22 majors, 19 minors, and 27 graduate programs. And as I've started to look at the curriculum of those programs, one of the things that's really struck me is how transdisciplinary those programs are. Really trying to turn out students who can engage in the 21st century global challenges. So it's exciting to see that approach to education and I'm so excited to be part of WSU taking that approach. As we develop those educational programs, we really are building the next generation of leaders in everything that ranges from animal science to food science, apparel and natural resources. All of that is residing within the college. And we're also leaders across the country. Chris mentioned we've got National Academy members, four of them are affiliated with Connors. We also have 19 Washington State Academy of Science members, 13 regions professors and over 20 statewide supported endowed professors and distinguished professors. And so tremendous support from the agricultural sector in delivering the mission, the land grab mission across Washington. I think Connors can really be a tremendous assistance to all of us. And I think it's a great opportunity to see the banner of members and the world at large as we really start tackling some of those challenges related to agriculture, economics and human development. And so I would encourage you to take a look at some of our programs as you're after you have seen some of the tours tomorrow and really think about how we can connect with Connors and the board and its work. So we're going to start with Connors. We lead 18 subject matter centers. The three I want to draw attention to first is bioproduct sciences and engineering lab. A tremendous facility and resource to Connors and to WSU as a whole. The second is the Center for Precision Automated Ag Systems. And I think you'll see some of that work tomorrow as you're touring over at Prosser. And then the final one is center for sustaining AG development. I would really encourage you to take a look at some of those centers and think about how we can partner. Connors and WSU really does support a sustainable future. And it does so by that powerful combination of discovery and translational research to address all things related to the 21st century global challenges. We're doing that not just here locally or here in the world but also globally as well. And so we encourage you to really think about partnering with us in the future and think how we can help serve the board and your work. So with that I'm going to close. I know we're probably a little bit behind time. And I really want to welcome you all here. I hope you have a wonderful time. I hope you see lots of things that get your creative juices flowing and we left the weather warm for you as well. So we'll get into the topic of the day. So labor and automation. Dr. Jill McCoskey is going to serve as M.C. She's a banner board member. And she had some assistance from Douglas Jackson Smith. But Jill really put together the tours. And I would like to thank Washington State University for hosting us and supporting our community. Thank you. Thank you so much, Chuck. The availability and agricultural labor is one of the challenges in the agricultural industry at this time. So there's often there are fewer workers coming up from Mexico. And a lot of people are unwilling to do the hard and often dangerous work of agriculture in agriculture. So today we'll get many different perspectives. There'll be speakers both from Washington State University and from across the country. And we'll start out with Mino's car key and he will talk about innovation in specialty crops technologies. Mino's is one of the leading experts in autonomous agricultural machinery systems, field robotics and machine intelligence for production. So when I was growing up in the main hills of Nepal some 40 years ago agriculture was my part of life. It's to wake up early, work in the field of many different kinds. And it lasts around nine o'clock. Good to this till come back. They're the same kind of work like tending animals, harvesting oranges, plowing, petty rice and so on. It was a hard work and really a back breaking work and also something that took away my time that I would otherwise be able to put in my education and get better grades. So I wanted a life different than what I was doing. Perhaps not away from agriculture but at least I didn't want to really work in the field every day morning and evening or sometimes even taking my classes, I mean it's keeping my classes to make sure that we cast the mansion renfo to plan price. So that was more important than going to school for some days during months. As I moved to my university college in Kathmandu University in Thailand and then my PSD at Iowa State University I was involved in agriculture one way or the other. I learned a lot of things around computer science, automation control is around agriculture to develop some technologies. I started to learn more and more about agriculture particularly at the west a lot of the scale bigger since I was working in automating or improving the auto-riding system for this kind of tractor and implement system at Iowa State University Department PSD. A lot of things were mechanized or automated. Nobody would be taking animals to plow fields and tend them behind. So it was much better environment. I was inside the cab running my computer trying to make sure this tractor follows certain path but that was much, much easier than harvesting a padded ice manually. But then as I moved further to Pacific Northwest some 12 years ago now I started to realize well not really but things are still pretty much the same. The way I used to harvest is not much different than how we are harvesting apples at Washington State and in Washington State and many other parts of the world. And this is a really difficult physically challenging but also sometimes then there is stuff like there are a lot of reports around that. And it also exposes to really harsh environmental conditions like really hard summer really cold winters and sometimes even wildfire smokes that are at a toxic level and exposure to chemicals and other things. And that's why I think if this is there with all the advancement in artificial intelligence robotic technologies, many other supporting technologies as a sensor, data analytics data internet of things, I think we are in the point that we must do better than what we're doing in solving some of the challenges to use machines to do the hard job and allow human workers to do more of a management operation in those conditions. It's also certainly linked to what Jill mentioned about availability and cost of labor because we always are facing decreasing availability and increasing cost of labor and certainly that's not going to be sustainable. And that's why some 10-12 years ago I started working in developing robotic solutions. My program has been very close partnership with Dr. Sindhank who is sitting behind here developing robotic automated solutions for different kinds of applications particularly focusing on harvesting. There are some long research and development. It's not just me coming here and starting developing robot to pick apples. There are a lot of researches around the world developing many different kinds of robotic solutions for harvesting, pruning, painting, other applications in a specialty cross particularly, but it's still limited commercial success, I would say. And there are a couple of major reasons why we have not been able to successfully commercialize these machines because of the high speed accuracy, robustness or the lack of those qualities in these machines produce plant damage, certain technologies such as second gas apple harvesting for example and cost, lack of reduction that cycle because it's a relatively small market, technologies are more expensive small market meaning production cost is larger and certainly if it is more costly farmers are not able to adopt them running in really thin margin and that's kind of a cycle we need to prepare. To address these challenges there are researches around the world working and developing various different kinds of different ways of harvesting specialty crops such as apples, fairs, fruit crops and vegetable crops such as these papers here a lot of universities in New Zealand Australia conversion from map to windows perhaps what is causing some of this pardon me on that and then in Europe there are a lot of projects there and there are projects in China and other parts of the world as well but I'm not including everything but along the mists we at Washington State University have also prioritized this particular area a lot and we have developed very innovative solutions to perform a lot of these field operations and then the next couple of slides will be just going through those At Washington a station for precision and automotive cultural systems we're particularly focusing on Apple and theory harvesting technologies we're using both what we call robotic pick and place kind of technologies but at the same time we're also looking at alternative ways of harvesting that involves what we call targeted second cats kind of technologies we'll see some of the videos later if it runs the windows and and then within that the scope of these pick and place and mass harvesting or second gas kind of harvesting systems we're looking at very different innovative ways of using cameras and using artificial intelligence techniques to locate detect and locate where the fruit is avoid obstacles and integrate various robotic components together into a robotic system and also in the second cats area we're looking at various ways to save trees and various different kinds of mechanisms to catch fruit right on the net where they are so that we can keep the diamonds at a minimum level here is an example of automotive area harvesting work we did a few years ago now and we started with a big machine that would take, grab and shake territory trunks but then we applied a really optimized second signal and also added cameras both daytime and nighttime capabilities to take images find where branches are and we're looking at the ways to actually go to those branches or trunks automatically grab them automatically and suck them automatically we then also have been working in robotic apple harvesting for quite some years now we first try to understand how human speakers pick these apples using different kinds of sensors in our fingers what kind of force of pressure is involved what kind of muscle is involved what kind of torque is involved and what keeps the fruit is still safe so it is being picked and detached from the branches we then develop a robotic handler or we also call in effectors that are very gentle and can do the job without damaging fruit and then we also use different kinds of cameras color as well as positioning our 3D information that would go together into detecting these apples using one of the artificial intelligence techniques and integrate all of that together into a robotic system that looks something like this different versions of the prototypes that we can see in this video so timeline wise I think this first prototype was built in about built in maybe after 2015-16 time frame continued to improve the prototype over time you can see in the next second or so a newer version I guess and this one we tried kind of synchronized two kind of robots one is picking another is catching and third robot behind there you can see who is moving the fruit away he is currently developing a robotic strawberry harvesting down in Florida so it's not a robot but a roboticist once we kind of knew what we could do demonstrated prototype we started collaborating with this company called AFF Robotics we wrote proposals together to bring the technology to the next level bring it to a full scale machine as you can see here six arms on the left side six on the right side full scale machine with different kinds of hands similar technologies in terms of artificial intelligence that was behind it and this company has been developing and testing this machine now in Washington as we speak my students are in the field supporting the field work all of that you can see here in this video that this is in my opinion one of the most advanced robotic solutions for picking fruit in the world I'll show a couple of other examples in a little bit from other companies but because I work with this company I have that premise I think to say that this is one of the really best ones but I think more seriously we have made a lot of progress in picking fruit and getting it to commercialize this and I think we are really close to to pick apples commercially or maybe AFF Robotics is already providing very small scale service this year down the road we still have two months left roughly of the harvesting season in any sense as I said pick and place one fruit at a time technology we also have been advancing what we call targeted second cost harvesting system it requires certain kind of training and we have been looking at different mechanisms for taking that optimizes the force and the type of signal we apply how fast and how far that kind of things and then different kinds of catching mechanisms how far from the fruit and what kind of material that would go onto those catching surfaces and all of that put together is a targeted second cat harvesting system that are tested in many different kinds of many different varieties of apples it certainly works for some varieties and it's not for all kinds of apples that we produce we can see in this video how it functions currently you see only three layers of catchers and there is one machine in the other side that can close the canopy so that the fruit would not fall outside of these catchers and the goal to have six or seven layers so that the fruit would not have to drop very far from where they are right now it's just for testing there are three layers and you can see between those two layers there is not much different the depth is certainly like about 18 inches or so the fruit are always falling within a foot or so and that is really keeping the quality in my opinion close to acceptable level it's about 10% for some varieties right now 10% cruising at cuts and for others it's still relatively higher but also as I mentioned earlier for example gala you keep sacking and they don't want to fall off versus there are other like envy and jazz they are relatively easy to move from the tree which is kind of sacking and also keep the quality at acceptable level or close to acceptable level this time and we are continuing to advance so that's another alternative approach and thinking these are not competitive technologies, picking, placing with robot versus this kind of targeted second catch they are suitable in certain situations certain crop varieties and I think they can go in a complementary way in the future we're also developing robotic solutions for strawberry harvesting in collaboration with some of the other researchers from other states as you can see here the goal here is to have relatively smaller modular machines that can pick and and fill a bucket or even carry those buckets outside of the field but rather than having a big machine we would like to have relatively small machines and have them work together this has been tested in Florida as I speak and we are providing artificial intelligence and other supports for this machine to work and continuing to advance and improve this technology and potentially commercialize in the future now going more towards what to do after we have this fruit harvested and those beans and dinners filled this is the project led by Dr. C. Wang again sitting behind there in the audience we have been working our center has been working in this kind of what we call an automated bean handling system also called bin dove something that follows us and does the thing for us here is an empty bin that would otherwise be full if it was harvesting season and then this robot would go grab it and pull it and bring it outside of the rows and help load them onto trucks these are research efforts at WSU and a few other examples from other research programs around the world but then in recent years they have been a lot of interest from venture capitalists and private startups and even established bigger agricultural agri tech companies to bring these kinds of robotic solutions into commercialization for example, acquisition of Blue River Technology by John Beer a couple of years ago for some 450 million dollars or so so as an example of the interest level and showing some YouTube videos of a couple of companies are putting a lot of efforts in picking apples or other similarly step in size fruit crops around the world these are publicly available videos so you can watch them on YouTube as well and just borrowing from a direct source even to the public I was asking the CEOs or the top level management of these companies a video that they would like to share one of these companies is called Robotics Plus out of New Zealand similar technologies in terms of vision system, deep learning and all of that then they're putting several robotic manipulators or arms and different kinds of hands together to pick kiwi and I think they're also trying apple picking it's kind of similar technology Harvest Crew is a company down in Florida as I mentioned earlier one of my students is a leading roboticist in this company right now trying to develop and commercialize a robotic a strawberry picking machine, it's a big machine a lot of arms and hands working simultaneously and I think they're really close to commercializing they may already be picking some fruit commercially as a service Bond and Robotics is a company or was a company focusing really heavily and picking fruit and they tested the machine a lot in the state of Washington in the last four or five years recently they stopped working in this area and I think the IP has been taken by another company and they're trying to revive this and continue to advance this technology but when it comes to apple picking the mention earlier FF Robotics and this company or this technology are the two that are most advanced and I think the closest to commercialize this this is table aerobics from Israel a different mobility style for picking instead of ground robots now we're using buying robots vision system again with the state pretty much the same taking images using deep learning best image processing finding where they are locating them but then picking is being conducted with these kinds of buying robots not enough what I mean by not enough is that well we're making a lot of progress in robotic picking I think we're closer than ever in solving my dream of reducing labor use and picking different kinds of fruits really back picking or you're trying to open down the ladder with 40 pounds of fruit in the state of Washington we harvest some 18 billion apples a year there is this 18 billion motions of human hand a lot of repetitive motion we're getting closer to solve that but that's not enough because how labor is used in orchard operations as you can see in the winter we have pruning and simplifying it really heavily but just provide some concept a little bit after pruning is over some overlap there there is a kind of a narrower bell curve of cleaning and some other operations when I said cleaning it is both flour cleaning and green fruit cleaning labor use is maybe slightly taller and narrower Jeff is here I think he has a better idea about this curve harvesting is the tallest one and runs for about 2 to 3 months with robotic picking technology this tallest curve would go down we may have maybe 20% or 10% of the labor for that particular operation but then other peaks are still there so that's why it is not enough to just pick and we have to do other things so that we have a constant use demand of labor throughout the growing seasons and we have a year long employment for the seasonal workers but at a lower level and that's why at Washington University we're not only focusing on picking but also creating canopy so that it could be robotic the canopy is already a robotic picking one so we have a lot of labor in training trees pruning branches cleaning flour, cleaning green fruit and even pollinating these flowers so that we have only right amount of fruit at right location being pollinated and set leading to a completely autonomous operation in the future that allows fruit to grow in the best places in the field and we are working in many very different aspects of these canopy and crop management technologies but this past winter and spring we were testing these machines first time in the field and I would say with this kind of technology this is first time for something like what we're doing three different machines running here I don't know if I'm kind of making it easy but similar mechanisms in terms of arm and hands different brain, slightly different brain cameras are same but the way images are analyzed are slightly different in the factor of the hand is different between operations because for pruning we have a cutting seed there, cleaning we have a brush for pollination we have a spray nozzle they share a lot of technology but there are certain differences and this is the way we're trying to go and all kinds of operations are automated but with a machine that could function to perform multiple operations or a multi-purpose machine and that's one way I think we could also improve the commercial biology of these machines so with that I'll take just another minute or two here challenges and directions we're making a lot of progress in picking apples as I said we're closer than ever in making them commercially viable but it's still achieving really high efficiency is a huge challenge even for the modern authors that we have in Washington and other parts of the world I think we're roughly with these kinds of machines that we saw at most maybe 75% of fruit and still 25% 20% of fruit behind branches or maybe they're growing in the cluster it's very difficult for these robots to pick so there needs to be some human robot collaboration to make sure it works at least in the starting conventional authors I don't think these machines are very good yet because they push bigger canopies, fruit being inside it's not easy to go get them at least at a reasonable speed and cost we still face challenges with the speed complexity and cost we're taking several seconds to perform these kinds of operations some of these companies are claiming they can do one foot per second but I think there is still room for improvement in complexity cost and speed fruit quality for certain kind of technologies as a second catch we need to continue to improve the impact on fruit and minimize the damage some of the opportunities are added soft robotics soft hands certainly but also soft arm that we're looking at at Washington State University they could be really fast and they could be really affordable compared to for example some of the arms we saw here they may cost 30-40 thousand dollars some of the commercially some of the other hands that are being used in these commercial ready products or those products that we're trying to commercialize it may cost like 5-10 thousand but we're looking at soft hands that make us just a thousand dollars so there are some of those improvements looking at modular technologies and multi-purpose machines human machine collaboration as I mentioned earlier there are some of the collaborative approaches so that these trees are being improved for robotic operations while the engineering solutions are also being improved together as a system just as an example here is this kind of accessible modular technology examples when I say technology it's not just machines but also vertical technologies that bring these trees the type that we like and cell phone based and small robotic solutions all work together as accessible and modular technologies finally I would like to just provide this kind of share this concept of what I call a control center human type physical system where field operations is now in offices more than in the field we have remote supervision, remote operation using artificial intelligence 3D sensing virtual and argumented reality so that we can avoid a dangerous working situations in the field but also provide opportunities for people who may not otherwise be able to work in the field climbing up and down those ladders with 40 pounds of food so this is another concept we're looking at finally this is my last slide and there is my contact information there finally I would like to share one new concept our center is trying to pursue Dr. Sindrang our director is there who has been leading this so far but I'm really closely involved is robotic solutions become more commonplace in the future we anticipate that in the next 10-15 years we start to see a lot of these kinds of robots working in specialty crops and other crops so like tractor test laboratory in Nebraska maybe there are others in the world I'm not sure even every tractor that is produced today has to go through a testing laboratory and come up with a report a standardized report before it could be sold we would like to come up with a similar testing laboratory robotic system testing laboratory at C-PASS to serve the robotic agricultural systems of future Nebraska testing lab was created some 100 years ago and they're doing so great now after 100 years I think would be the next similar example in this space if we start today and get some support and there has been some discussion already at college level but again I'm just sharing that with all the dignitaries our leadership here we'll be continuing to push that envelope and hopefully we create this lab that will serve the nation and the world for next 100 years with that thank you very much Zilford we're just a little bit behind on our time but I thought we would offer the opportunity to ask one or two questions and I can bring the microphone to you any questions online next we will move on to innovation in dairy technologies and we're pleased to have Dr. Marcos Marcos and he's an assistant professor in animal science he specializes in feed evaluation management strategies nutrient requirements and the economics and the operations thank you Zilford for the invitation for the introduction I'll have a different approach here I hope way more on labor and how is the interaction between the dairy industry and labor, labor savings or labor in general this is not working so the world needs a lot more food and how is actually labor playing a role in that we're still trying to figure out so analog technologies have been changing agriculture for centuries so just an example of how many hours we would need for acre to 38 hours in the 1900s by 1960s about 10 hours I guess now it's about half of that or maybe less than half of that per acre so actually we are using less and less and less labor in the agriculture I will tell you that from the dairy industry that's completely the opposite or it's a different story, not completely the opposite but it is a different story so everything you see in the agriculture and every time that you look at the agriculture look at the last presentation we are replacing our labor by robots, maybe in the dairy industry we have something else to say so during the later half of 20 centres of information to inform how certain commodities and varieties were grown and processed along with market changes with market changes in labor so we all know that the US depended a lot of the Central American labor currently about 75% of our labor of farm workers are migrant laborers or off migrant laborers that is a lot however there is a lot of recent limitations in immigration a lot of new restrictions and we all know that is for the following 2030 50 years that's going to change or continue to change we all know that automation plays a huge part a huge role in this but we also have another problem which I highlight here which is the high turn over rates of labor caused by injury illness but in the dairy industry whenever you go every farmer you ask they always complain about high turn over laborers in the dairy industry always they always complain I also lead their challenging formal department we visit several farms and they all say you want to fix my problem with heat stress with my nutrition I want a solution for my labor problem and the students and even us they answer that question it's really really hard we discuss that a lot within the industry, within farmers within even the students it's really hard to keep labor in a very low rate in the dairy industry remember that the dairy workers or the mucus they have to wake up very early in the morning it's very intense labor it's really really hard if you've seen a mucer working in a mucing parlor it's really really really fast really tiresome work so it is a very hard job to do for sure also the culture of labor is gradually aging so in the past it was something almost natural if you were a son or a daughter of a mucer of a dairy man they don't want that anymore they don't want to wake up at 4 or 3 a.m. in the morning to mute their cows just don't want it the new generation they are avoiding this at maximum replacing this if I can say so the old generation it's been a huge problem in the dairy industry so we're going to continue with that but this is typically the losses by increasing wages they try to increase wages but remember probably dairy is one of the agriculture project that works in a very tiny margin it's really hard for them to increase wages sometimes reducing output if you don't have enough labor force to milk a thousand cows maybe less relocating their operation that's occurring in California they're all moving towards Idaho or Texas those are the main states it's almost impossible to milk cows in California if you don't have 10,000 cows or so so what we call smaller operations they're all moving mainly toward Idaho and Texas going out of business that's for sure we know that this is happening but mostly there's a typo here a farm labor supply could incentivate their farmers to invest in labor-saving technologies so they are moving towards automation is that good or bad we'll see we'll try to see it by the end of the talk so right now or at least a few years ago we were in a situation where actually the adoption of labor-saving technologies is not only an option but also a need they need that of course with new technology there's new opportunities I'll try to show you that there's a lot of new data out there because of these new technologies being implemented in the farm however there are like signs of it as well so the new scenario is the application of automation technology is a growing trend in the livestock industry plays an important role in the future prospect so mostly identification, report feeding that's not really so much used right now or completely automated feeding but in the past we used by hand feeding now we'll have automatic systems mucing that probably most of you have been thinking about it when you think about automation in the area you think about robots right we'll talk about those later detection of animal behavior and many other farm operations can be done so I will show you a few of them more but when I talk about automation I'm not talking only about robot mucing but specifically for any AMS or a committed mucing system reduced labor demand, there are social circumstance for the dairy farmers especially because not always you have to wake up at 4 or 5 am to muc your cows only if you get an alarm they will let you know that you have to wake up and go there and check your cows there's something going on with that cow in the past in every mastitis case in a farm there will be an alarm now the robots are much better so they will automatically muc that cow separated from the bulk tank separate that muc and then maybe during the afternoon muc or during the other muc you start trading that cow for mastitis you could do improvement in animal health and well-being because that robot also traces how healthy that cow is so usually whenever the cow is sick she will decrease her number of steps per day for instance to make it easier for you to understand so with that there's an alarm that will tell you that cow might or might not be sick but you can go there and check or should go there and check that cow so you actually end up identifying diseases in earlier stages whenever you have a commotion in the farm and in recent muc there are still debates the research does not tell you that the industry does actually the ones who are selling the robots of course they will tell you that you will increase muc production but all the research let's say both cows are both system side by side with ideal management they don't show an increase in muc production but anyways this will be out there you will see some of that so actually what we need to understand with the automation is that we are not only switching from a need but we are switching from a scenario where automation is a solution for labor issues to try to find benefits from automation order than labor so when I'm trying to say that so in the dairy industry labor is probably not the access of what is going to happen with the labor or with the people working for the dairy industry actually we still lack labor in the dairy industry we need more actually automation in agriculture and other livestock systems are good because they will move into the dairy system most of the cases most of the farms are abandoned fought so if we are talking about small farms like in the northeast of the country like 120 200 cows maybe that is a problem if you replace if you put 2, 3 or 4 robots you really don't need labor because the family can do everything else so easily you have 2 or 3 people in the family working for that dairy everything you need in the farm visit several farms in Europe or even here in the US they basically is just the family working so in this case yes you won't need your staff anymore the family will do all the business however here in the west or farms they don't have 200 cows they have 2,000 cows 20,000 cows in this case there is an opportunity and if you implement 10, 15 robots what you are going to do with all the labor while there is a lot else to do in a dairy farm other than milking cows and that is something that people that are not from the dairy industry most of the time they don't understand the thing that adding the robots to the farm will actually replace all the labor that is in there that is actually not true and I will try to show you why with that that we are going to talk about so the dairy industry has undergone a profound summation moving towards an intensive life scale production unit which is the case of the west here in the US technology adoption in their units allows for higher mu-kills and lower per unit costs remember we have a very tight margin mainly for labor saving innovations the percentage of US dairy farms requires robots is expected to increase 20 to 30% annually for the foreseeable future mainly in the northeast of the country not in the west because they have smaller farms if you go to the east you will see a lot of robots being implemented over there in countries like Sweden Denmark they have about 50% of their farms already robots their farms are very closer to what the northeast has so it's a 1.6 billion industry already so it's a huge industry so I'm going to show you before we go to that discussion about labor back to the sculptural labor I'm going to show you like four or five examples there are just examples of automation and what we can gain out of those is something that are already being implemented in some farms for instance, Villa Hall already suggests they already installed cameras they can implement a body condition score system so the body condition score you evaluate how fat the cow is and for those who doesn't know the management of the dairy farm so the scale is from 1 to 5 and we always target in 3 if you have 2,000 cows you cannot go out there to the pens and check for a cow that's impossible however if you have an automated system that can identify the body condition score or every single cow every single day you can somewhat prepare a plan to improve that system that is very new technology we have a lot of problems with those because our cows are black and white and usually cameras they do understand or they need a contrast but not within the same animal if we have all white or all black it's going to be way easier so I do have a project with that a paper I published with that and we have like we spent like six months only preparing the program to identify that those stains are still a cow so they would like actually cut the cow for all the color so it's really hard to actually identify the cow but they're improving a lot and it's very very very common you go to a dairy farm and see either too many fat cows or too many thin cows most of the time they over fat then under fat cows so most of the time they are too fat so cows are too fat they lose production most of the problems are reproduction and if the cows don't reproduce they don't stay in the farm they are killed so we are also always talking about lifespan of a cow so we need to keep those cows longer in the farms also for humanitarian reasons and so forth but if they don't reproduce they don't get pregnant they don't stay in the farm so it improves the lifespan of the cows in the farm anyways we do have several technologies this needs to be improved some of them already been implemented for now they are kind of an extra depending on how much you're spending the first of all we'll give you this camera for free I know that Gia is producing a new one as well that is quite can be a fight pain in the future what is the problem with body condition score you need to train your style and even with high educated students it's hard to train them to identify good body condition score imagine with farm labor that don't most of them don't speak English and they are super tired waking up 3 a.m. 4 a.m. in the morning they are feeding the cows the cows are dead look at that cow I'll check on that cow later and that person will never come back to that pack whenever you have an automated system that will raise an alarm to the farmer you have this pan that 50% of their cows are under the ideal body condition score you need to check what is going on with that pan so that's something that we need to make sure as a better alternative we all know body condition score that is for sure the most important management tool in a dairy farm and they are not well or properly used in a farm we don't have a well trained labor to do so that's the best management management tool in a dairy farm for sure not the cameras but the body condition score mentioned visual system system like this that can actually trace your cow identify if the cow is eating or not so you could potentially check every single pan if you put cameras over there they will identify the cow and identify if she is eating or not and raise an alarm there is a sick cow in that pan she is not eating and so forth again new technology she could also identify a lame cow if she is walking properly or not if she is taking her back or so forth there is something new as well mastitis detection installing cameras in the milking parlor according to the other temperature you can clearly see in the graph here that there is something different with that cow and then again an alarm could come to the farmers cell phone and then the cell phone could check with the labor if that is actually if some management was done with that cow parapsitis control especially for organic farms for instance there is a huge problem ticks in hosting cows there are cameras that can identify that you cross some sort of boundaries or limits of number of ticks that animal has or not especially in grazing systems again the obstacles will be the problems of black and white cow in a Jersey cow this will work much better than hosting for them detection of astros that has been used for several years depending on how many steps on how agitated the cow is daily they will identify the cows in heat you go there 12 hours after heat detection that cow that's a lot to use rumen as well rumination it's being used a lot we can use pedometers for that or colors so with colors we can also identify rumenations and so forth also the calf feeding development automatic feeders that's a huge problem in a farm there is an ideal process that you have to go with the calf you should increase mucin take after certain age you should decrease slowly decrease mucin take so the calf should increase concentrating take that might be easy with 10 calves but with 10,000 calves that is almost impossible so in the end you do a group to which is not really on the humanitarian side of raising those calves and so forth so automation plays an important role in terms of how do we raise our calves in the farm there's a lot of good things about automatic feeders for calves and I already talked about automated mucin system and again they will replace the mucers and you have an automated system although for robots each robot can deal with only 60 cows 60, 70 cows at most remember if you have 10,000 cows you can make the calculations how many robots you need $150,000 per robot plus about $150,000 of renovations you have to do in the farm to install that robot so it's hugely expensive but that's not what I want to discuss my last like two or three minutes it's like what will you do with that labor if you're implementing all those innovations in a farm it means that maybe you don't need that labor or that staff anymore so actually there's several things you're going to do every farm you go I'm a nutritionist I'm a dairy nutritionist and I think that is like impressive how they can have like 10,000 cows on one diet for 10,000 cows there's the I'm sort of the most absurd thing in a dairy farm they're losing money but there's the justification for not doing that labor that's their justification I don't have the labor well but it's just like a machine you can program your diet nowadays you program your diet in a truck in a TMR wagon truck and the TMR wagon truck will load whatever you want it oh but my labor is not trained to do that I cannot train my labor to program the computer and so forth there's a big problem they are flooding money out of the sink by doing one diet for 10,000 cows and I'll tell them that the great majority of farm teams in the US do that what else? check body condition score metritis check old farm studies health check all those amazing technologies that we develop here in the university and research centers they're not being applied in the farm because they don't have the people to do that either they don't have enough people or the people are not well trained they are not trained enough to do that so there's a huge opportunity also those new technologies generate hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of data per day they have absolutely no idea what to do with that thing the company goes to the farm and says you're going to see this you're going to see that you're going to have this and that information the farmer the great majority of the dairy men have no idea of what to do with that data what we suggest is we need to relocate all those people that were doing something else and we need to train them and the University and Washington State and other land grain universities to train these new people so we need to train those for this new perspective so all the jobs they could do in the farms so for sure in dairy farms especially big dairy farms automation is a solution for lack of labor but it's an opportunity for training for instance mucers they're not be mucing anymore but what can they do instead so we're going to train them to do some other tasks just to remind you a couple of slides real quick we had a problem with overflow of labor and that only ended in November 2020 so the Washington Air Federation was dealing with this huge lawsuit against the dairy farm here in Washington because they were all overflowed with workers with labor labor overflowed with time with work so they have to deal with that if they don't have enough labor automation we'll make them work a little less or within their limits or within what they should work so forth so they should not work over time so some future perspective technologies affect management labor and production the number of tears has increased substantially while the average herd size has increased consequently more the areas depend on higher labor so this also has remarked that the field of dairy technology despite the increase is just in infancy so we will have more technology going on that does not mean that we're going to throw all those people in the streets no dairy can absorb the dairy industry can absorb this new technology for sure at least for a while they predict the future characterized by precision dairy farming in which farmers, personnel advisors use sensor derived data to determine best practice on the farm improved data collection and analysis could raise efficiency and profitability but proper research training and skill acquisition this is the most important part the labor is there but they don't know how to do they need us, okay so 500 large, my last slide the modern global agriculture industry is more efficient than any time in the past labor-saving technology exhibits a considerable impact on labor demand supply and therefore usually have significant policy implications from a policy perspective mechanization technology might lead to decrease demand for labor that's in agriculture probably not in dairy for the following years considered the impact on economic agents labor-saving technology are adopted because they can potentially increase revenues of labor in fields however to ensure adopters labor-saving must be economically viable the labor availability appears to be decreasing the demand for labor has remained relatively constant with 1 million workers at the annual average since 2007 nonetheless a widespread shortage of agricultural labor has not yet happened and lastly labor-saving labor-enhancing technology appears besides mitigation labor-saving technology could benefit such as improvement of working conditions okay sorry about the time but thank you to one or two questions if there's any questions from the audience so you mentioned about the retraining of the workforce for new scale sites so I guess this goes back to President Schultz comments the land grant system and extension are we prepared to change the methods of teaching and training for that workforce redevelopment my opinion is that we are prepared because let me go out maybe not because we need to speak Spanish that's the first thing right we need to speak Spanish 75% of our labor force maybe more but other than that I think we do have the knowledge when we do have the tools to teach them we need to fight the resistance from them they will have some resistance not only from the farmer but also from the labor force sometimes they are afraid of new technology as we were sometimes in the past it's also going to have to be placed if you aren't going to come to our camp and go to farm yeah that's for sure we have to go to the farm and this kind of thing knowledge wise I think we are we do have the technology we need to work on the language limitations we have and again yes for sure we need to travel to the places and to get there and to cross that resistance that they have linked to the university going there and teach them how to do it and I think we are next up I'm very pleased to welcome Professor David Silverman from the University of California Berkeley David holds the Robinson chair in agricultural and resource economics at Berkeley his expertise is in agricultural and environmental policy water marketing risk management and especially the economics of innovation and biotechnology and biofuels and David was the 2019 recipient of the Wolf Prize in Agriculture and he is a member of the National Academies of Sciences welcome David it's a great pleasure to be here thanks to the committee for inviting me and it was really really amazing to hear the lectures and to think about actually the big progress that you made I actually picked apples and fell from trees so and also and milk cows and maybe tell you a little episode that can tell you the economics when I was in Israel in the 1960s we were picking apples and there was a label chosen so people developed a drought machine to pick apples and then they had the 6th day war and then suddenly they have cheap label and suddenly everything stopped to some extent a label shorted this really after if I look at my talk I try to speak a little bit about concepts that economics have and emphasize some of the lessons of the past and then see what happens in the future but generally there are several basic concepts in economics that are really important especially when we discuss a lot of the issues that are associated with economics the first concept is the issue of industry innovation generally scarcity leads to develop new technology it's a combination of scarcity and new scientific knowledge when you have this combination finally you have new technologies now in order that it will be adopted you need to have a perception of profitability it's not enough to have a technology to be adopted and to be profitable and to choose elements knowledge in human capital and entrepreneurial and entrepreneurial spirit and credit so a lot of time people have new technologies I really enjoy don't enjoy it actually every time I go to international organization you have people that say we have these technologies why not want to adopt it it's not that the farmer is stupid you don't develop a supply chain and marketing you can use it so you really need it and therefore if not enough technology you need to supply chain all the way from the innovation to the farmers now the other thing is about adoption there is a lot of people include many economies that think that adoption is about imitation that's not true there are several elements of adoption first is awareness you need to know that technology exists and awareness is in many ways commercial extensions world of mouth but it's only awareness then you have assessment and assessment is important every person the smartest and the dumbest assess is it good for me and the number one thing that people ask does the technology fit me it may be brilliant but if I don't know how to do it it won't work there was this lecture about what will happen to people that lose the job in the farm now we need and I speak about it now we need there are new jobs generally what we know from history the good thing about aging is that you retire I will retire soon because you have basically what happened you have to educate new generation of people that have new skill it's very very difficult to take a 50 year old guy that never used a computer and making a computer problem so to some extent one of the key elements is that you have to make sure that the technology is appropriate for person demographic is the biggest enemy of technology adoption the only thing that accelerates technology adoption is the crisis so to some extent you have to regularize when it comes to adoption you have awareness you have assessment, you have choice and then you have economic circumstances and a lot of time crisis, trigger change opportunity trigger change opportunity generally maybe will be once served as effective as crisis so to some extent these are things that are important why? because a lot of time you need to have a back load of technologies so they will be available when the crisis occurs I didn't give a talk about repurigation but I study irrigation in the United States repurigation generally hardly adopted but every time you have a crisis another sector enter to be seen so to some extent the thing about innovation you need to have a back load of innovation all the time and when the crisis occurs you need to have the sales force and the cleverness to be able to put them forward another thing is that farmers are atrogynous there is nothing like a representative farmer they are atrogynous in terms of age capacity in terms of interest so you realize that you always need to find who is the person that will adopt first and that is the problem because people say God we are in a democracy why don't you give everyone the opportunity in most cases very few farmers will be able to adopt technology and then it goes down the line for people that really are interested in technology to others the other thing that is important not all the technologies are adopted but all the farmers sometimes small farmers can survive if you have companies that rent the technology so you can maintain a diverse agriculture if at the same time you have some people that own machine and some people that develop machine that basically are empty to others so to some extent the fact that you have a machine that have element of economic of scale is not a problem if you have agents that rent the machine if you look at these two if you have combined work shared by many I don't know a lot of farmers in California that have laser leveling but almost every farmer use it because they want so to some extent you really need to understand it and then there is an element of learning by doing the key element is companies that improve the technology by learning by doing and farmers improve the technology by learning by using so it's a dynamic game it is moving all the time and that is important later on I'm not thinking about the land grant college and it's very important to have good product support it's not enough to produce a good product, you need to have the marketing and you need to have the supply plan and a lot of time when we look at the university we forget that you really depend on the supply plan you need to educate people that will be working and knowing how to work with consumers you need to develop good logistics that people feel good about adopting the technology no one will adopt technology if he knows that no one will support so what are the basic features of US agriculture I really see that the key element of US agriculture has been the land grant college and what are called educational industrial complex that is really unique here what do you mean by the educational industrial complex people make inventions then they move to start up then they move to start up the company there is this movement all the time now you have a lot of people say it's impure that scientists are getting in business it's even less impure that they are not in business almost all the big innovation started when the researcher that was in academic university moved all the way and started the company and they moved it forward directly or indirectly and I think we are explicit about it an advanced economy with infrastructure and it's very important that we will have the web system and the internet will be developed, farmers are ambitious and the government is very important supportive government is not partial supportive government means support for research support for education developing very good primary and high school education these are very very important more than a bicycle if you look at California agriculture and Washington agriculture they survive very well without subsidies forever maybe in wheat you need some sort of intervention but the key role of the government at least in my view is to provide the infrastructure of human capital to develop agriculture now I move very fast in the history of U.S. agriculture there were about three a period one was a settlement from 1750 to 1819 people reached the Washington state as they go they cannot farm the ocean so what happened we moved to intensification and intensification was really crucial because an intensification benefited from the land grant college if you look at the 20th century it moved immensely the other thing is sustainability the 21st century people care about sustainability about climate change about natural resources based and and look at it globally so what happened we have innovations that we have we Brazil, Argentina feed the world we have high capital intensity we still have environmental side effects but also agriculture is moving from commodities to differentiated products and we really cannot speak about agriculture we can speak about ugly food supply chain to me the key my discipline and most of the art school that we don't think about the supply chain we think about farming they are a small part of it and in many ways the farming itself becomes very simple and simple and simple still you don't need human but the system itself the supply chain is complex and what I will mention to me this can be the golden era of the ugly food system because agriculture can move to something that can cause the bioeconomy if it would be up to me if I was dean I am 75 and I never wanted the job but if I was dean what I would do I would claim the name of the school from school of agriculture and national schools of the bioeconomy because agriculture is much more than producing food this climate chain and food security and non-renewable resources we can do much more and we have incredible capacity in bioeconomy we have to utilize it now let's go a little bit about the west what happened in the west so in the west you have two elements back in washington state you have areas where they live they grow wheat and then you have fruit and vegetables basically provided the man innovations led to mechanized agriculture then there was a crop breeding farm size increases basically what happened is farm size increases and farmers today especially in feed crop in the mid-west they may be complaining but they are doing well to me the main reason to keep ag policies today especially policies that support main crops like wheat etc is to maintain land prices and to me that's a nice objective for individuals that pay a campaign but it's not an objective outcome now we have to produce food we have to increase conductivity but we don't need land prices at the market determine the other thing is food and vegetables now the food and vegetables benefit from government activities from water projects now in the past until 1960 we have something called the Bracero program that brought people from Mexico and in the south you basically have a a situation of care crop that were mostly black so you have keep label and therefore fruit and vegetables wasn't very developed now the universities did an incredible job in terms of crop breeding and bio-breeding think about it we didn't know nothing one hundred fish years ago about growing fruit and vegetables in America people went all over the world and now we are the best in almond and grapes and who knows what and this is because of academic research that really took advantage of but surpassed what was done in Europe for many many years if you look at almond and olives another thing that of European we grow it much better and this is a huge achievement of the land grant system and the west becomes the center of many fruits and vegetables and it won't last performance but if you look at a U.S. honey cluster today we have two honey clusters you have the Midwest with the wheat that is basically more like Brazil or Ukraine or Russia or Australia and then you have Florida and California and a little bit of Michigan and about five pictures in Georgia and that are totally different as they work with Israel and Australia and some countries in Europe and you have two systems that are different but have a lot of same in common the land grant system gave them a lot of power so what happened in the 1960s suddenly the Brazil program disappeared one reason they disappeared was besides the political upheaval is the cotton harvester is a huge invention once it entered suddenly you really didn't need a lot of helicopter and the sauce so you started to have the great migration and as the Brazil program was abolished what happened the first thing after the Brazil program was abolished people invented the tomato harvester it was a controversy but suddenly you moved to automation you start having unionization and you have cold storage even though we lost labor this was the golden era of agriculture in the west because we started to make if you go and look at us and tomatoes and other crops they move from a very primitive system to more advanced system and we start exporting stuff everywhere other things metal bromide but all together the west becomes a center of food and vegetables in this period despite the fact that we lost labor because what happened labor you become a permanent professional worker on the farm you start having consultants for personal control of irrigation etc. and then labor was provided by contractors and it continued till these days now from the 1990 to 2000 there was another round with China growing demand for food increase demand for unique product characteristics again prepackaged salads which is a huge industry suddenly increase the value of agriculture and make agriculture much much more interesting digitization that driven by supplier and buyer more contracting and automation so we really now move to a system that is totally different it's not that you have a lot of market and small farmers and the market sell to a farmer market you really have integrated supply chain that is not reflected in the way we think and speak at the universities we really have a system that whatever Walmart whoever sells whoever is a seller can be Walmart or boutique the farmer is producing for some sort of demand and this is also in Europe now you have a lot of normal sociologists and activists and it is terrible but this is the world, this is the way computer operate, this is the way that every other industry operate in this world you don't want to be working and producing air mutiny product you want to have a dispensated product you have to think differently about agriculture and it's entering to the 21st century and you have the opportunity and one of the biggest things that we have is the monetized perspective about agriculture among activists they don't know the difference between a cow and a chicken and they will tell you okay it has to be competitive small farm, this is very nice if you want to take your kid to pet a chicken, I did it too this is my kid, I love it but if you really look at modern agriculture it's a different era and it actually can be earlier and can solve a lot of problems and this is the big test for agriculture now while the medical system to some extent succeeded and some extent failed when it comes to the pandemic I think altogether agriculture did quite well because the pressure was really incredible the farm they suffer from restriction of labor from lack of labor in the food sector in particular it was a huge problem people don't come to the shop to the store what happened, retailers something was a big shift 40% of the food in America goes to the institutes, restaurants school, suddenly you move everything as to move to supermarket the only crisis we have was the toilet paper crisis we have a little bit of crisis but altogether this was the order of magnitude crisis that was relatively low look what happened in California when you have a fire somewhere suddenly you have a shutdown of all the electricity the food system not only in the US globally functioned relatively quite well despite of some food problems now what happened is that the COVID globally incredible defuse the food comments I don't think about the US it's India, in Mexico in India suddenly suddenly almost a lot of stuff is automated of course in China there was 400% increase in online orders because people cannot leave the home all over the world you saw it business to business e-commerce in agriculture increased now one problem was that big companies need better than small companies especially companies that were prepared companies didn't realize it was a crisis like Walmart did very well other companies didn't realize it was a crisis didn't realize it was a crisis but the idea that I mentioned before have the infrastructure be ready when the crisis is okay your response really proved itself in the pandemic now the interesting thing what happened in the restaurant the restaurant that shifted to take out if you could hotel suddenly realized that they need to have permanent residence in the hotel if you look at something in the hotel a lot of hotels decided okay from now on we have guests and we try to develop some elements from other world so our heat can cooperate but we have to look at the supply chain in general and we can have this thing now people call it pivoting what is pivoting if you have a supply chain that you have some that goes apple, it goes to the processor from the processor it goes to the retailer and the consumer suddenly you have a situation that some processor will go directly to the retailer some retailer will go directly to the consumer you have Uber food you develop all these adaptations and to me we need to understand it it's part of agriculture as well as everything else we are moving to serve the consumers I know we need to study all over the world and for Israel some farmers who take a truck go to a neighborhood and basically send emails to all the people in the neighborhood I come with a truck and I have it it happens in many other countries so people develop new mechanism of market and things that I think will stay there together so I have several examples there is a company in I think in South Carolina there is basically a grocery startup that is a dry store supermarket some farmers in Illinois move from restaurant to people flawlessly so ability to adjust and to use computers to recognize Ukraine it was really cool some people mostly did it well of course some people didn't do it as well but I think that this is something that is very very important so what happened is that the pandemic really changed the way that we think about farming in America and think about what we do in our food in America and this part of the thing that all together it caused incredible effect on food security the damage food security was much less than the damage on education and I think that the system responded quite well because of entrepreneurship because of ability and in countries that you didn't have the capacity to deal with the capacity to deal with take advantage of the internet infrastructure of the internet of the human capital it didn't work as well as in other countries so in India it worked very well because they have some of the skill and in other countries it didn't work as well but Brazil for example but all together I think that we realize our crisis for the problem so where we are now now we have a situation number one that minimum demand is going up there are workers there is domestic and international there is aging now at the same time precision enters to the world I was working on Brazilian farming 30 years ago I started writing papers and proceeded with three elements to be able to monitor to evaluate and implement monitoring was developed 30 years ago with remote sensing but having a lot of data is not enough you need to do something about it so what you do you have artificial intelligence you have all these technologies and you need there but even if you have a solution are you implementing so there were a lot of failure in the US to introduce precision farming because the implementation tool wasn't there but now we have drones now we have much more to locating and to send them there and so to some extent I think that we really see that precision systems have a cut on one end and labor is expensive on the other end we have all the elements of precision are really increasing and they are generally the result of other industries the result of cell phone and the competition but we have the best camera and a lot of defense industry draw me with that and so we learn from other industries about how to prepare for precision ag and I think it will be big another thing is that financing being presented in ag investment they realize that there are some fundamental issues high labor cost drawing demand in the future and what happen is that we will have this type of revolution we want it or not and it's a role of the university to work with industry and to develop this technology now in California there was a big reluctance to do agricultural engineering because of the tomato harvest I don't know if you are aware of it but in all of the countries people say go to university to displace labor I don't think that we have this feeling in 1980 2000 we don't have this feeling people are older they don't want to work in the field and farm workers that migrate from Mexico they don't want to be farm workers people come from Mexico or other countries they want to work in the city there is altogether some fundamental labor shortage because population in the US get older there is more need there is a good opportunity for agriculture and I think the demand wouldn't be for people to harvest apples we need to have demand for livestock and this is the opportunity for agriculture in two ways first I am a big believer in life long learning developed mechanism that we don't think only until 23 years old we have developed courses that are 2, 3, 5, 6 months that we train and we work in companies to train farm workers it was a very nice thing to do all the farm workers will have a job we will train them are we capable to train them do we know in the university how to work with older people we are working basically with kids we have dormitories and fraternities and football and all this other thing that 90% is allowing you to grow up but without are we ready to take 30-40 year old people with three kids this is a huge challenge of the land transition to develop extension that really tried to develop new life skills when people basically old skills don't work and take it into account at 20 in age this is a huge challenge for social sciences don't worry about farming it's important about farming studying adoption and a lot of people don't have money to study to do all this experiment but the key element is deal with older people now the other thing if you look at the future we have climate change this is the biggest problem so to me this would be the biggest error of agriculture and bioeconomy and now the key point is that we have mechanical solutions that are great but we have even something bigger which is biotech if we don't take advantage of biotech we are in trouble because agriculture can produce three times or four times more than it produced not only here all over the world look at corn versus wheat look at generally speaking every time that people use biotech now we have crisper and then there will be a son and grandson of crisper but we have to convince the world to use this technology because we need to combine both the soil and the mechanical and the electronic with new biology because when everything agriculture is a life science if we don't take advantage of the biology we are doomed if we take advantage of the biology we can solve the problem of climate change agriculture can provide new biofuels because if we have better photosynthesis and nitrogen fixation which can be done with genetic engineering you can produce biofuels that will have an energy emission of coal not for small coal but for big car and truck so to me the big challenge is to really to educate the population and now we have a new government to educate them that organic is not and you can make money of it but it's basically an ornament that in my way is a waste of time and a destruction what you really need to do to have the education if you really want to deal with climate and sustainability of the world you really have to take advantage of the new biotechnology and combined information technology with biotechnology to basically triple the capacity of agriculture to provide more income to the rural sector and I think to make all of us happy David Zilberman any questions online or check so great job lots of challenges did a good summary we'll talk about some of that stuff this afternoon but so is there a new paradigm now for our culture and you kind of tease that my comments this afternoon will be a paradigm for the food and ag systems and I like your idea of the bioeconomy because it's not just food but how last statement there land grant systems reinvent I guess I'm showing my age but I think we've had re-eventing the land grant system every decade for the last 30 or 40 years so why now and how do we implement that tell you two minutes if I look at it the land grant all the time because it's a good thing from society that less and less people work in agriculture so we cleaned it from agriculture to natural resources and environment etc but if you look at it we went down because the value of agriculture went down now the value of agriculture goes up because we can produce biofuel we can use chemical we can use pharmaceutical basically what happened is that now we have to move to this bioeconomy thing because agriculture is not about protecting the environment or about natural resources that was very that was really nice basically about aging trees or liking trees it's about producing materials that cannot be produced not big work about sequestration carbons through soil management about changing in policies that allow you to deal with climate change so to me this is a big change instead of going down you go up so this element of the bioeconomy means that we care about food we care about fuel we care about the environment we care about climate change we care about food security agriculture is much more than food and the thing once you realize it and it's a huge thing because you remember when we had 2008 and people start arguing about biofuel people think God don't produce biofuel there is food security people now that was the best thing that happened to agriculture because productivity went up and people in developing countries became better off so we really said we can do more now the biggest problem that we had in agriculture is lack of demand how much food can you eat now the demand is growing because we can move from relying on oil we basically borrowed from the dinosaur or wherever oil for about 150 years it's a problem now we can use our knowledge biology to develop a renewable system so if you look at bioeconomy renewability agriculture is more than food it's a totally different paradigm and the land grant system can approach and say God we can work with the medical school because we can produce medicine we can work with mining engineering because instead of mining you can produce it on the trees and we can do studies that show why biofuel by nature is better than fossil fuel because biofuel with R&D if the productivity is going down the greenhouse gas of biofuel goes down if goes up the greenhouse a meeting of biofuel goes down so I think it's a really new paradigm that we should really emphasize and it generates much better jobs and much more interesting jobs and we locate a lot of them in the rural area so to me that that's a big difference well thank you so much we are a little behind so I was going to give us a 15 minute break but maybe a 7 minute break so we were supposed to come back at 1035 and maybe a couple minutes after that so please take a short break and we'll start we'll start again the next speaker is Leland Brenna who's a rural sociologist from Penn State University it turns out that he was planning to join us in person but he has a health issue in his family that he could not travel for so he will be our one speaker that is speaking remotely and we are moving his slides along from here I want to encourage everyone to put questions in the Q&A put questions in the chat box and then we can include those in the question so we can have at least one or two questions for each speaker so Leland are you on? I'm here can you hear me? yes can you hear me? yes is this not working? yes I'm here I'm here for this opportunity and for accommodating the fact I couldn't travel this week I appreciate that so I'll be discussing some issues related to automation and artificial intelligence in agriculture and from a sociological perspective they help me do some of the analysis that I'll be presenting here today next slide please next thank you so one of the more common perspectives on technology and technology adoption can often be referred to as technological determinism this refers to scientific discoveries and technological changes are inevitable and that they always contribute to social welfare there's a connection between technology and progress some of the related concepts that are often associated with that are scientism the notion that facts and values are distinct categories and that science is neutral science fits into the facts category and doesn't intersect with values neoclassical economics is often associated with this kind of perspective in the sense that there's an assumption that social welfare will emerge from the aggregation of individual level choices and then another related thing is ludicism this notion that the reason people resist technology has more to do with attitudinal perspectives not because of some sort of power dynamic or the fact that they might be dispossessed as a result of some sort of technology adoption now the counter example counter arguments to this these more dominant perspectives generally from a sociological perspective is that science and technology are social products they're not inevitable in some ways they're not naturally occurring that social context the research agendas and the applications of science and technology another is that power imbalances can be reinforced through technological change and furthermore that public policy and in particular land-grade university research can shape the trajectory of innovation I'll give some examples of this as we move forward next slide please one of the more prominent theories at least from rural sociology on this subject is from Bill Friedland and his graduate students Bill Friedland was a professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz for many many years in 1981 they did this published this interesting study on lettuce mechanization in the lettuce industry in California and what they sought labor dynamic so this included the power of the farmers and also the ability of labor to organize and the availability of labor and what they basically found is that mechanization in the lettuce industry was influenced by on the one hand the end of the guest worker program and also the end of the access then of cheap labor but it was also about as laborers began to organize the challenge became how can we for the growers was how can we undermine power of farm workers by incorporating mechanization into the process next slide please so I was on this involved in this USDA funded SCRI project that ran from about 2012 to 2017 Peter Hearst a horticulturist at Purdue University was the principal investigator on this but we had people plant breeders electrical engineers computer scientists all kinds of robotics experts from Purdue from Penn State from Washington State University and also some some people from the private sector who were developing some of these robotic pruning mechanisms for market so it was a rather large project and I was part of the social science team that was brought in to help understand how growers might or might not be interested in these robotic pruners so I'm just going to present a little bit of some of the findings that we had from this project next slide please so the research questions basically how does labor supply influence interest in adoption and then also how does farm or firm structure influence the interest in adoption next slide please so we interviewed 53 apple and wine grape growers across the country California, New York, Pennsylvania and Washington we also did a survey of over 2000 apple and wine grape growers in those four states we gathered the list from various grower organizations and county offices in the Department of Agriculture and so forth we had a pretty good response rate considering how difficult it is to do a survey with farmers these days it's an outstanding response rate and I'll just report on some of the bivariate and logistic regression of this analysis next slide please so just some of the variables we looked at were gender, the state geographic location farm type and the profitability of the farm various labor issues and then some attitudinal issues related to the farmers the apple and wine grape growers for example what was their perspective on manual pruning is that superior to way a machine could ever do the pruning as well as manual labor could next slide please one of our main outcome dummy variables we had a list of possible variables trying to evaluate whether people were interested in the technology so there's a scale of basically one to five strongly agree struck to strongly agree and the first one was I would never consider buying an automated pruner right that's kind of the first one and then we ask questions about what if there was a labor shortage what if it was about the same cost what if it was 20% cheaper and so forth and that gave us a kind of a scale to look at but if you just looked at I would never consider what we found was that it would be about 42 little over 42% disagreed with the statement that they would never consider it right so that means that they would consider it and so we just did some logistic progressions on these and some library analysis and I'll just run over that very briefly and then give kind of a concluding comments based on that next slide I would never consider buying and compared to some of the other things so let's see if they agree so what you see if the machine could do similar work for the at least 20% lower cost than hand labor right there's more interest in that of course because if you could save 20% why wouldn't you but you can see a kind of a breakdown there of what we're looking to buy okay next slide this is just trying to show you some of the variation in that okay next please this just shows the farm size variation what this is I think this is interesting is that the smallest farmers in the largest farmers are the least interested in the pruning the robotic pruning technology and as I show more information I'm going to show you the next slide so here's a breakdown for farm labor needs the first slide shows disagreement based on number of year-round employees on the farm so what this shows is that people with more year-round laborers were least likely least interested in the new in the robotic pruning technology on the other hand on the right side of the screen you see the number of seasonal employees on the farm growers with more seasonal employees are more interested in the pruning technology right so it's the kind of laborers they're dependent on influences the the relative interest in this technology we through the qualitative interviews we you know at first we couldn't quite make sense of this but then when we went back and looked at what some of the farmers were telling us in our qualitative interviews it made sense next slide please so as one person put it automation is more valuable when labor needs are high so as the one grower was explained to us their highest labor needs during the harvest season and furthermore that's the time and this was especially they had full-time employees on this particular farm so he said you know what I have all these employees on staff mainly because I need them during the high labor times like in harvest time so if you brought in a pruning device what are my workers that I hire full time to do when that pruning machine is working because I have to keep them around until the harvest time so they're talking about what they really need is you know mechanization during the whole production process or otherwise it's really not that important alright next slide please yeah this is kind of saying the same kind of thing we need mechanization through the whole production process otherwise what am I going to do with these workers during the times of the year when they're not working because of this pruning machine next slide please another was and this helps explain why the largest growers if you remember back a few slides the largest growers were not all that interested in the pruning technology that's because they could afford to hire labor at a higher cost this was one of the largest farms growers that we spoke to and his quotation to me was labor is not a problem for us we pay $3 above minimum wage and so if you're willing to pay for labor labor is not a problem for these guys and so the larger farmers can afford to pay more labor so it's more the middle range middle range and seasonal workers they're the ones looking more for robots and mechanization next slide please we also found some resistance to this this question had come up a couple of times with the earlier speakers too this one apple grower in California told me what would those families do if I automated he had I think he had something a small number about 10 full time workers maybe 7 or 8 full time and then a couple of other seasonal ones and from his perspective these are families that need work and what are they going to do so that was also some of the issues that came into their thinking next slide please so some of the some of the attitudinal questions we brought up was how would you characterize your perspective on pruning is it more an art or is it more of a science and by the way our apple pruning expert on this project found that it's very much a science and what is that could they with just a few cuts right because to do robotics they were pointing out it has to be as as few motions from the robot as possible to really make it work and they found that they could with just three cuts they could prune an apple tree very effectively that they could also prune it better than any individual person working on it so that's what their claim was anyway I'm not, I don't recall exactly how they measured it but basically they were finding that it is mostly an art or mostly a science and not an art but we kept this question in the survey because we wanted to get a sense of if farmers perspectives on the value of manual pruning would somehow influence their perspective next slide please so some other things was how important is manual labor for harvesting from high importance to low importance how important it is for dormant pruning and then also that art science consideration next slide please so then just very quickly to run through our logistic model here we included a number of these and the main outcome variable we used was I would consider buying an automated pruner if the machine could do similar quality work for the same cost or less than hand labor and it was very simple yes or no so that's our dummy variable that we use as the outcome variable which of these variables would help us somehow understand the likelihood that someone would say I would choose this this robotic pruner if these conditions are met next slide please so what we found was again if you recall back to that bivariate analysis the annual gross revenue and then the number of seasonal employees and the importance of manual labor were the key determinants of interest but you notice that the mid level right it's the those in the 100,000 to 249,000 are more interested than others it's the those who have 11 to 20 seasonal employees not more than 20 and not less than 11 and those who consider manual labor to be of moderate importance all right next slide please so yeah our basic finding is that these growers are interested in the robotic pruner if it is the same or lower cost than hand labor producers with an annual gross revenue between 100 and 250 so they're the ones more likely than those with more or less profitable producers and again if you recall back to the way some of the growers were describing it to us in our qualitative interviews they're the ones competing for that labor with the larger growers who can pay more or who have more stable workforces and so forth so what we found is yeah it's those more middle-range growers and the same with the seasonal employees those with kind of a mid level of seasonal employees are the ones most likely to be interested in the pruner and yeah so kind of related to this issue of the whole production process is what we began to see here okay next slide please so basic summary here is we mostly confirm we believe what Bill Friedland had laid out in his early 1980s work is that technology adoption isn't inevitable it was and it's not equally appealing to all growers and it's not just attitudinal in fact the attitudinal issues really had very little influence if any they had some in the bivariate but they didn't hold up in the logistic regression basically that interest in automation varied by economic structure and by labor needs and availability one of the earlier speakers was talking about you know the decline in Mexican labor in California we heard about this often from the growers in Washington and in California especially they bemoan the fact that the border control is becoming stricter just quite the contrary to what our political discourse is saying it's harder to cross the border now than it used to be and they bemoan the fact that it used to be easy for people to cross the border back and forth and they said what would happen would be some of the farmers from Mexico would come across the border work in their fields and then go back and harvest their own crops back in Mexico so they were getting these farmers going back and forth and how they wished that that was still the case. Another finding is that relationships are not linear in terms of size and scale of operation was the middle range that was more interested and it was more about seasonal labor versus long-term or year-round workers and the location of the operation didn't seem to matter. Next slide. I think it shows some of the complexity of how these technologies are evaluated by growers and others. I also want to talk about a new study that I'm a part of this is in Australia. The PIs on the project are Robert Sparrow, Christopher Mays and Chris DeGaling and they've brought me on as a consultant on their project by the Australian government and part of their project grew out of this pruning technology project that I was that I just described to you and however they're doing taking a slightly different approach they're looking at this more broadly than just growers and workers they're looking at community-wide impacts that some of these technologies present. Their plan is to use citizen juries for those of you not familiar with how citizen juries work is you bring together a group of people as if they're a jury for a trial and you present competing evidence foreign against and whatever and then see how the citizens interpret makes sense of the opportunities, the risks, the benefits and so forth. So they want to ask what are the social and ethical issues that stakeholders anticipate from the applications of AI robotics and agriculture they also want to look at some of the ethical issues that are raised by the applications of AI and robotics and agriculture and furthermore what do farmers, consumers and rural communities as those most affected by these technologies what do they want from AI and robotics when it comes to the use of those technologies in agriculture right so they're trying to get a much broader perspective of how to think about these the introduction of these new technologies. Next slide. So this is spare on Howard are part of that project too and they have this article that lays out some of these ethical concerns and so I just want to highlight a few of them so one is will it become another barrier to entry for small farmers right if AI and robotics create higher costs for small growers to get into to farming will it empower capital at the expense of labor also will since work is an important part of contributed justice will eliminating work lead to socially disengaged people and we often hear how automation or some sort of disruption in production will lead to some unemployment and then through training and education we can get them ready to take on new jobs but with that overlooks is that disruption can be quite painful for families and communities at during that time of transition and furthermore the work that we do has a big part of influencing how we see ourselves in relation to our society right that's the contributed justice part it's not ethics often discusses distributive justice how are the risks and benefits distributed contributed justice implies am I contributing to my society and this is where some of the social safety net issues don't take into consideration okay I might be given some unemployment insurance or other kinds of things that can help me make the transition but in the meantime I am not working for my society I'm not contributing to my society and these are also important issues to consider and then furthermore with the increase of AI and robotics does this make the technology more susceptible to hacking sabotage and other security risk and I don't know there's an answer for this but it's something we need to consider next slide please so furthermore Howard our paper examine how some of the contradictions in this claims because the united nations food and ag organization claim that to feed this growing world what we really need is poverty reduction biodiversity protection and climate change mitigation and they argue that automation and AI are most often associated with the exact opposite of those things industrialization standardization and monocultures since in order for some of these robotics to work you need homogenized apple or grape or other fruit trees so in other words yeah they say the opposite so what's needed is thoughtful policy is what they're arguing but we're not seeing evidence of these thoughtful policies yet anything taking really seriously what those things are next slide please I think this is the final slide so our couple more slides will AI and automation unfold in a matter that maximizes benefits for small farmers or for small workers or will it maximize benefits for the larger and the capital intensive will it increase engagement will it provide resilience to security risks these are I think relevant questions that we need to address next slide please this is just a very simple analysis of how the benefits of productivity have been distributed since basically right around the end of World War II we saw as productivity mostly related to technological adoption right workers became more productive wages and productivity tended to go together after 1980 or so there was a gap and productivity did not necessarily lead to higher wages for workers and if you look at that slide you'll begin to perhaps understand why not all workers are eager to adopt new technologies you know I was I grew up on a farm in southeastern Minnesota I worked on a lot of dairy farms I pulled weeds and bean fields over the summers and so forth those jobs you know I didn't exactly like those jobs but I made money doing it and I would have probably not gotten through college I would have had a little amount of debt that I had if I hadn't worked those jobs and so you know the introduction of glyphosate resistant soybeans ended my job as a weed picker in the soybean fields you know maybe that's for the better it wasn't a pleasant job but again I made money on it and I felt like I was part of something so these are important questions next slide please yeah, final slide here policy issues public policies and other institutional factors will shape the future research and technological development are we going to be engaged in those policies to make sure that they have benefits for everyone public policies will shape the distribution of risks and benefits can we create policies that incentivize the pursuit of the public interest the private interest and can they amplify labor interest over capital interest and next slide please and I think that's it yes, any questions feel free to send me an email if you don't have any questions or if we don't have the time right now I was interested in the results that you didn't find differences across the locations I would have expected differences based on types of farms and differences in minimum wages and things like that were all those variables covered? I think we captured that in the size and scale of the farms but the geographic we did not find differences across geography we did in other things for instance we measured concern about climate change and there was absolute difference between Washington and California growers compared to Pennsylvania and New York growers in terms of concern about climate change but as far as the interest in pruning we did not find a geographic difference interesting any other questions from the audience hey David Silverman this is a fascinating study I have two questions why are you surprised do you have an attitude of technology I don't expect that most people will be interested in technology any marketer knows that there are small people interested in technology and technology is an option if you develop a technology it may not be used for 20 years it may be used tomorrow so to some extent I think there is a separation between what you do with the institution and the economic reality and the policy so my feeling is if we can separate it then there is a supply chain and then there is a policy then we have some sort of a connection so to some extent the implication is not that you don't need to do research but rather that you have to recognize will benefit from it and then it's a role of a policy maker but policies that make it make it feasible so I really think that this really is important because I really love the research but the implication is not don't develop the technology have more sound policy think about the social implication of policy develop a mechanism to adjust to help people etc etc but I think all together there is a big difference between economists and sociologists and I really love this talk because I think it can really lead to multidisciplinary dialogue I agree with you David I don't see a big difference between institutional economists and sociologists neoclassical I do but I think you're and I if I didn't convey this adequately then I failed in my presentation but what did surprise me was that the larger range growers were more interested than the larger growers I really thought we would see some sort of linear progression that the larger farmers would have the greater capital capacity and so far that's where my surprise I did not expect the smaller growers to have as much interest so to that but yes I think the policy implications are where where the rubber hits the road so to speak question it's an online question it's from John Reed and he asks have there been studies to consider augmenting labor with automation tech that assists in tasks like pruning in a way to make existing labor productive versus robots replacing labor yeah that's a good question I'm not aware of such things I am doing some work in Northern Ghana right now on peanut production and one of the things we're looking at is labor enhancing technologies as opposed to labor saving technologies and the question that Mr. Reed asks in some ways gets at that but I'm not aware of anything of that nature in the United States it may be happening I'm just not aware of it and I haven't done it myself is Diane Charlton from Montana State University Department of Agricultural and Resource for Agricultural Economics and Economics and Diane's research interests are at the intersection of labor markets, labor, immigration agricultural protection and development in economics thank you and thank you for having me I really enjoyed the presentations this morning and I think there's a lot of intersections some of the things that I was planning on saying today so hopefully we'll tie some of these pieces together I want to start by just creating the landscape of where we came from and where we are today in terms of the US workforce so we go back to 1900 40% of the US population lived on farms in 60% in rural areas today less than 1% live on farms than just 14% in rural areas and so this beckons the question if so much of the US workforce is transitioned out of agricultural work how would we continue to produce many labor intensive agricultural crops and of course this answer lies largely in immigration so this is the US crop workforce in 2016 according to the National Agricultural Worker Survey which excludes H2A guest workers we would include H2A in here the foreign born population would be even larger H2A is roughly 10% of the full time equivalent crop workforce so so more than 65% of US crop workforce is from Mexico less than 26% are actually US born and I also want to note that the United States is not alone in bringing workers from other countries to work on our farms around the world more developed countries that have already transitioned out of farm work bring in guest workers from other countries South Africa brings in guest workers from Zimbabwe Canada from Mexico the Caribbean New Zealand from other Pacific islands so the United States is not alone this is a global trend and the United States has depended primarily on workers from Mexico for several decades however Mexico is now transitioning out of farm work similar to the way the United States did in the 20th century so this is the results from a study that I did with Ed Taylor from UC Davis several years ago we took household survey data that was nationally representative of rural Mexico and we measured a trend in the probability of working in agriculture between 1980 and 2010 the survey asked about the work histories of everyone in the household including all children from the household head so even if children had moved away from the home we could see whether they were working in agriculture so whether working in the United States or Mexico the probability of working in agriculture is decreasing by about 1% per year so that's about 250,000 people a year moving out of agricultural work and if we look at every census region of rural Mexico so even if we look at the probability of working in agriculture is much higher than say in the northeast of Mexico we still find a statistically significant negative trend in the probability of working in agriculture and people always ask me about that little bump around 2007 we were emerging surveys with retrospective data and that is one of the places we're emerging a couple of surveys so I think that is probably a product of trying to merge surveys in our paper and then we looked at the process checks to convince ourselves that it was a negative trend and not just the results of retrospective data bias so Mexicans are transitioning out of farm work much as the US workforce did in addition the crop workforce is becoming less migratory so there's a really interesting paper by FANEDOLM in 2015 where they show that since 1999 the probability that crop workers are migratory crop workers are migratory has been declining by quite a lot so this is in 2016 according to the NAS only 79% of the crop workforce was located in one location we're not following the crop we're not shuttle migrants only 8% actually practice to follow the crop going from farm to farm to farmers and keep that in mind that the crop workers are more than one so they need to have migrants in which they're live in one location in work in another so workforce is becoming less migratory you can imagine from a farmers perspective if workers are less migratory the labor supply is going to be much tighter so given the seasonality of labor demand having a less migratory workforce will happen in agriculture as the immigrant workforce declines and workers become less migratory? How do farmers respond to labor supply shocks? And so I just want to review a few studies that have used some quasi experiments to try to understand how agriculture responds to in word shifts in the farm labor supply. So the first one is a paper by Clemens Lewis and Postal. They looked at the termination of the Bracero program, the guest worker program between Mexico and the United States from World War II to 1964. The program was ended very abruptly in 1964. And so they looked at US counties and looked at how much each county relied on Bracero workers prior to 1964 as sort of this variable of how much they were affected by the termination of the Bracero program. And they found that the more the county depended on the Bracero program, the more likely they were to increase use of labor-saving technologies. And there did tend to be a little bit of a transition out of more labor-intensive crops. A paper by Lou et al looked at the 2008 Legal Arizona Workers Act. This was legislation in Arizona that made it very difficult for unauthorized immigrants to work in Arizona. They found that family farm labor supply increased in Arizona after Lava was implemented. And then there have been several papers that have looked at the impacts of 287G immigration enforcement policies. These are policies that permit the local law enforcement to cooperate with ICE to detect and detain unauthorized workers. And these papers have shown that implementation of 287G policies reduced the low-skilled immigrant workforce, reduced agricultural expenditures, farm incomes, and vegetable production, reduced total agricultural acreage and increased capital substitution on farms, and have increased labor efficiency on dairies that reduced aggregate dairy production and total number of dairy operations. And so of course these are limited quasi experiments, but they do give us some idea of how agriculture responds to inward shocks to farm labor supply. And overall we see an increase in adoption of labor-saving technologies and a reduction in overall production of labor-intensive crops and dairy production. Most recently we've been thinking a lot about COVID-19 and adjusting our lives to that shock. Agriculture was not excluded. Of course agricultural work was deemed essential and had to be performed in person, and agricultural activities are also very time-sensitive, so potentially very vulnerable to shocks from COVID-19 if workers were to get sick and no one was available to harvest crops. I measured the association between month-to-month variation in historical fruit, vegetable, and horticultural employment from April to August 2019 and COVID-19 cases and deaths within US counties in 2020 to see if COVID-19 was increasing within counties the same time that employment in FEH production was expected to increase. And just a glance at some of these counties that have greater FEH employment in peak month, which would be July, obviously here in Washington, a lot of FEH employment, both California, Arizona, Florida, a little bit more northeast and in Michigan. I found that 100 additional workers in historical monthly FEH workforce were associated with 2.27 to 4.54% for COVID-19 cases within US counties. That was 15.78 to 18.65 additional COVID-19 cases for 100,000 individuals in the county and 0.21 to 0.34 deaths for 100,000. All these results were significant at the 1% level of confidence, so these were very precise estimates. I do want to emphasize that this is not looking for a causal relationship. This does not mean that an increased employment of FEH workers causes COVID-19 to increase. It is nearly an interesting correlation, but I do think it is an interesting correlation because this does highlight some of the vulnerabilities in the agricultural production that were highlighted during COVID-19 and are still issues right now as we are still dealing with sickness and how the workforce can recover. In particular, in this study, I found that employment by farm labor contractors were also positively associated with increased cases of COVID-19 and deaths. I thought that was also particularly important and interesting because farm labor contractors have historically been one of the methods in which employers can adjust to tight labor supplies by contracting workers through a third party. If the farm labor contractors are also susceptible, this could create even more challenges for farm employers. This leads to the question of whether this could be a turning point for farm labor management. We have been in this era of tightening farm labor supply for quite a while and now we have an additional shock and additional challenge that increases the cost of employment and some of the risks and vulnerabilities. Cost of farm labor has been rising for years. This is the real U.S. farm wages from 1990 to 2019. We can see that they've been rising steadily consistent with this story of diminishing farm labor supply. What does that mean for U.S. agriculture? Several of the papers that I mentioned previously that use this quasi-natural experiments, they saw some movement out of labor-intensive crops. Will U.S. farms simply convert to less labor-intensive crops and will we simply import fruits and vegetables from other countries where labor is more abundant? Now, I think there probably will be some movement towards increased imports of fruits and vegetables, but I really don't think this is going to be the full solution. I think we will still be a major producers of some very labor-intensive crops. I think there is a consumer base that would be willing to pay a little bit more for domestically grown fruits and vegetables. This example is a little bit extreme, but I saw in the Wall Street Journal a few months ago that people will actually pay $50 per package of eight strawberries because these strawberries are supposed to be such high quality. I don't know who buys strawberries for $50 per package of eight, but some of those people exist and I think it just does highlight that there are specialty markets and consumers who are willing to pay a little bit more for a product that they perceive to be of higher quality. So I don't think we will completely convert out of the production of labor-intensive fruits and vegetables, so producers are really going to have to look for better or other solutions. So one solution would be to try to recruit workers from further abroad. If Mexicans don't want to work in agriculture, maybe we can recruit workers from somewhere else, another country that is not as far along in this development process as Mexico is, and maybe more workers are still working in agriculture. If we try to look a little bit further south, the rural population of Central America is quite a bit less than Mexico. More than six million more people live in rural Mexico than in rural Central America. And furthermore, if we think about recruiting workers from Central America, we would still be competing with Mexico and other Central American countries for that limited supply of labor. Mexico actually has a guest worker program to bring guest workers from Guatemala to work on Mexican farms at the same time that Mexico is exporting farm workers to the United States. We could think about recruiting workers from further abroad. I know I've heard Bill Martin talk about recruiting workers from Asia or Africa, where farm labor is still relatively abundant in many of those countries. But we have to think about the costs and logistics of bringing workers from so far abroad. In Montana, where I live, they actually do bring in H2A workers from South Africa, but those South Africans are driving combines. So think of the marginal product of labor if you're driving a convoy versus handpicking strawberries. And so I think that will be a major factor as we think of bringing workers from further abroad. Another solution would be to streamline and expand the H2A program. Now this doesn't necessarily bring in more workers as workers are transitioning out of farm work, but it does maybe help bring in farm workers to the United States as we're competing with Mexican farms for that limited supply of farm workers. H2A has been around since 1986. Use of H2A was very low in the first couple decades of its existence. There's lots of costs associated with H2A, lots of logistics in terms of filing paperwork with multiple government agencies paying for housing for transport from and return to the the workers country and lots of regulations. But despite all these costs, H2A employment did grow by more than 450 from 2001 to 2019, which I think is indicative of this issue of this diminishing farm labor supply. Even though H2A is costly, it is a solution to contract guest workers. And I like to show this little chart not because you can actually read it, but but I downloaded this from the Department of Labor a few years ago. I should check to see that it's actually still up there. But this is the H2A application process. And my favorite part is that when you get to the end here, it says congratulations, you're ready to file with the USCIS. So that's what farmers have been dealing with. There have been many efforts to streamline the H2A program for many years, and none of them have been successful. I'm a little bit optimistic that as the demand for H2A has increased, and there is some bipartisan support for some changes that maybe someday we will actually improve this program, hopefully to the benefit of workers and employers. There's relatively little research that looks at some of the the causes of H2A growth. And so this is a paper, this is from a paper that I wrote with my co-author, Marcelo Castillo, from the SDAERS. And we noticed that H2A applications increased when the housing boom was occurring in the early 2000s, decreased a little bit during the housing bust, and then continued to increase again during the recovery. And so we plotted that along with construction employment, and we thought that the national trends were pretty interesting. And then we looked at some of the housing literature, and we thought, well, I think we could actually causally identify the impacts of housing boomed in busts on H2A demand. And so that's what we did. And we found that a 1% increase in housing demand led to a 0.4 to 0.97% increase in H2A employment on average within U.S. community zones from 2001 to 2017. So the story that I think is happening here is that during a housing boom, construction employment increases, employment increases in other industries, like landscaping and services, many of the industries that employ immigrants with low levels of education. So if those industries pull workers out of agriculture, then employers might demand more H2A workers who would be contracted specifically to work in agriculture. We also found positive effects of housing booms on local farm wages, which is consistent with that story of pulling workers out of agriculture. And so today, we see help one in signs and stores all over the country. And there are all of these options in the non-farm industry. What does that mean for agricultural employers? I expect we'll probably see an increased demand for H2A workers. But even as we look to H2A workers, workers in these sending countries might also have other employment opportunities and may not be as interested in working on U.S. farms. So I think this will be an ongoing challenge. And this leads us to technological innovation. So as David alluded to earlier, the UC Tomato Harvest is one of the most famous examples of a major technological innovation in agriculture in the United States. It was a joint innovation between plant scientist Jack Hannah and engineer Coby Lorenzen. They had to develop a tomato that ripened uniformly and when it just gets smashed, when it was harvested by the machine. Within three years of this innovation, California's acreage and mechanically harvested tomatoes rose from 3% to 90%. It saved an estimated 19 million man hours per year by 1973. So a huge change to the agricultural industry. Here's a photo from UC Davis of one of the early harvesters. Worker advocates sued the University of California. United Farm Workers was opposed to mechanization and there was picketing outside of UC Davis's professors offices. And they argued that the UC research benefited agribusiness at the expense of small growers, farm workers and consumers who might have fewer product choices. And in particular, this argument that it harmed small growers took some attention and the University of California lost the lawsuit. And so since then, there's been a lot of reticence to actually invest in labor-saving technologies as David already mentioned. Schmitz and Sackler in 1970 find that there were positive net returns to the development of the tomato harvester, but some people gained while others lost. So it was not Pareto efficient. But that's not where we are today. We're in a much different world today. And if we don't find ways to become more technological in agriculture, we won't be able to compete in the global market. So Manoj already described a lot of the innovations in robotic harvesters. So I'm not going to repeat that, but there's some really great strides in robotics. There's also similar to that tomato harvester where we had the cooperation of plant scientists and engineers. There's also innovations in cultivating new varieties. I pulled this article a few years ago because I just liked the creativity of it. I don't know if anybody actually grows the sun-train grape, but raisin grapes used to be the most labor-intensive crop grown in North America. That wasn't until the 1980s. So originally, raisin grapes were harvested. Workers would go through the rows, harvest the grapes, and put them on paper trays between the trellises. Then they would have to go back through after the grapes had dried in the sun, roll those trellises up, and then take a forklift and pick up those rolls of paper trays. In the 1980s, a dry-on-the-vine technology was created in which a certain variety of grapes, the workers could actually go through and snip the canes. Then the grapes would just hang there in clusters and dry on the vine, and then they could be mechanically harvested. This reduced the labor demand dramatically, and then this farmer was very innovative and he bred a grape that will actually naturally dry on the vine without actually having to go through it and cut the grapes. So I don't know if anybody grows sun-train, but it does show the innovation that farmers have in trying to breed in varieties to solve this issue of labor. There's innovations in cultivation practices. Weaves are traditionally removed mechanically between rows and manually within rows, but integrated weed management systems can robotically remove intro weeds and reduce hand-feeding times by 20 to 40 percent. And there's also automation in other industries along the food supply chain. So agriculture is not alone. We are seeing health wanted science in many industries, and agriculture is only one of them. But as we move forward and as we see that mechanization and robotics and precision agriculture are part of our future, I think we really need to think about what kinds of skills farms will require in the future, and we need to begin preparing in advance. Well, they need technical, mechanical, data analytic skills, and how are we educating the farm workforce of tomorrow? Are the students coming through FFA going to be the workers who are analyzing these data, or are we going to be bringing in more educated workers from abroad to work on U.S. farms? And how do we prepare for that? So thank you. I appreciate the, well, we've discussed in the conference and I'm happy to take questions. Yeah, Chi. I'm a student from eight-count department. So for the question, like bring further foreign laborers, like when you talk about the law reasons, is there like a specific obstacle? Could be the reasons that preventing that from happening? Or is the law from the labor exporting country or the law in the U.S.? Oh, in terms of preventing workers actually arriving here in the United States? Yes. So is there like a specific obstacle? Could be the reason for that not happening. So immigration policies can affect labor supply as some of those studies have shown that some of the immigration policies that have been implemented at more local levels, we can see that when we make it more difficult for workers and authorized workers to enter, then we do have these declines in agricultural production and labor intensive crops. So that is part of the story. But I think we have to think more broadly as well, because we're seeing that Mexico, where many of our unauthorized workers have come from, and just an estimated 50% of the crop workforce is unauthorized. If Mexicans don't want to work in agriculture, Central Americans don't want to work in agriculture, we will have an issue even if we make it really easy for people to come to U.S. farms. So I think that's part of the issue, but I think we have a bigger issue. Yeah, I just pretty curious that, like from my experience, like, because of the ag income, ag labor using is pretty in a seasonality. And because the wage when compared to the developing country, it's pretty high. And then, so for me, it's a great idea that labor just come here and work in the peak season for a few months. But I just curious why that couldn't be the, what couldn't happen. Yeah, and well, I think part of it, I think there are studies, I can't cite them off the top of my head, but I've heard of studies in which, you know, even with the, even if there's a slight change in relative wages, people tend to stay in their home countries more frequently. I think there's just other costs of migration. So that might be part of the story. I think part of the story too is if people can come and maybe work in agriculture temporarily and then find a non-farm job, often agriculture is just a springboard to other opportunities. So that could be part of the issue as well. H2A has been an effort to try to fill in this gap. And thus far, H2A has continued to increase. But if Mexicans don't want to work in agriculture again, keep coming back to that, do people want to work in agriculture? But thank you. It was a great question. So I have David and then Douglas. I see that the key point is what type of constraint you have on this program. You see that we could continue the Brazil, the Brazilian program till this day from South Africa or Taiwan. That is a huge program that Russia has from Vietnam for many, many years. So the key element is that we want to have a program that will pay people decent salaries. But they are really difficult for the employees. So they really become quite difficult. So to me, the key element is the program design. And the parameters of the program design become more and more difficult. So it's demand, supply, and what type of equilibrium you want. I think that's the reason that we are having a situation, a solution, maybe automation. Now, the other thing about automation, to understand automation in other countries, to do the same thing, is automation only American or coming from America? Maybe if we don't do it Europe. Yeah, I think those are excellent points. I think it's always interesting with the H2A program. We have this issue for prior to H2A. People want to come work in agriculture and springboard on to non-farm jobs. H2A prevents workers from going to the non-farm sector. But how do we protect the rights of H2A workers when they might have less of a voice, less of ability to leave an employer? So there's lots of issues in that. I think you raised some interesting issues just by mentioning the difficulties with that program. So one of the motivations for this workshop is our discussions around the, you know, what do we know about the environmental and economic and social sustainability footprint of the food system, food supply chain agriculture. And as I teach and have studied, you know, the US agricultural system is much to crow about and be excited about, but on a social sustainability footprint, the labor conditions and working conditions are a sore point, a point of which we don't spend as much thinking and talking. When we look at how prior innovation has occurred in agriculture, technological innovation, very little of it has been driven by an impulse of solving that problem. It solves the labor shortfall issues from an employer point of view, but not so much how to create an employment path. And we've talked a lot today about the prospect is there to make really good jobs for which we can train people. What are the economic incentives or what would be required to create a different kind of innovation path that rewards the creation of those jobs as part of the technology innovation process? Like what Manaj was talking about, what would you have to do as an engineer and an economist to front and center the social potential implications or the labor implications as much as the sort of employer or market implications, which I don't think would be rewarded in the status quo. So maybe a question in response as this labor supply is getting tighter. Don't you think that the workers should theoretically have more bargaining power? And so I think the market forces our transition as to an era in which the workers can make greater demands. And there will be incentives for employers to create and bring in technologies that make the jobs more comfortable, which is the silver lining side of all of this. I think we remain optimistic that that will be part of the story in the time that's now. I'd like to ask the panel to join me in the seats on the stage. So our panel includes Karina Gallardo, who is a professor and extension specialist in the School of Economic Sciences. She studies consumer preferences for food quality and understanding profitability and other factors affecting growing adoption of new technologies. And I'm thankful to have her as one of my colleagues. We have Steve Mantel, who is the founder of Innovate Egg, a Walla Walla-based Washington-based egg startup and Microsoft partner and company. Prior to embarking on the startup, Steve spent 12 years at Microsoft, where he was most recently focused on the fastest growing product line, Azure Cloud. He's Australian by birth and has an MBA from the University of Washington. We also have Tomas Madigal. He is the son of farm workers and a large micro family who settled in the Lower Yakima Valley. He is a food systems researcher and an equity and social justice consultant. And he holds a PhD with specialization in Mexican labor and development of US agriculture. And he shapes policy at the state level and is a member of a number of task force. And then the last person we were supposed to have was Hannah Hanne, but she became sick. And so she asked Jeff Cleverina to step in her place. And I'm very thankful that you did it at the last moment. And Jeff is the chair of the technology committee for the Washington State Tree Fruit Commission. And so with this panel, we'll start out by each panelist can talk about their perspectives on the issues that we've been discussing and think about the problems and challenges and what the future might hold and just take about five minutes each. And then I hope that we'll have a discussion both online and with the audience. Maybe we'll start with Carina so that we don't put Jeff on the spot to start. Okay. There we go. All good morning. My name is Carina Gallardo. I'm with the School of Economic Sciences at Washington State University. Happy to be here sharing this table with all of you. My main thoughts are about listening to Manoj talk. I think that from an economics perspective, we have a three or four stage task. First is defining the cost benefit of any mechanization or automation adoption. Picking rates, efficiency gains, savings in man hours. Where are we there? What are the standards that we are looking at? Picking rate is important. We have a very high standard to compete with the machine. So not sure if we are there yet or not. One thing that also is important here and this comes from my conversations with industry is reliability of the technology. What happens if the technology decides not to work in the middle of the harvest? The apples will still mature, be mature and be ripening. They will not work until an engineer comes and solves the problem. So there are many issues that are involved in this cost benefit. Second, and this is from David and my colleague Jeff Lux that also agrees with this, supply chain. What are the factors or what are going to be the impacts in the entire supply chain of adoption of this automatization and mechanization? Are we going to see initial perhaps decreasing supply because we are seeing more defective fruit or we are going to have a mixture declining the picking rate, a mixture of machine versus labor in the field at the initial stages of the adoption? What is going to happen with the arrangements at the packing house and how the consumers are going to react to this? So supply change that is important. The third one is what is going to be the impact on labor? And there has been a lot say, we have the experience of the tomato harvest. We don't want workers outside of my notch office throwing stones at him. We want to see what is going to be the realistic effect on labor? Is it going to displace labor? What is going to happen? In my opinion, this is we are not in a perfect equilibrium in the labor market. We are not in the point where supply meets demand of labor. We are experiencing a shortage. And the reason why we don't see the shortage in the fields is because growers are going to H2A. Talking with industry, it has been said at least for the state of Washington right now, 60% of harvest labor is perhaps covered by H2A and 40% by local labor force. So effects of automatization of farm labor important to study. And the last but not least is who is ready to adopt? We see the work of Leland in Penn State and he said, yes, we see differences in the scale of the operations. But I will also add the horticultural arrangement of the field. Not necessarily large scale means the orchard is ready to adopt the machine. It is important my notch talk about this. We need to have a very strict fruit wall with a very strict training so that we make easy for the artificial intelligence of the robot to locate the fruit, to avoid obstacles and to detach from the tree. So free standing tree probably not. So it needs to be a tree that is conducive to increase the efficiency of the machine. So having said that, I would just like to mention about Diane's talk on what is happening in the policy perspective. What is going to happen with H2A in the future with this decreasing pools of available labor from our usual partner in supply and labor that is Mexico? What is going to happen to the Farm Workforce Modernization Act that was I believe it passed in the House, but it's waiting approval in the Senate? Is this going to streamline the H2A? Are they I think they are loving or they want to have year round H2A availability right now? We only can have H2A for short periods of time or definite periods of time. Having them year long, is this going to be something positive as Diane mentioned for board the worker and the farm operations? What is going to happen with that? How the industry sees this? And at the end, what is going to be the role of the land universities? And this is just an anecdotal experience that I had. My institution WSU along with the College of Ag and the Washington Department of Ag, we were trying to put or they were trying to put together I guess their leadership, agricultural leadership program to try to provide some lacking skills to field supervisors. Most of them Hispanic, most of them Spanish speaking. As you can tell, I am a Spanish speaker by my first language is Spanish. So we were brainstorming on how to develop a curricula. So we put together soil and crop sciences. We put together entomology, pathology. We were all excited. Economics, yes, let's teach them everything. You know, at the end of the day, there was a next survey and they said, you know what, we are all interested in human resources or management of our crews, how we're going to manage our crews, how we're going to communicate. So what David said is absolutely certain. The need is to how to work with people. And that is the need and the training, the new perspectives. It's also very important. Thank you. Good day. Mass free of permission to speak to you. It's not often that you get a chance to have a conversation. Yesterday and today had an opportunity of engaging and listening to what this group plans to do and what they're interested in investing in. And there are a few observations that I want to bring in from the literature from my field experience and also from my ethical position, right? Farm policy and immigration policy have been intimately intimate in shaping the landscape for the development of agriculture in the last century. I think a lot of the previous presenters provided examples of just how that has occurred with each historical mechanization, modernization and automation in agriculture that were made in order to try to resolve the limits of capitalist development or the industrialization of agriculture. New problems have always arisen and violence against workers in particular has plagued the industry. Riot, maskers, like premature deaths during my dissertation here in Washington. The most common activity that I witnessed were funerals for farm workers that were maybe 50 years old or younger that died from workplace injuries or chronic disease. The industrialization of agriculture is unsustainable. It has been unsustainable and it relies primarily on the federal subsidization it receives in order to survive. This has led to a move away from any intervention that's really seeking to overcome the limits of agriculture and instead seeks to maintain the high level of public subsidy for private agricultural enterprises as evidenced by the union of agricultural and immigration policy that I just mentioned here in the United States over the last century. At the turn of the 20th century as now, the reluctance of farm policy makers to implement equity in rural society as part of their development of industrial agriculture has resulted in the continued estrangement and quoting estrangement, depersonalization and impoverishment of rural society. This includes small farmers and farm laborers and their rural families. And this was Walter Goldschmidt writing in 1947 that many of you probably have read. The United States has failed to extend equal protections to agricultural workers as those that are enjoyed by other industrialized workers, creating a distinct labor system that is different and unequal over the past century in taxification, mechanization, modernization and proposed automation of industrial agriculture has resulted over the past century in creating a skilled agricultural working class without the accompaniment of professionalization has demonstrated in that graphic of production continuing to go way up and wages declining. Those closest to the problem are the closest to the actual solution that can save us and those workshops like this continue to push forward failed farm policy precisely because small farmers and agricultural workers are not at the decision making table of what investments are going to be made and what solutions are going to be chosen. And then just a reflection on some of the points made today when there was a call to invest in land grant institutions for both robotics development and for reeducation. I just want to provide the warning that we've learned is that starting at the university level is too late. Retraining and education needs to begin early. The ways that we are doing this and in our community is teaching youth to code, for example, and to participate in making their own products and the solutions that they come up with are completely different than types of solutions that are coming from people that don't have that creativity. And so we are doing this automation is here. We know that it's here. These are some of the observations that I've made and that I offered today. Thank you. Hi, Steve Mantel. I'm going to make an ad. So I think I'll just call out some themes really interesting, fascinating actually hearing the takeaways of the speakers this morning and trends. My takeaways of aligning with this morning are we're generally seeing from our observation as a startup and as an ag tech startup a lot of consolidation to larger farms, right? That's a trend that was called out. With that also is institutional ownership that's driving a lot of that, basically your hedge funds, your pension funds, and so on and so forth. Now it's not exclusively that you have some of your larger family owned owners that are growers that are in that mix as well. But as you bring in, let's say these more financial driven, driven is probably not the right word, but entities that have a high level of acumen when a brick comes to financial analysis. They're used to looking at dashboards, right on what performance KPIs are and so on and so forth. There is increasingly a push then from that ownership down to management of these farms to speak in those same terms. And there's this disconnect where now you've got your tiers of ownership, management, team leads effectively, and then your frontline workers. And it becomes harder and harder to communicate quantitatively, if you will, in terms of what's improving, what needs to be improved, how is that shifting over time. However, this, I think, shifting of ownership is pushing or pulling adoption of data driven solutions. And it's about finding to your earlier points, how do we help equip that frontline, that mid tier and management with the ability to talk and be conversant around data for making decisions. So one of those I think is very much embracing the next generation that's coming in, down at the high school and even down at the elementary level, helping them take their phones and ultimately how do they relate to the real world of food production and how can it be more exciting to them and more relevant to them. One aspect of that is, and I think across all of those different persona types that I talked about is being able to have each of those personas relate to what needs to be done and also be able to feedback into how to improve the system. A component of that is virtual reality and augmented reality. And I think the challenge coming from a number of years in high tech at Microsoft, it's having augmented reality out in field is not something that's going to happen anytime in the short to mid term. Maybe five years plus out, but you've got a lot of different things that are in the way, including connectivity challenges out here where it's really spotty up and down, very expensive glasses and so on. But I do believe that is starting to shift. I was looking for my ray bands that I have, I noticed you're wearing ray bands, but ray bands that I picked up at Sunglass a couple of weeks ago. These are a cheap prop that I brought instead. And for around $300, I bought a set of ray bands that have two cameras on the front and they have two speakers that are right beside the ears and has a microphone. And I could basically make recordings, listen to different music, for instance. And the point being is, let's pull back and think about how can we meet that front line in a way that is easy and affordable for rolling out. And so an example with that would be to take this complex set of data, just hard to really pull apart in terms of what you do with it. And for instance, if it's pruning or picking or thinning, perhaps changing the music that is playing above somebody's ear in terms of the cadence of that. And this is not a novel, I picked this up from somebody on the call a while ago, thinking along these lines. Music is something that we can all relate to, doesn't matter what your language or what your education is. And so it's finding some of these different ways to bridge that divide where we can bring together data in a way that is relatable. For some growers, they literally are looking for us as reports as a service. So we have to hand them a piece of paper that has a map. Map is also something that everybody can relate to with three or four different colors. You have to incorporate whether people are colorblind, which I seem to be increasingly going down the route of his eye age. So meeting them where they are, I think a couple more things to add in there. Around the new generation that we see that are in college or coming out of college, I am floored when we post a data science role for our company, an internship role. And we even put, hey, you must be at least studying for your masters and you must not require a visa and this, that and the other. We have hundreds of applications come in. I'm just blown away. Now if I put with a very similar job description, a marketing person and a finance person, I might get three applications for that. And so there's this thirst and the thirst often around these folks is it's around how can they make a difference around sustainability, around challenges in the workforce? How can they just really roll their sleeves up and be part of the solution? And so I think my takeaway really is, yes, we need to workforce upskill. We need to bring together cross function collaboration and push on that more. And I think we as I say to some of these hedge funds and pension funds and so on as they're in looking at making different acquisitions. When I was at Microsoft, part of what I did was mergers and acquisitions for a few years. And so we would take small companies and we would bring them into this huge company. And you've got this disconnect between a small startup's culture and how they compensate and all the things that they stand for that why that person ended up working for that startup. And then they get pulled into this large company that the antidote to or the way to help make them successful we found over and over and over was having ownership and management lean in on culture on having that be open on encouraging the front line the middle line to collaborate together that every it's okay to fail along the way to lean in more heavily on incentives where there's a 20% I'm just making that number up but say a 20% bonus a significant bonus not $100 here and there of their compensation for really leaning in on adopting or pushing on technology to help augment things and then of course there's the training lines on now is it working okay perfect. So I'm Jeff Cleveringa filling in for Inez one of the hats I wear is I'm a commissioner on the Washington Tree Fruit Research Commission started a little over 50 years ago taxed a self-imposed tax by the growers in the state to fund research. One of the things in 1969 when we were formed was to help us solve some of the labor issues that we were seeing in tree fruit and here we are 50 some years later and we're we're having a conference now on labor so apparently it took us a long time and we still aren't there yet so while it's a goal it's there's still a lot of labor involved in in specialty crops for sure. One of the things I think that we need to all we keep in mind is that rural has kind of become like a lower class like oh you're from the rural area and really that's where the food is grown and I think that the population needs to realize that rural is where the food is grown and none of us can survive without food we can survive without a lot of things but none of us can survive without food clothing and shelter and water. So it should be an honor and a badge of courage to be from rural America as we saw with Diane's presentation we've got about 14% of us are now rural Americans and so that number and I'm sure that number shrinks probably every time a statistic is done as we keep getting population movement and so I think that what we're seeing as an industry as well is the labor force people that want to move from the city to the rural to do agricultural jobs is pretty non-existent. Now there are some we can do some remote type of business type things that we've all learned through COVID but really if you want the hands on we need to recruit from the rural area because those are the people who already know that it's in their blood it's in their genes they know rural America. So some of the things we're doing is going to schools giving presentations talking about agriculture so what the mindset of agriculture isn't what your dad and grandparents used to do long hours working in the dirt with a shovel or a hoe pulling weeds those kind of things we need people in rural America students to understand that it's about technology it's about data analytics it's about autonomous tractors it's these kind of things that are coming to us at a really high rate of speed at sensors it's all those things we need these groups to go out get a good education wherever you would choose and then come back to agriculture because you understand it. I have a friend in California and he has a fantastic saying and I quote a lot but farmers need military grade products at farm pricing and people don't realize that and I being on the commission and being involved with technology I get companies that come all the time and they're like we're here to solve this and in a lab what they did sounds great and looks great and you put it in the dirt and in a hot environment and it just literally just melts and you just watch it and you just watch their dreams just get crushed because they didn't understand the difference between a laboratory setting and a true real world setting out in rural and so I think that's part of part of it is that we just we need to let people know I think this training retraining all these things are all super important we we're very dependent on guest workers and a lot of that is because we don't have that work supply people are when when we talk about migrant workers and those things that number just diminishes over time and and we've all been involved in that and so wages have gone up we're paying more and more and more every year for farm workers the last two years I think our wages have gone up almost 15 percent so it's a dramatic increase and the other thing farmers tend to be price takers and not price setters and so that's one thing too that maybe farmers can get better at but again we're back to this so you grow the crop in the rural areas but you need the consumers you need the people and when you're not near them the the geography of marketing those products and the movement of those products becomes overwhelming for farmers who want to just grow the product and do the best they can with what they're good at and so there is some logistics and supply chain things that that work against farmers and so I think there's there's yeah I'll go ahead and we can turn it over to questions and go from there but and I do represent industry as well so I work for a company we're based out of Wenatchee Washington it's a family-owned orchard company we raise apples and cherries throughout Washington state and then we pack and market apples and cherries and pears for growers here in Washington as well and then my family we farm too so we were a lot of different hats so hopefully I take it easy well thank you thank you all those great statements from all of you I want to open it up to questions from the audience John thanks Jill John McNamara from the board I want to do a quick quote from a fellow probably none of you know John Black in Australia who spent 30 years building up their industry I went over there to consult the first time about 15 years ago on this issue on robotics and dairy and he said John those jobs are demeaning dangerous degrading humans shouldn't be doing them we should be better at that and we've touched on it here this morning you know what do you do with the labor you displace what about you know wages so I'd like to kind of make a comment and then a question for you we're the board and land grants are used to doing research and the technology kind of thing we're not labor managers not human resource people okay in that sense but the pandemic has given us an opportunity for change here so I'd like to hear what are a couple of next steps that that aren't technical okay that there are societal steps that you would like to see to help totally change the paradigm about labor labor capital in agriculture and food production well we heard a lot of presenters speak to the problem of policy and one of the things that I think would be very influential is divorcing immigration policy from farm policy and the farm worker modernization act is the most recent example of that marriage that would need to be dissolved in order to revolutionize the system uh my name is Qin Lang uh director for the center for precision and the ag automated ag assistance and uh it's very good to uh you know have this opportunity to hear all the presentations and then I also had quite a few years working in the automation side or a robotic mechanization side for the agriculture so I do learn quite a lot in the past 20 30 years but I do have a few questions for the panelists first of all you know the ag automation or mechanization or robotization it's not new technology okay it has been developed for more than 50 years just like uh said earlier but still today is not quite yet adopted yet and uh why is that okay and so uh you know for me I'm a work on the academic side more so doing research most of my time but how to best integrate with the university research and the industry need so this is more for the technology push and market pulling and how to integrate that I think this is a still a challenge and I would like to hear from the industry point of view to see what will be best way to do this because I have a lot of experiences on fields okay we've developed quite a lot of robotic solutions but the only field can really move into you know for practice and what is missing okay so I think this is something I think is a big challenge from us I believe it's not only in the university research but also in the industry so I would like to hear something from them thank you okay um well I I'll try to address there was a lot of things in there I think some of the things about adoption are reliability repeatability those kind of things in automation so the the Karina uh said earlier in her presentation what happens when the robot breaks down well if it's harvest um our industry is a 12-month industry but harvest only occurs for 80 days of that 12 months the rest of it is packing and shipping and supplying consumers with apples let's say so the whole thing falls apart if the fruit doesn't get harvested so if we're talking harvest automation it's got to be really good it's got to be reliable and repeatable and it can do it every single day if you're going to not have workers show up for that so I think that's part of it some of the other parts when you talk vision systems I think you're really the processing speed of vision has really only maybe in the last five to seven years got to the speed where it could be usable where it's near instantaneous so I think that's part of it too like we can't run a robot through make all the decisions and then tomorrow go execute those while the data is being processed at night that doesn't work so it needs to be near real time and I think that's you'll see adoption increase as technology becomes cheaper that's the other part of the equation is cost so growers only have a certain margin that they can work within to make a living and to then be able to hire those people and to do the tasks again the following year so economics are a big driver of things as well I know that yeah economics is critical I think from a adoption perspective it just has to be made easier it has to be made easier for ag tech that's innovation to really understand the just earlier point around hey get out of the lab get into kind of the real world and the tree fruit research commission has done some great work on getting a smart orchard project and some other projects that are going that are lab like real world lab like however I think more is neat needs to be done there that's that's repeatable as a go-to as opposed to just on a one-off repeatable grant basis where there's college an institute or a center for innovation adoption type of thing it's a honey pot if you will where you can bring that together and you've got a horticulturist you've got all the the persona types that we talked about that represent different levels of personas within an orchard or I know we're not talking just about orchards but in within a farm and and real-world experience basically so that's what I've got on top of that yes I was thinking about where are we there with the actually fruit Jeff Steve do you think that is it possible to have a new variety or a new cultivar of say apples that would be more easy to work with the machine like easier to detach riping uniformly be able to predict where where is it going to grow so the the robot can detected less prone to bruising things like that do you think that is also something that we're missing with the tomato harvester there was a new variety of tomato that was developed what do you think do we need that new variety of apple sure that would be great and it needs to taste really good too right because we want that consumer to not buy it once but twice so I think that's the other part of the equation is it's it's got to eat really well I think that the the Washington state breeding program I think there's some of those things in mind but that takes a long time when we when we're not talking biotech so when we leave biotech out and we go to natural breeding and we cross and then we gather seeds and it's a very very long process and so we can use biotechnology to weed out some of the characteristics we don't like just by testing for them but when we're not using biotechnology in an actively in a breeding program I think the process just becomes slower so yeah well I would still have one thing to follow you know just like Jeff and Steve said you know for technology robustness you know reliability is a critical issue but the issue here is you know when we develop technology we know normally it takes many steps from the concept to usable technology and it takes time okay and you know non-product will be just with design that and it will be reliable and and robust and you know very fast but in this process you know just I said earlier it's a portion of pulling process and is there any way could we create a mechanism so the growth the end users could be actively involved in speed of this process and is there any you know thought or thinking or should we pursue more in this field well I think when you're talking about industry partnering with uh research and researchers and new technology and stuff I think that that's one of the roles that we as the commission are trying to take sometimes we're matchmakers and sometimes we're dream crushers at the same time so we get companies that come to us and say I'm going to develop this vision system and we're going to do XYZ and it's going to be the best thing ever and we're like then you don't need us because we've already spent all the money to do that and this company here has that figured out we're not going to fund you to reinvent the wheel so we do a little dream crushing at times but we try to be a matchmaker and we would say we'd rather you partner with them and license their technology than we pay to reinvent the technology so I think we're trying to partner with industry both public and private industry as well to accomplish those things we try to put them in touch with real growers and real orchard settings when they want to vet their technology and those things so I think we're trying to be the best matchmaker we can and as an industry we each have our own little trade secrets if you want to call them that every industry does things that you don't share with your competition but a lot of this technology stuff like companies are floored when they come to me and I take them around to six of my competitors and we sit down and chat with them about how the technology benefits all of us as an industry not just me first it's it's all of us because when we have more pull as an industry than I do as a company so we're working towards that it's definitely a goal um I'm Amy Ando I'm a member of the board and this is a great panel thank you all I particularly appreciated Tom Austin's comments I think we needed to hear that this afternoon the board is going to be talking about what does a paradigm a new paradigm for agriculture look like and I think a new paradigm needs to be centered on equity which our current and historical systems certainly have not been so my question for you all is what would that look like or what would be some steps towards that some things that are tangible and feasible at least eventually so I'm curious what ideas you have adding to that last exchange what you're missing is a brain and so the bottom line for a lot of this development and robotics has been to eliminate workers and that's going about agriculture backwards because there's millennial knowledge in some of these agricultural workers and their ability not just to make decisions around like you know the the fruit that they're picking whether it's ready but also solutions are brought from that tradition and so examples of the technological innovations that farm workers are bringing to the table to the different places that they work for example shellfish harvesters get a like a fork that people use for taking hay take it to a metal smith and create a cloth and it helps them to be able to dig more clams up when they're harvesting clams um similarly in the thinning of apples the I guess your index and thumb finger that you're that you're using get really raw and so they keep trying to find different ways whether it's using condoms or using mantles from candles people are are but there's never been an investment in supporting the creation of technological low-tech um you know PPE equipment and we have had about 25 different farm worker uprisings since 2013 here in Washington state and almost every single one of them had to do with some breakdown in a technological advancement whether it was a new checking machine to calculate peace rates or whether it was not having the right protection when you're harvesting daffodils and and getting skin injuries from that getting pesticides in yours you name it like and so it's not always about the wage but it's it tends to be these kinds of problems um and so I think that's what's been missing in your conversations you haven't had opportunity to learn from people that are directly engaged in maintaining agriculture at the level that it's experienced the success is not because of entrepreneurship or um you know a capitalist planner figuring things out the success is at the at the local level at the at the most closest level of how a worker interacts uh with the natural environment and and their their ability to to bring in that ancestral knowledge in how they cultivate these crops and so um I I'll go ahead and see to the other folks about what the future might look like for you and I I'd add further to build upon your point is it's a bit around culture and that should include H2A workers given that there's it's such a prevalent source of labor and um where I referenced earlier on on incentives and so on but to your point on on grain if you can put all the incentives in such in place unless there's um a catalyst and so I'm just thinking out loud that perhaps it's uh having somebody whether it's within the age to a group or somebody at the um the grower team lead level that has a mandate and has a remit around adoption of technologies whether that be as simple as something along you know using something different on on your hands to um you're using your phone to be able to communicate on different things and close the loop so it's what I think we need is that some catalysts and some people that are equipped to be able to think on how to adopt and to be able to take uh synthesize the broader set of perspectives of folk among them that perhaps may be generational and and aren't they're tired and they're not going to do that yes we're running over time so I will have one quick question that I can bring to David but we'll try to wrap it up so thank you thank you well thank you everyone everyone and thank you Gomez you just talked about what I wanted to ask because I wanted to ask what are the real efforts about two issues that we have been talking today the first one the preservation and the transfer of the really expert knowledge because we I've heard during this day a lot about the decreasing numbers of agricultural labor which means that we have this expertise going away from where we need it because even though we have apples everywhere location is super important to the um the knowledge that they have in their specific location so what efforts in that one and the second one you also talk about more educated labor if you go in the reality of that that's not going to happen any soon so what are the efforts to actually educate the labor to these new opportunities that automation is bringing to them is industry going to take the cost of that education our university is going to help with extinction as well so I'll just real quick touch on a little bit of that so education obviously in rural areas we are working with schools high schools mostly talking about futures of agriculture so that was part of it and then the apple education foundation which is a big scholarship foundation funded by the industry to give scholarships for those who want to go on to any sort of continuing schooling but when we bring technology to the orchards it doesn't do us any good if it doesn't meet the real world so we bring our managers our crew bosses those we want them to interact so we introduce them to the technology provider right away and then they interact we take feedback like we want those because they do they have a lot of that hands-on knowledge historic knowledge all of those things and it's super important and it scares us as an industry to watch that age group get older and older and then the replacement isn't coming so the next generation of those who want to do some of this and be decision makers is dwindling and so we're trying to incentivize financially educationally scholarship wise all the things that we can do as an industry as well to try and and encourage more young people to come into our industry so yeah we're we would love it too we're we're struggling to find that replacement workforce for our aging population of workers innovation is the issue of democracy do you see the is a young generation of people that are outside the industry people that come down into the screen maybe people that are working in farm work instance want to be an entrepreneur I'll take a quick go at the second part um this summer we had uh as part of the ag ai or ag aid institute uh with wsu and several of the universities um we had an internship program and I think we ended up with 17 interns several of those were all undergrads from different universities and from different types of studies and and what was interesting to me is that we tapped a few people on the shoulder to to apply into the ag aid internship program that weren't necessarily headed toward working with agriculture maybe they had something lightly related around data science or biology or something along those lines and the feedback that I generally saw from we generally saw from folks and this included at the high school level as well as once they once it's experiential for them and it's not just about working hard labor it's actually boy there are things you can do this computer vision things here there's all sorts of really neat things you can do coding um on helping things be more efficient efficiencies with business folk um they're they're excited about and so I think to Jeff's earlier point is it's it's about helping um telling the story evangelizing to the broad that it's not just about all about hard labor and working tail end up on there it's here are some of the opportunities around this and here's why it's so critical to get involved we're actually over time now so I just want to thank you now I just want to take this a quick chance to um thank everyone including uh Robin Shane and H. Jacobs and the the national academies and also Chuck Rice for his help thanks to Travis Jackson Smith for all the for all the help and support he gave I want to say thank WSU for the support of this the support of the workshop including Kirk Schultz and and uh Chris Keane remember Chris Keane and then and then finally thank you to the to the WSU Tri-Cities group especially um Aaron Prenva who supported all the he's the chief information officer who supported though everything working on time and uh I I found this really interesting I learned a lot I thought it was thought-provoking to think about how we can have a more sustainable and equitable food system and I hope I hope we all uh continue to think about these issues so thank you everyone