News — FoodAndFarmLabor

It’s a misty morning near Salinas, California and the advanced.farm TX harvester—a lightweight, driverless tractor covered in canvas—is picking strawberrie

FARMING FoodAndFarmLabor

It’s a misty morning near Salinas, California and the advanced.farm TX harvester—a lightweight, driverless tractor covered in canvas—is picking strawberrie

s. Like a dot-matrix printer moving along a page, the harvester’s robotic hands move back and forth along the beds, scanning for signs of red. When it identifies a ripe berry, it dives down, gently plucks it from the plant, and places it in a crate. At the same time, a crew of about two dozen farmworkers is also harvesting strawberries just a few hundred feet away, on an adjacent farm. As an energetic song blasts from a parked vehicle, the men and women stoop to pick berries straight into plastic clamshells that they tile, side-by-side, into cardboard trays. Once...

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