farms and automation

i just finished watching a dirty jobs episode on harvesting walnuts in california. and one of the things that always strikes me when watching dirty jobs is how automated and efficient a lot of it seems to be. i mean, take the walnuts episode for example. the company used shakers to shake down the walnuts from the grid of hundreds of trees. these were vehicles with a clamp that could shake a tree till all the walnuts were down. then a little vehicle called a sweeper, this one from 1972 apparently, was used to sweep the walnuts into neat lines. these were then picked up by another vehicle to take to the processing plant, where the process upto shipping was all taken care of by machines. the humans only had to scrub, clean up the mess created and keep the plant running smoothly.

i can't say i have been to many farms in nepal, but i believe most farms here still rely on manual labor for the majority of tasks. with all sorts of specialized farm equipment available, i wonder by how much we could increase the productivity of nepali farms if these were utilized. and the machines don't necessarily replace humans, but instead provide them with the dirty job of cleaning up after them.

also there was this other episode on a californian egg farm. i had no idea how automated and mechanical even the process of egg production had become. about 1.4 million hens were simply laid out in little cramped spaces. chicken feed was supplied individually to each bird automatically via a system of pipes. and when an egg was laid, it rolled down a half-pipe into a processing plant that would take care of it until it was packaged and ready to ship. the farm shipped a whole lot of eggs everyday but something about the method makes me uneasy. the hens spent their lives in these little cages where they could barely spread their wings, their sole purpose in their pitiful lives to produce eggs for us. this is one area where i would rather have numerous smaller farms handled by people than a big automated one, even if it means limited productivity and profit.

alright, i'm off. have a great weekend!