It's Dairy Month in South Dakota, wherein we celebrate an industry in which the pro-corporate policies of Bill Janklow, M. Michael Rounds, and Dennis Daugaard have concentrated ownership in just 370 hands. (Once upon a time, South Dakota had 20,000 independent dairy producers.)
We'll see a month of Ag United outreach activities like Lunch on the Farm at the Royalwood Dairy in Brandon tomorrow, intended to sustain our fantasies of that family farming still looks like our Fisher-Price playsets, with smiling calves prancing playfully in green pastures. Not a word will be spoken about the exploitation of immigrant labor or the reliance on state-supported Korean and Chinese investors buying their green cards to give massive corporate agriculture operations an unfair advantage in the South Dakota marketplace.
But don't worry about those exploited laborers. We're about to solve that problem—no, not with sensible immigration reform. With robots:
Robots are invading farms all over America, including a dairy farm near Ethan. But the dairy farmers couldn't be happier.
A machine, called an astronaut, is just like a robot. Gary and Amy Blaze use four of them to milk their 200 head of dairy cows three times a day. The robots use laser scanning technology to line up the milkers on the cows' utters.
The Blaze's decided to buy the robot milkers mainly because hired help wasn't reliable.
"You tell a robot to do something and it does it exactly what you told it to do every single time," Gary said.
"We would get calls at 4:30 a.m. or so saying they couldn't be here today or do you really need us today," Amy said.
Each cow wears a tag with a computer chip, allowing the robot to identify each one by a number. A computer in the robot registers all kinds of information on each cow, like body temperature, weight and milk production [Don Jorgensen, "Robots Invade Dairy Farm," KELOLand.com, 2013.06.10].
One A4 Astronaut costs $210,000. It can milk 60 cows a day. I invite my farm-experienced readers to calculate when that investment reaches break-even point over hiring people to handle your teats. We get rid of hassles with employee turnover and Social Security and USCIS... at least until the robots wake up and start arguing for workplace rights as sentient beings.
Bonus Free Association: I can't help thinking of that scene in The Matrix where Morpheus shows Neo the fields where machines harvest humans as batteries. (Oops—there goes another hour of my life to YouTube.)
If they can take over milking cows, the robots can certainly take over tillage and harvest too. You could reduce your workforce by at least 80% with automation.
For me the best celebration of dairy month is what happened at the Vernon Herschberger trial.
Hershberger's case also provides true conservatives with a practical case where they can fight for real individual liberty and perhaps build coalitions with liberal groups to effect meaningful change.
WE have a grassroots start in SD, correct?
Cory,
Your Luddite roots are showing. Think back to the good old days before robots washed your clothes and your dishes. Before there was any chance for women to get out of the home.
How many horses would it take to transport food to cities with 20 million people?
How many telephone operators would it take to connect the calls America makes in a day in 2013? The volume is now so great that every person would need to work that job and no other.
How many scribes would it take to copy the daily newspaper by 5 AM?
Yes, machines and robots have made some of us lose jobs and change our lives. But it has freed the human spirit from a life of drudgery. Would we really be better off if 10 million of us milked cows by hand twice a day?
The world is a hard place and change will continue unless something changes.
These automagic milkers would be a great aid to the "keep them barefoot and pregnant" guys setting up an automated milking system. They could sing to the hum of automated breast pumps. Religious groups could make sure of the supply and demand.
Jeff, do I sound like I'm condemning robots? I rather look forward to their company.
I guess I mentioned them in the same condemnatory breath as corporations, so I have it coming.
Seriously, your points about mechanization, modernization, and liberation are well taken. And if mechanization renders obsolete the exploitation of immigrant labor, of any human labor, then that's one more reason to cheer. But what will become of men when machines do all the work?
With luck, the right kind of education and environment people will continue to do the loving, the thinking and the playing. Oh, and the Blogging too.
But Jeff, nobody pays 11.1 million illegal immigrants for loving, thinking, playing, or blogging. Crush their ag industry back home with American farm subsidies, mechanize away their jobs here... where's the paradigm shift that puts food on those people's tables?
Reform our deportation policy and declare a 500 yard wide kill-zone along the border and the illegal invasion will stop. We spent billions keeping Chinese and Russians from invading and let illegal aliens walk across the border. This was and is insane.
The US needs 11 million under-educated superstitious non-English speakers like we need a Mexican slum.