Breaking News
Odometers Rolled ForwardStarlink Spy Network: Is Elon Musk Setting Up A Secret Backchannel At GSA?
The Worst New "Assistance Technology"
Vows to kill the Kennedy clan, crazed writings and eerie predictions...
Top Tech News
Scientists reach pivotal breakthrough in quest for limitless energy:
Kawasaki CORLEO Walks Like a Robot, Rides Like a Bike!
World's Smallest Pacemaker is Made for Newborns, Activated by Light, and Requires No Surgery
Barrel-rotor flying car prototype begins flight testing
Coin-sized nuclear 3V battery with 50-year lifespan enters mass production
BREAKTHROUGH Testing Soon for Starship's Point-to-Point Flights: The Future of Transportation
Molten salt test loop to advance next-gen nuclear reactors
Quantum Teleportation Achieved Over Internet For The First Time
Watch the Jetson Personal Air Vehicle take flight, then order your own
Microneedles extract harmful cells, deliver drugs into chronic wounds
As California's labor shortage grows, farmers race to replace workers with robots
But if you do get a peek, you won't see anything humanoid or space-aged. AgroBot is still more John Deere than C-3PO — a boxy contraption moving in fits and starts, with its computer-driven sensors, graspers and cutters missing 1 in 3 berries.
Such has been the progress of ag-tech in California, where despite the adoption of drones, iPhone apps and satellite-driven sensors, the hand and knife still harvest the bulk of more than 200 crops.
Now, the $47-billion agriculture industry is trying to bring technological innovation up to warp speed before it runs out of low-wage immigrant workers.
California will have to remake its fields like it did its factories, with more machines and better-educated workers to labor beside them, or risk losing entire crops, economists say.