Pickers not under threat from robots

AN AGRICULTURAL industry body believes Australia’s vegetable farms could be fully automated within the next 10 years.

Picking fruit the old fashioned way will one day be under threat from technological advancements. Photo: Trevor Veale. Picture: Trevor Veale/Coffs Coast Advocat

AN AGRICULTURAL industry body believes Australia’s vegetable farms could be fully automated within the next 10 years.

AUSVEG deputy chief Andrew White said the leading minds in robotics research envisaged fleets of robots and automated vehicles working with each other.

“With the work being done on robotics and mechanisation across a wide range of on-farm applications, from seeding to spraying to harvesting, the leading minds in the industry believe there will be fully automated solutions for certain crops by 2025,” Mr White said.

“Australia has been an innovator in the robotics space for industries like mining, and with targeted research and development applying our field robotics expertise to the agriculture industry, we’re now world leaders in farm mechanisation.”

However, Oz Group Co-Op chairman Gurmesh Singh doesn’t believe automated farming will affect local jobs any time soon.

“Unless technology takes a huge leap, I don’t expect we’ll see any job losses to robotic pickers in the next 20 years at least,” Mr Singh said.

“Some crops are becoming more automated but there will always be crops that require human pickers.

“The crops we have in this area – primarily blueberries and bananas – don’t lend themselves very well to automated pickers.”

Mr Singh said the company was already taking advantage of some automation, but computers could not do the entire job.

“We are becoming more automated in that we use technology to weigh and pack our crops, but we still use people to pick and for quality checking on the production line.

“What we’re seeing now is technology that makes humans’ jobs easier.

“We’re probably a generation away at least from technology which will completely replace humans.”