How to Pick an Orange?

A hulking, nameless creature lumbers among the citrus trees, its eight arms and eyes in constant motion, searching for its prey: oranges.

Part robot, part tractor, the contraption is an unusual combination of one internal-combustion engine, four rubber tires, eight digital cameras, eight electronic arms and an excruciating number of computer algorithms that choreograph every movement. Its metal arms maneuver among the branches, where “eyes” spot the fruit and suction-cup “hands” grasp them even more gently than human hands, which is what they are designed to replace. In fact, just one human finger is involved in this entire enterprise, for the thing also needs no driver. The robot sets its own course and speed, relying on a human only to push the on/off button on a remote control.

For now, this machine exists exclusively in a virtual citrus orchard on a computer screen in an unassuming second-story office in Sorrento Valley, San Diego’s corridor of high-technology entrepreneurship. It was conceived by two Massachusetts Institute of Technology-educated inventers, Bret Wallach and Tony Koselka, who founded Vision Robotics Corp., a 4-year-old company whose most recent success was the invention of a robot vacuum cleaner capable of cleaning the carpet by itself while dodging table legs and other obstacles.

The company’s next project is this robotic orange picker, which must treat oranges with enough care to leave them unmarked and suitable for the produce section of the grocery store, and must do so cheaply enough to beat the going price for hand labor, which Wallach says is about a penny an orange. Within four years, they predict, their invention could make the leap from the computer screen to the test track, where it will pluck orange Nerf balls from a potted plant, and then to real groves of oranges.

At the moment, though, harvesting most fresh produce remains an anachronism in an era of computer-driven combines, genetically modified plants and crop yields monitored by global positioning satellites. And that’s especially apparent in California, where about half of the fruit and vegetables (as measured by sales volume) are harvested by hand.

That may be about to change. The Vision Robotics robot, which may wind up with as many as 12 cameras, is just one of the experiments that someday might harvest fruit such as peaches, plums, apricots, blackberries and cherries. Many agricultural researchers say machines may offer the best hope for many types of American agriculture that now depend on an immigrant workforce, subsidies and tariffs. Many believe machines offer a better, cheaper and possibly more humane way to harvest the labor-intensive crops that are the hallmark of farming in California, a nearly $28-billion industry.

New interest has been spurred by several recent developments. First, a global marketplace means that cheap imported produce now flows more freely into the American marketplace--a concern so pressing that this fall the U.S. House of Representatives passed the $270-million Specialty Crops Competitiveness Act of 2004. The Senate approved the measure on Dec. 7, and President Bush was expected to sign it. The legislation would designate new sources of federal money to pay for mechanization research for the first time in decades, among other steps to make U.S.-grown specialty crops more competitive. In addition, private companies such as Vision Robotics are developing machines that once seemed impossible.

California--the state with the nation’s largest and most complicated agricultural labor market--has been down the road to mechanization before, when the tomato harvester revolutionized production of that crop more than 40 years ago. But now, as then, the questions raised by the technology are rife with political, social and economic implications. Machines like these have the potential to render obsolete the legions of mostly immigrant men who work some of the worst jobs America has to offer. When their skills are obsolete, then what?

There’s no clear answer, but there’s also no doubt that a bumper crop of controversy followed the last era when machines replaced the men in California’s fields.

Tthe produce harvest offers the nation’s jobs of last resort. Anyone with an occupational option does something other than pick produce by hand. Handpicking is so arduous, dangerous and undesirable that usually only immigrants, many of them undocumented, take the job.

In California, the number of farmworkers has grown nearly threefold in the past four decades, to an estimated 1.1 million workers, according to a 2004 report in the journal California Agriculture. A key reason for the expansion is the growth in high-value, labor-intensive crops. During the past three decades, the nation’s taste for fresh fruits and vegetables has soared, with Americans eating about 25% more fresh produce. Harvesting, then, has required much more labor because it is done by hand. An apple destined for applesauce could be shaken off the tree, but an apple destined for the produce section must be free of bruises and cuts.

As the demand for people to hand-harvest crops has grown, so has the supply of people willing to endure the job’s miseries. “If a worker complains about poor pay or mistreatment, the foreman will say, ‘If you don’t like this job, I’ve got others to take it,’ and they’re right,” says Marc Grossman, a spokesman for the United Farm Workers union and former press secretary for Cesar Chavez.

Still, in a job market rife with human desperation, the work exerts a powerful pull. For the privilege, Eduardo Percastegui, a 34-year-old immigrant from Hidalgo, Mexico, paid a coyote $1,600 to take him to Immokalee, Fla., where he picks oranges. The rewards of his sacrifice are tangible. His wages for handpicking oranges are triple what he might have earned in Mexico. Now his wife has a television, and each of his daughters has a bicycle.

“I am here to give them a chance,” he says. “It’s the window of opportunity that is open to me.”

Percastegui has heard vague talk of these machines that can do the work of many men, but he has never actually seen one--though such a machine is, in fact, working in an orchard less than an hour’s drive from the ramshackle house he shares with seven other men. Cesar Chavez, quoting fearful farmworkers in a 1978 article in the Nation, called such machines “los monstruos,” the monsters. Farmworker perceptions haven’t changed. “The machines may take our work,” Percastegui says. “We don’t know what is the future.”

Felix Real thinks he knows. The 27-year-old immigrant from Guadalajara is harvesting juice-laden Valencia oranges with a mechanical harvester less than 30 miles away. He watches his progress on two television screens in the cab of the machine he drives, with his left hand resting at 11 o’clock on the steering wheel and his right hand gripping a six-button joystick. His harvester is designed to pick oranges for making juice, and thus the fruit can be handled roughly. The machine uses metal bars to rake through the trees’ branches, resulting in a startling and seemingly violent sight. With a tremendous racket, a sudden deluge hits. Outside Real’s window, it is raining oranges.

In just 10 minutes, Real and the machine have scoured the fruit from 10 trees, a feat that would take four pickers a full day to accomplish. For his work, Real earns $150 a day, double or even triple what Percastegui earns harvesting the crop by hand. “This is the new age,” Real hollers, in Spanish, above the din. “This machine, I believe, is the future.”

If that future plays out in California, as many expect it will, then technology will be only one of the threats that farmworkers must confront. They also face a global marketplace where their already low wages no longer are competitive. The reality is that a machine will never clamor for representation by the UFW, attract the scrutiny of immigration officials or require subsidized housing and social services as the result of low wages.

Vision Robotics’ Wallach, for one, envisions a machine that will scan fields for disease, pests and the best time to pick the fruit for the highest yield. Because workers are paid what is called a “piece rate”--that is, for the weight of what they bring in--they have an incentive to pick everything as fast as possible, including small green oranges within reach. The machine will be more selective, Wallach says, and can do the work of up to 20 men. Those few who remain will have jobs that offer year-round employment, and the skilled workers who run the machines will have higher wages.

Galen Brown, a retired agricultural engineer in Florida, is a national authority on harvest-mechanization efforts. Brown has been helping citrus growers in Florida with several experimental juice-orange harvesters, and the Sunshine State’s products are now competing favorably with Brazilian orange juice, almost entirely because of a tariff that boosts the price of juice imported from Brazil. When Brown looks at the Florida orange groves filled with men, he sees a potent combination of lost opportunity, economic folly and human misery. “I ask myself, ‘Why do people have to work that hard for that little pay?’ And the only way out of that trap, really, is to figure out a way to mechanize.”

The tomato harvester was introduced in 1960 and revolutionized both harvesting and the way many people look at technological advances in farming. That device, a combination of cutters, shakers and conveyer belts, became what may be the most controversial machine in the history of American farming.

In the days before the machine, workers stooped in fields to cull tomatoes from the vine and then carried 50-pound boxes of them to trucks. Few people, including the tomato harvester’s inventors, initially believed that there was another way to get the tomatoes out of the field. But after years of research, scientists developed a machine--modified versions of which are still working--that could cut the tomato plant from the soil and then shake tomatoes from the vine onto a conveyer belt that would begin the journey to processing plants, where the tomatoes were turned into products such as soups and ketchup.

The machine was the offspring of what was then an unprecedented collaboration between a plant breeder, Gordie C. “Jack” Hanna, and an agricultural engineer, Coby Lorenzen, both at UC Davis. Hanna “had to breed a tomato that could be harvested by a machine that did not yet exist,” as one account put it. Lorenzen, meanwhile, “had to develop a machine for a tomato that had not yet been bred.”

For more than a decade, Hanna bred hundreds of strains in search of a plant with tomatoes that would ripen at the same time, come easily off the vine, withstand the rough handling of a machine and still be suitable for use in cooked processed foods. Lorenzen devised as many as 40 different designs for a harvesting machine.

The machine made its debut in a field south of Davis in 1960, with hundreds of skeptical observers watching its progress, but few farmers expressed an interest in the machine until 1964. That’s when the federal bracero program, which had recruited farmworkers from Mexico, came to an end, and the prospect of losing a workforce made growers take the mechanical harvester more seriously. The timing proved a potent combination.

By 1968, 95% of the processed tomato crop was being harvested by machine. The farmers’ costs plummeted from 50% of production expenses to 12%. But the number of people who worked harvesting tomatoes plummeted too. In 1998, those who remained to run the machines, however, earned wages that were, according to a 2000 report by California Agriculture, 22% higher.

When the revolution was over, an estimated 45,000 braceros were gone. Between 5,000 and 10,000 processed tomato workers remained in the field. Tomato processing and farming operations, which some predicted would flee California for Mexico, instead stayed and expanded, leading to more cannery jobs. California now grows roughly five times more processed tomatoes than it grew in the pre-mechanized days.

Clearly, machine harvesting was a better way to get tomatoes out of the field. Not everyone, however, agreed that ought to be the only goal. The tomato harvester got credit for saving California’s tomato industry, but it also was blamed for decimating the participation of the small farmers who couldn’t afford the machinery. Its inventors won the city of Philadelphia’s honorary John Scott Medal, putting them in the same league as Thomas Edison and the Wright brothers as creators who added measurably to the “comfort, happiness and wellness” of mankind. But they also were derided as “social sleepwalkers” by William Friedland, an emeritus sociology professor at UC Santa Cruz, in a 1973 academic paper analyzing the state’s scientific and technological research agenda. Agricultural researchers, he wrote, failed to consider the societal implications of their invention.

“Rural communities have been sacrificed to agricultural productivity,” Friedland says today. “If you go to the Netherlands, national policy has encouraged the maintenance of really small-scale units, instead of going to a system that would produce economic concentration. What I’m suggesting is there are other ways of operating an agriculture system than what we have here.”

But to Jim Thompson, an engineer at UC Davis who analyzed the effects of the mechanization of the processed tomato harvest, the machine’s legacy is clear. The issue, Thompson says, is whether California agriculture will be stuck offering seasonal employment with poor wages to many, or invent machines that generate stable, year-round employment with decent wages for fewer workers.

As it is now, California farming towns and the people who live there pay a steep price for the seasonal nature of farm employment. That price includes the strain on charities and medical services, and the poor quality of life in communities where so many people struggle to pay for life’s basics. “Even if [wages] are good by the hour, they’re not good by the year,” he says. “If you foster stable employment, then you don’t have people who are unemployed for nine months of the year.”

The mechanical tomato harvester debate, naturally, found its way into the courtroom. William Hoerger, an attorney for California Rural Legal Assistance, represented farmworkers in a 1979 lawsuit that accused the University of California of unlawfully spending the public’s money on harvest mechanization research that ultimately displaced farmworkers and small family farmers. Land-grant universities were established as places that would conduct research to benefit rural communities and farmers, the lawsuit argued, not do research that put people out of work. The suit, considered a stunt until it won a partial victory in an early ruling, lost on appeal. But by then it had exposed prevailing public concerns about the loss of small farms and the withering of rural communities.

“Mechanization hit a public button,” Hoerger now says, “and the most notorious example was the tomato harvester.”

Even before the lawsuit, the anti-mechanization movement had discovered the book “Hard Tomatoes, Hard Times,” written in 1973 by Jim Hightower, who went on to become a two-time Texas agriculture commissioner and liberal radio personality. The title was a shot at the tomato harvester, and Hightower, with his characteristic Texas flair and ample statistics, argued that tax-supported research institutions had become the handmaiden of corporate agribusiness, not farmers or farm towns.

A seminal statement made by Bob Bergland, Jimmy Carter’s secretary of agriculture, captured the prevailing philosophy of the federal government during that era. Bergland said he would not endorse putting federal money into research where “the major effect of that research will be the replacing of an adequate and willing workforce with machines.”

The national public policy battle that erupted in California in the wake of the tomato harvester left two distinct visions of agriculture--one that promoted machines and eliminated the need for many workers but would give those who remained higher wages, far better working conditions and year-round employment on large, efficient farms and another that preserved jobs for a vast group of people. Those competing visions remain today.

Since the late 1970s, the anti-mechanization forces have had the advantage. The government-funded research that played a critical role in the development of the tomato harvester essentially ended with the controversy that followed its introduction. A purge of federal and state mechanization research projects followed Bergland’s statement, leaving only one survivor: Donald Peterson at the Agricultural Research Service’s Appalachian Fruit Research Station in Kearneysville, W.Va. “I was told to keep a low profile, and I did,” says Peterson, now 57 and contemplating retirement. “I’m the last one left. All those projects were closed out, and not because the [mechanization] problems have been solved.”

Analysts say government-funded research was the force that made progress possible. “With agricultural mechanization, you don’t just wake up one day and say, ‘Now I’m going to start harvesting with machines,’ ” says Philip Martin, a UC Davis agricultural economics professor. “One guy alone could not shift from handpicking tomatoes. It has to be an industry-wide thing. That’s why government has to play a role, and that’s why when government stopped playing the role, it slowed down the whole process.”

Twenty years ago, in an article in Science magazine, Martin and colleague Alan Olmstead analyzed the issues raised by the anti-mechanization lawsuit and the political tenor of the times. They presciently outlined the future that labor-intensive agriculture would face if mechanization research stopped: “Slowing the rate of mechanization is a prescription for increasing the industry’s vulnerability to foreign producers and intensifying the pressure on American fruit and vegetable farmers to import foreign workers who are willing to work for low wages. This could complicate the nation’s already serious immigration dilemma and perpetuate the ‘harvest-of-shame’ wages and working conditions that isolate the harvest labor market from other U.S. labor markets. Instead of preserving a labor-intensive industry dependent on alien workers in the United States, a rational strategy might be to phase out dependence on foreign workers by mechanizing wherever possible and importing more of the commodities that cannot be mechanized.”

That 1985 prediction bears an uncanny resemblance to the predicament confronting farmers in 2005. How much impact the proposed Specialty Crops Competitiveness Act would have on the pace of mechanization research is unclear, but it would certainly signal a shift in momentum.

From today’s vantage point, any worker victories over the encroachment by machinery seem pyrrhic. The use of farm labor contractors, whose fees cut into workers’ already limited wages, is on the rise. Across the country, worker-rights organizations are battling abuses that include instances of workers being denied payment and being held in virtual slavery. Conditions are sufficiently deplorable that Oxfam America, an international economic and social justice organization, bleakly pointed out the obvious last year: “Documented or not, farmworkers are human beings.”

Even the nation’s cheapest laborers are not proving themselves cheap enough. “We’ve had this cheap labor, but is it cheap if China gets into the citrus game and tree-fruit game with per capita incomes of $200 to $300?” asks John Burr, a fourth-generation California farmer who is an enthusiastic backer of robotic harvesting. “The grower is always better off if he can control his destiny.”

As for farmworkers, their destiny remains much the same as it always has been: uncertain.