farming – The OM Blog by Heizer, Render, & Munson

OM in the News: Robotic Harvesting Systems are Revolutionizing Farming

As we suggest in our text, the trade off between labor and capital investment is ongoing.

The growing demand for food supply that derives from the continuously increasing population has made agricultural productivity growth an important priority. Labor availability pressure driven by demographics of an aging population, increasing urbanization, climate change and land degradation, as well as certain limitations regarding the arable land availability push forward slowly but steadily, the use of advanced agricultural technologies.

Incorporating such technologies into agricultural production benefits the overall productivity and in turn supports the economic development and growth. (For details, see this new 29 page report titled “A Survey of Robotic Harvesting Systems and Enabling Technologies.”) Additionally, automation in agriculture helps improve the difficult work conditions of farmers and agricultural workers that are generally linked to various musculoskeletal disorders.

Functionalities and hardware typically required by an operating agricultural robot harvester include: (a) vision systems, (b) motion planning/navigation methodologies (for the robotic platform and/or arm), (c) Human-Robot-Interaction (HRI) strategies with 3D visualization, (d) system operation planning and grasping strategies and (e) robotic end-effector/gripper design.

Application of robotic solutions for crop monitoring and harvesting has significant beneficial effects on production profits, enabling faster and easier automated harvest and increasing crop quality and yield. So the development of robotic technologies and their application in agriculture is becoming a growing topic of operations management interest.

Classroom discussion questions:

Summarize some of the applications noted in this video and report.
Why is this an operations management issue?

OM in the News: A Forecasting Nightmare for Farmers

In early July, S. Carolina farmer Jeremy Storey dropped off an order of eggs at a restaurant’s back door as planned and continued on his way. But 6 hours later, he got a call that the eggs were never collected — the restaurant had suddenly closed because a staff member tested positive for Covid-19, and nobody canceled the order. After half a day in the hot sun, the eggs could no longer be eaten. “Half the restaurants we’re going to now, we find out upon delivering to them that they’re closed,” he said. He’s now sitting on a surplus of about 24,000 eggs, with no idea when, or if, things will stabilize.

The unpredictability is a major problem for farmers. If they can’t forecast what demand for eggs (and other products) will look like tomorrow, much less months out, they run the risk of overproducing — which would leave them with expensive surpluses — or underproducing, which would prevent them from having enough product on hand to meet demand.

Now, just as restaurants began to resume dine-in service, a new surge of coronavirus cases has paused reopening plans and put farmers back in limbo — and made it even more difficult to forecast. Planning is essential to farmers because they have to anticipate their customers’ demand months, and sometimes years, ahead of when they deliver so that they have enough time to grow crops or raise animals, writes CNN Business (July 16,2020).

Uncertainty “is really what’s causing the problem,” said a union exec. “There’s no end in sight. That makes it “really hard to plan for the future.” If the uncertainty drags out for another year or two, he said, some farms and restaurants will go out of business. It also means that some restaurants that make it through this dark period won’t have a steady source of supply at the other end.

Classroom discussion questions:

1 Should demand during the pandemic be excluded from future time-series forecasts?

2. With so much uncertainty, is it better to raise or lower production for the next agricultural cycle?

OM in the News: Farms, Robots, and Illegal Immigrants

Maria Guadalupe has gone from packing bagged salads into boxes to setting up and monitoring robots that do her old job.

Lettuce-packing facilities are wet, loud, and freezing — and much of the work is physically taxing, even mind-numbing. Now, a fleet of robots designed to replace humans, has become one of the agriculture industry’s latest answers to a diminishing supply of immigrant labor, reports The New York Times (Nov. 24, 2018). Smart machines can assemble 60 to 80 salad bags a minute, double the output of a worker.

Enlisting robots makes sound economic sense, with Americans’ insatiable appetite for healthy fare, at a time when companies cannot recruit enough people to work in the fields or the factory. A decade ago, people lined up by the hundreds for jobs at packing houses during the lettuce season. No more. But moving up the technology ladder creates higher-skilled positions that attract young people.

A 2017 survey found 55% of farmers reported labor shortages– 70% for those who depend on seasonal workers. About 3/4 of U.S. crop workers were born abroad, and they are overwhelmingly illegal. Beefed up border enforcement has rendered “follow-the-crop” migration a relative rarity.

California’s $54 billion agricultural industry is leading the move to automate in the fields and packing plants. Driscoll’s, the berry titan, has invested in several robotic strawberry harvesting start-ups which use imaging technology to assess a berry’s ripeness before it is harvested. Christopher Ranch, a giant in garlic, began using a 30-foot-tall robot to insert garlic buds into sleeves for sale in supermarkets. Bartley Walker now offers a robotic hoeing machine with a detection camera capable of identifying the weeds that sprout between row crops like broccoli and cauliflower. One machine replaces 11 workers. About 60% of the romaine lettuce and half of all cabbage and celery produced by Taylor Farms are harvested with automated systems. (Delicate fruit, like peaches, plums and raspberries will remain labor intensive for the foreseeable future).

Classroom discussion questions:

How is technology changing the crop industry?
What can be done to resolve the labor shortage?

OM in the News: Technology Driving the Farm Tractors

Dwindling farm incomes and open-source software are inspiring homespun hackers, helping advance farming technology. In Manitoba, farmer Matt Reimer has created a tractor that drives itself. — Homespun hackers are helping advance farming technology. Farmer Matt Reimer has created a tractor that drives itself.

The green tractor trundling across a Manitoba field with an empty cab looks like it’s on a collision course with Matt Reimer’s combine—until it neatly turns to pull alongside so he can pour freshly harvested wheat into its trailer. The robot tractor isn’t a prototype or top-of-the-line showpiece. It’s an 8-year-old John Deere that Reimer modified with drone parts, open-source software and a Microsoft tablet. All told, those items cost him around $8,000. “Reimer’s alterations are part of a technology revolution sweeping North America’s breadbasket,” writes The Wall Street Journal (April 19. 2016).

Farmers, many of them self-taught, are building their own robotic equipment, satellite-navigation networks and mobile applications, moving their tinkering projects out of machine sheds and behind a computer screen. This homespun hacking—which sometimes leapfrogs innovations by big equipment companies like John Deere and Trimble Navigation—reflects dwindling farm incomes, the low price of electronic hardware and, sometimes, off-season boredom. Technology is already firmly rooted in modern farming, allowing a shrinking number of farmers to oversee more acres. Advances like auto-steering tractors have freed some farmers to trade futures contracts on their smartphones from inside a tractor cab, pausing only to turn and stop their machines. Defectors from Silicon Valley powerhouses like Google and Yahoo are building software to analyze soil and manage fertilizer use.

With less money to spend, some farmers say they can build their own tools, suited to their farms, at a lower cost. “Poverty is the mother of invention,” said farmer Jim Poyzer, who used to be a programmer. During the winter months Poyzer began tinkering with a microprocessor, eventually developing a system to monitor and adjust how many seeds his planter places in his Iowa fields. The system tailors the flow of seeds to the soil’s ability to produce healthy crops.

Classroom discussion questions:

What other tools of OM can farmers employ to increase productivity and profits?
Why are the large equipment manufacturers leading the technology charge?

OM in the News: Cows Now Milk Themselves With Farm Robotics

Something strange is happening at farms in upstate New York, reports The New York Times (April 23, 2014). The cows are milking themselves. Desperate for reliable labor and buoyed by soaring prices, dairy operations across the state are charging into a brave new world of udder care: robotic milkers, which feed and milk cow after cow without the help of a single farmhand. The view is improved as well. “Most milking parlors, you really only see the back end of the cow,” says one farmer. “I don’t see that as building up much of a relationship.”

The cows seem to like it, too. Robots allow the cows to set their own hours, lining up for automated milking 5 or 6 times a day — turning the predawn and late-afternoon sessions around which dairy farmers long built their lives into a thing of the past. With transponders around their necks, the cows get individualized service. Lasers scan and map their underbellies, and a computer charts each animal’s “milking speed,” a critical factor in a 24-hour-a-day operation. The robots also monitor the amount and quality of milk produced, the frequency of visits to the machine, how much each cow has eaten, and even the number of steps each cow has taken per day.

Farmers say the machines allow them to do more of what they love: caring for animals. “I’d rather be a cow manager, than a people manager,” adds a farm owner. The machines cost up to $250,000 for a unit that includes a mechanical arm, teat-cleaning equipment, computerized displays, a milking apparatus and sensors to detect the position of the teats. Some owners expected a dip in production as their cows got used to the machines. But the cattle were quick learners. “It just clicked,” said one. “One day we came in and they had started milking themselves.” We think your students will enjoy this very down-to-earth 3 minute video embedded in the article.

Classroom discussion questions:

1. Why is this an OM issue?
2. What other technologies noted in Chapter 7 can be employed in this industry?