Farmworkers face coronavirus risk: ‘You can’t pick strawberries over Zoom’

Sorry, I am going to be the insensitive sleazeball here.<p>The point of staying at home is not that if you get this disease you are going to die. The issue is that if we ALL get it then a larger proportion of people are going to die because we don&#x27;t have enough hospitals.<p>We had to choose some people as being important enough that they are allowed to be out and about and use some of that valuable limited healthcare resources while the rest of us try really hard not to get sick and risk going to the hospital. If this goes south, you may wish that you were one of the people who got the disease early.<p>Farm labor has always gotten the short end of the stick and this is an added burden. I would vote to give them extra income during this period if that was being considered. But the fact is that they are part of the food chain in this country and so are considered &quot;essential&quot; people to continue doing their jobs.

Planet Money did a good podcast on this topic recently. I learned that it&#x27;s hard to follow CDC guidelines when you&#x27;re sleeping 20 in a garage and there&#x27;s only enough water to shower every few days.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.npr.org&#x2F;2020&#x2F;03&#x2F;25&#x2F;821593542&#x2F;episode-984-food-and-farmworkers" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.npr.org&#x2F;2020&#x2F;03&#x2F;25&#x2F;821593542&#x2F;episode-984-food-an...</a>

I would think out of every job in a supply chain field workers would be some of the best protected by default. Not (often) working in air-recircuculated environments, many already wear face masks and gloves, less crowded than warehouses, working in the sun and often more humid environments.<p>The big issues I think would be sick pay (mentioned), or migrating workers who travel very far, including across borders.

Remember, flattening the curve doesn’t necessarily mean that fewer people in total get sick, the area under the curve might be the same, esp. if it becomes like the common cold in terms of evading our immune system.<p>We are just trying to buy time to ramp up production of materials that can reduce the burden on the medical system.

I&#x27;m not sure about strawberries but aren&#x27;t farmworkers in general essential workers? Our food supply and delivery chain is what allows others to stay at home.

I have been farming for 8 years and asking for Meaningful Ag automation for 5. Applied twice to YC.<p>Simply put there is no $$ to replace manual labour. All Agtech is a sham. They are pimps for data collected from farms and fields that get fed to Wall Street and input and pesticide and tractor companies that use it to sell more stuff to farmers.<p>It doesn’t save farmers money. It doesn’t bring them meaningful Agtech or being Agbots and Farmbot to replace farm labour. The only agtech worth investing is Agtech that harvests data. That’s why probably all the Agtech and Agbot startups have investments from Ag input companies. It’s a dirty little secret that anyone can find out with a little bit of digging around...<p>Agtech has betrayed Ag.

Off-topic, but how did zoom become the Kleenex of video-conferencing apps? I’ve been doing a lot of video-conferencing, but haven’t used zoom. Is it the best one, or is there some other explanation?

Look at those photos. Those citrus trees are canopied trees. You can let an Agbot roam in that orchard. It won’t even pick up signals. There is no systems approach. If you can’t harvest data, no Agbots. I understand the importance of data with tech. But if the end result is data, then it is the product. It doesn’t enable Ag.

You can&#x27;t pick strawberries over zoom, but it&#x27;s pretty easy to distance yourself from others on a farm. And let&#x27;s face it, if you have the physical fortitude for farm work, you aren&#x27;t at risk from coronavirus.

Well, not yet. Joystick and a little remote device (or something) and maybe one day we will do stuff like this without fully solving machine learning vision type problems.<p>Please be quiet kids! I&#x27;m picking strawberries. Actually, Bobby, come over here. Do you want to play a game while I take a nap?