It turns out that lettuce is a labor-intensive crop. Workers with shovels thin the lettuce plants, weed them as necessary, and harvest them by hand. No machines have been found that don't crush the lettuce plants.
Until now. They interviewed a farmer experimenting with a tractor complete with an imac computer that automatically maps the lettuce plants, takes pictures of them, and thins them to the right spacing within a tenth of an inch. Later it harvests them when they are the perfect size.
The worker driving the tractor just has to push a few buttons for this modern marvel to do all the back-breaking labor formerly done by humans.
The part that had me cussing though, was the way the machine thins the lettuce plants.
The reporter says the tractor shoots a "killing spray" on the plants that are not in the right place.
Killing spray is another word for herbicide or pesticide, so I'm pretty sure my organic farmers will not be using this tractor any time soon.
Killing sprays are not uncommon in fields. There was a time (I hope this is not still a common practice) when Agent Orange-like herbicides were sprayed on crops of green beans to defoliate them so the tractors could more easily pick the beans. When machines get involved in agriculture, chemicals are not far behind.
It's another reminder that healthy organic earth-friendly vegetables require people willing to do tough menial labor for very little money. It raises the question of why we insist on paying so comparatively little for fresh produce when it is labor intensive and time sensitive?
I suppose mainstream farmers are realizing that since we don't value our food enough to pay a living wage and provide less oppressive working conditions, they'll eliminate the workers and use machines to grow vegetables in ways that poison our earth, and most likely our bodies.
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