rScotty, yes of course. Most fresh produce in the US is grown in California. This year, min wage has been set to 13/hour and you can work crews for 50 hours a week before you hit overtime. Next year, that clicks up to 14/hour min plus a limit of 45 hours / week before you hit 1.5X overtime. The year after (2022), that clicks up to 15/hour and just a 40 hour work week. In essence, each year by law labor gets 7 to 8% more expensive, and 10 to 11% less available.
In short, the particularly labor-intensive crops are hitting a threshold where labor renders them no-longer sustainable. This is why 80% of the worlds almonds are grown in California - it's one of the only high-value crops that can be all machine harvested. For table grapes, caneberries, stone fruit, fresh market blueberries, and many other crops, there's no mechanization available.
This is where our Burros slot in. Autonomy you can buy today (there's virtually nothing else on the market) in a people-scale platform that can later be expanded towards further automation.
We are constantly thinking about the what else to add question also. Should we add a 26 to 33 inch mower deck to mow for example? We generally look at these questions through the lens of labor - if there are a lot of people doing the work, there's likely high value via automation.
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Interesting....To tell the truth, I don't know quite what to do with your reply because it is so contrary to what I experienced that it makes little to no sense to me. In fact, now I am wondering if this "Burro" is real or just a hopeful pipe dream. If the latter, hang in there. I don't want to put up objections to anyone's dreams, but a bit of a reality check never hurts.
Although farming expenses do go up, basing your business decisions on the farm wages you show seems like an unrealistic and even somewhat bizarre type of metric. Frankly, it sounds academic rather than realistic. Perhaps someone has given you some bad information. If so, you may want to look into who and why.
I'm willing to grant there may be a few specialty farmers who pay minimum wage. Our family ran across one of those farmers one year while working in a vinyard grapes north of San Francisco. That was a wonderful winter. But they didn't do it the next year and we never ran across another - although our family did farm labor for decades.
The majority of farmers don't pay a minimum wage now, they never have done so, and I doubt they ever will. Not even close. Nobody checks on what farm workers are paid; as a political issue it's not even close to being on any realistic agenda. I'm not trying to be flip; but I am surprised to hear anyone quote those inflated farm wages.
Farmers don't pay that much because legally they don't have to. Adults doing farm labor - as well as children working with adults and/or parents - are specifically exempted from the requirements of minimum and overtime wages under the provisions of both the National Labor Relations Act (NRLA) and the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). Farm labor has been exempt from any sort of wage protection for my lifetime, my parent's lifetime, and back before them. There are a few simple outdated safety standards, but that is all.
As a prospective harvest worker, just bringing the subject up to a farmer would mean that you wouldn't get the job. It would label you as a potential troublemaker. From the farmer's viewoint, why should he bother to negotiate? There are plenty of others willing to take on the work.
I'm just not sure that Mechanized Burros relate to Farm Wages as you proposing in post #275.
rScotty
BTW, we were called "Harvies" - both among ourselves and also by the larger farming community. It's not entirely a respecful term but we wore it proudly.
