Robocrop

Today’s episode is about a future where nobody works on farms anymore, all farming is done by robots. Is it possible? Probably not. But it might be closer than you think.

Today’s episode features:

Curtiz Marez, a professor at UC San Diego and the author of Farm Worker Futurism: Speculative Technologies of Resistance which is the book that inspired this episode.
Sarah Mock, a former Wyoming farm kid turned farm researcher with the Farmers Business Network.
JJ Price, the global marketing manager at Spread, a lettuce factory in Japan.
My grandma. She doesn’t have a website.

We start this episode with some history, going back to the 1934 World Fair which featured the Farm Machinery Hall, full all kinds of machines: harvesters, threshers, cultivators ,corn pickers, mowers, tractors and mechanical cotton harvesters. There was even a milking machine on display, set up to milk an animatronic cow that could moo, switch its tail, turn its head, wink, chew cud and breathe. The c