BELOW AVERAGE IS OVER:

Weeding lettuce is slow, expensive, and potentially dangerous due to chemical exposure. Farm workers must spray individual weeds from a pesticide-filled backpack. Automated systems like the one designed by Danish firm F. Poulsen Engineering replace this with mechanical weeding and computer vision to distinguish between crops and pests. The company says it can do the job much faster and at no extra cost. That hits the sweet spot for inexpensive machinery to replace high-cost labor.

"Agriculture for hundreds of years has been an intuition business," says Lux's lead agricultural analyst Sara Olson in an interview. That will end as "precision agriculture" brings data and automation to traditional tasks, making farming more productive and profitable, she predicts. At first, robots will make existing jobs more productive. But jobs will ultimately be lost as robots assume more and more of the work. "Over time, there would have to be a shift," says Olson. "It will happen slowly enough that I see an opportunity for people who want to be in the industry to learn how to operate machinery, manufacture the equipment, and service and support these new systems."

Robots will likely make inroads fastest in areas where the labor is backbreaking, and peak harvest times create a short supply of workers. 

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