To apply robotic berry pickers you normally need to produce in a large scale (many tons of berries). So you will need to distribute them. If you don’t apply the externalities of transportation and preservation of the food it would seem that this kind of production makes sense but it doesn’t. It actually less effective if you count for the costs of transportation, packaging and freezing.

Environmentally this is also known as “mix vs sort” and is almost a physical rule. If your are very good in mixing (making things at large scale), your tend to be bad in sorting (distributing things).

Here is the book that talks about it in the 1930 https://soilandhealth.org/wp-content/uploads/0303critic/0303...

> To apply robotic berry pickers you normally need to produce in a large scale (many tons of berries).

Farmers could rent the machine. So the machine can travel instead of the berries.

Also, robotics is in many industries not competitive against cheap labor from low-wage countries. However, for agriculture that might be different, precisely because of distribution costs (e.g., it's expensive to ship fruits and vegetables from China).

I agree, we can apply robotics but always thinking in small scale farming, otherwise the gains in production will be lost in distribution. Sadly right now we are not paying for externalities of distribution so there is no incentive for thinking in small distributed economies.

There are more benefits of thinking small. We are creating a big interdependent and fragile economy. It’s seems robust but a black swan event - as Nassin Taleb would name - can provoke global disaster. Small scale economies are less exposed to this.