The question often heard is who will pick our produce under tighter immigration enforcement? Maybe the question that aught to be asked is when will humanoid robots be doing that job? In this Tough Things First podcast, Ray Zinn tells us the one constant is change.
Ray Zinn: Hi, Rob.
Rob Artigo: Well, I’ve heard this repeated frequently, and maybe you have as well, the often heard quote, “Who will pick our crops if migrants are sent home?” Now, we’re not anti-immigrant or migrant here at Tough Things First. That’s not the point here. The point is, now the replacement of those workers has already been going on for many years, and that’s bound to accelerate, don’t you think?
Ray Zinn: Yes. Back in the ’50s when I was working for my father, we had a cattle ranch and a feedlot, I should say cattle feedlot, and we would feed the cattle with hay and grain and so forth. Back in the day, we would hire these migrants. They would come over the border, but they would go home at night, but they would come over and work during the daytime to help take care of the cattle, to clean the corrals and to walk and clean their drinkers and also to feed them. And we used to feed them with pitchforks and bags of grain. That’s the way we used to feed them. But then we wanted to improve the growth of the animal so it would fatten up faster. And so we built a mill and we used to grind the hay and then a mix of feed with the grain with the hay and mix it with a little molasses, which was very tasty for the cattle.
And then it would be delivered in a truck with an auger that would dispense the feed into the troughs. And that concerned our migrants because they used to do that by hand. In other words, that was what they did. They would kind of chop up the hay and mix the grain with the hay and so forth. But it was very inefficient and it wasn’t very productive, and the animals didn’t do as well as it did when we improved the automation. And my dad reassured them that, “Oh, we used to love the job. There’s still things to be done.” And we found other ways that we could help employ their efforts rather than feeding the animals. And it was very effective in getting them to understand because to make the feed, we had to have people loading onto the conveyor. We had to have them cut the strings on the bales, and then they had to operate the batcher, which is the weighing device that weighed the hay and then dispenses the grain and somebody had to load the bins.
And I said, “So you didn’t lose your job. Your job changed. So it’s a job change rather than losing it.” And so when we talk about the who’s going to pick our fruit, if it is automated, somebody’s going to have to operate those automated systems. Granted, they’re going to have to change. The migrants that were working at my dad’s feedlot, they had to learn how to run the hay grinder or chopper and how to operate the mixers and so forth. They had to learn how to do that. And they didn’t have that skill set before, but they had to be taught. So when you talk about who’s going to pick our crops, if it’s automated, somebody’s going to have to manage that. You’re not going to get rid of humans just because you automate.
Rob Artigo: That’s a fascinating story because we had talked about how much automation is going on with running cattle in Mexico right now. Very large cattle organizations that are being almost entirely run by some kind of machine. So harvest automation has been going on for a long time. In the Central Valley of California, for example, they have machines that run up and down and pick grapes and nuts off of trees and fruit and all kinds of things now, which is something that used to be done by hand. But now we have humanoid robots that are coming online, and so they’re working in warehouses and they’re doing other things.
These are, I’m sure, very expensive. Maybe one day they’ll be less expensive. The headline that caught my attention this week, China Launches center to train 100 plus humanoid robots simultaneously. And it says, “Training its future workforce one robot at a time.” And that caught my attention because I thought, “Well, wait a minute, if you have to… I don’t know if you’d ever get to where if a robot does the work of 10 people because it never needs to take a break. Does that cost end up being the replacement of somebody who is a low skilled sort of manual labor type of position?”
Ray Zinn: Well, China is the most populous nation, either that or India is the most populous nation in the world. And most of those people are doing manual type labor and not operating sophisticated computers and so forth. Just like in the case of my father’s place, it costs a fortune to put in that mill that ground the hay and the batchers and the mixtures and all that stuff we had to put in. And that was to help reduce the cost of fattening up an animal. There’s no way a human could do that task. And so we had to use machinery to do it, but then there are half the people operate the machinery. And the same thing in the case of when we go from people doing it manually to humanoids robots. Back in the day, Adam Smith was a well-known author. He talked about the differentiation of labor. I don’t know if that’s the exact title, but it’s something like that.
Divisional labor, that’s what it’s called. Divisional labor. And that was back in the 1700s when the locomotive became into being. And we had other things that were automated back in the 1700s. And that was a big concern that Adam Smith talked about was the division of labor. And you can read about that. This has been a concern of humans since the beginning of time is having humanoids or robotic or mechanical ways of accomplishing tasks. And as I said, you can read about that. You can pick up the book. It’s been written… It’s been one of the most read books in history is The Wealth of Nations, I guess that’s the title of it. And so this is nothing new. We’ve been talking about this in our country since the 1600s. We just have to live with the fact that automation is to improve our lives. It’s not to take away jobs or to eliminate labor. It is to help us improve. We improve through automation.
And so I look at this as being a godsend to the average employee and not something where they’re going to cause them to lose their job. They may change the way they do their work. In other words, they’ll have to be taught as China does with somebody’s got to teach those humanoid robots. But it’s to make it more efficient. It’s not to eliminate people’s jobs. It’s to make the process more efficient and make it more available to more people.
Rob Artigo: You’re talking about China’s workforce is because of the one child policy in China, you have a shrinking… You have an aging workforce and no replacement for them. And that’s happening in a lot of places like in the US where you’re going to need those extra workers to get things done because you’re not having people have a lot of kids unfortunately. I think that’s really unfortunate that we’re not replacing ourselves. But that’s a story for another day.
Ray Zinn: But again, manual labor. Manual labor is a misnomer. It’s kind of like in computers, manual labor, I used to write my emails with my hand and a pen and a piece of paper, but now I type on a keyboard, so that’s still manual. Granted, I’m not long handing my emails and I’m not sending them out through the postal service. And now I typing them on a keyboard and then getting them sent out via the internet, but that’s still manual. I’m still having to do something manually. And so you’re not going to get rid of manual labor. There’s going to be manual… There’s no such a thing as total elimination of manual effort. So manual effort, you may change the way you do it, but it’s still manual.
Rob Artigo: Interesting topic, Ray. Very, very interesting topic. I’d invite the listeners to go to toughthingsfirst.com to check out more podcasts. You can also offer your questions there. If you have comments, those are welcome as well. Follow Ray on X and on Facebook and LinkedIn and of course, pick up Ray’s books, Tough Things First, the original, and as you heard, Zen of Zinn I, II, and III. On sale now, the Essential Leader by Ray Zen, 10 Skills, Attributes, and Fundamentals that Make Up the Essential Leader. Thank you, Ray.
Ray Zinn: Thank you, Rob.
