XPost: rec.arts.comics.strips   
   From: kludge@panix.com   
      
   Your Name   wrote:   
   >For many fruits and vegetables, picking machines are simply useless and   
   >damage the fruit, making it worthless. Human pickers are a far better   
   >option - usually they're low-paid students, travellers, and imported   
   >temporary workers, mainly because nobody else actually wants to do the   
   >physically hard work, often in the blazing sun.   
      
   The one thing that has made picking machines possible has been the breeding   
   of more rugged fruit varieties.  Machine picking of tomatoes only works   
   because we now have tough-skinned tomatoes that can be shot through a   
   hoppier.   
      
   One of the more interesting cases is tea.  The Soviets designed machines   
   that went over rows of tea plants with a hedge clipper, and produced large   
   amounts of really crappy tea by indiscriminately taking leaves.  The   
   Japanese now make their lower quality teas with a manually operated   
   clipper which is guided to each leaf by an operator but which cuts off   
   and vacuums up the leaves.  But if you want to do the traditional "two   
   leaves and a bud" harvesting, you're still stuck with a huge amount of   
   labour.   
      
   A friend across the river has a sweet potato farm, and he uses machine   
   picking (which destroys everything above-ground) which he says gets about   
   80% of the tubers in the ground.  Then he calls in a church group which   
   picks the last 20% for charity.   
   --scott   
   --   
   "C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)