The Reality of Agriculture Labor

More machines =? Better productivity and Less Labor.?

This statement is deeply entrenched in human evolution. A few thousand years ago, getting food was the only ‘job’ humans had. Over time, with the invention of machines, we were able to grow more food with a lesser number of people.?

As engineers, getting into farming, the first thing we tried to do was to improve productivity by eliminating labor, and boy were we in for a surprise!

Based on the crop, the most basic farming operations such as weeding, spraying nutrients, planting and harvesting can be done efficiently and effectively only by human labor.?

While mechanization has reduced human intervention in certain countries for certain crops, there are no scalable ‘economical alternatives’ in India yet.?

Economics Trumps Everything Else: Cost of labor is cheaper in India.

• Machine transplanting costs about Rs 6000/acre, about 50% higher than manual transplanting and the yield is not necessarily higher for machine transplanted crops!
• Drone Spray for paddy costs about Rs 400-Rs 500/acre, while manual spray costs about Rs 350-400/acre. There are other constraints with drones that we’ll expand in the next post.?

No Versatile and Flexible Equipment for our Field Layouts and Soil Type

• The area we farm is full of weird shaped fields, we also have low hanging power lines and poles at inconvenient locations that make equipment movement a nightmare. One slight touch and the equipment can explode.
• The gradients between fields are sometimes very steep and often places where equipment gets stuck.
• Certain soil types are very difficult for equipment, lands that are either sandy, stony or clayey are difficult to mechanize.

• When there are a lot of stones in the soil like our Kotagiri field, any tilling operations and planting operations become very difficult. The stones break the plough points or grind them down to nubs. At Machapur, where we have a lot of black cotton soil, heavy tractors get stuck in the mud and a lot of skill is needed to extricate them

Human labour is light, flexible, making them ‘all-terrain’ to operate on any kind of field and at a much lower cost.

Fun fact: There is a superstition in our area that women walking through the fields to deweed bring a good amount of luck and increase the yield. The science behind that is - the impact on the paddy roots from people walking on the field, allows the roots to move a bit and get access to air and more nutrients increasing yields.

Returns don’t justify Capex required for Automation/Mechanization

• For certain crops that don’t have on-ground operational constraints - soil/layout/terrain, unit operational costs are much cheaper with equipment than labor. For example: Maize seeded with Manual Labor costs about Rs 4500 per acre, and Maize seeded with Super Seeder is Rs 2500 per acre. Though it is cheaper to go with equipment, the capex required is prohibitively high unless farming is done on a large scale.
• Farmers typically use a 40HP tractor, and it's not powerful enough to run the ‘Super Seeder’ attachment. They need to purchase a powerful tractor. Upgrading to a single piece of equipment is not enough, additional capex is required to upgrade the entire ecosystem.

The truth is that agri labor is declining across the world for various reasons.?

Here’s an overview of how our region is adapting to declining labor.?

Migrant Labour: Our region loses a lot of rural labor to the Middle East and other urban areas in India. We depend on migrant labor from Bihar/West Bengal/Jharkand/Chattisgarh. Based on their skill level, they make anywhere from 50k-75k rupees a month. The migrant labor finds work for a good part of the year, as they travel across the country.?

Fun Fact: 73% of agri-labor in the US is all immigrant labor.?

Accepting lower yield: In Nalgonda (a district in Telangana) where there is an acute shortage of labour, farmers do ‘direct seeding’ of rice instead of transplanting. This reduces the overall yield by about 20%, bringing down profitability by about 30%. Left with no alternatives and equipment farmers are forced to stomach this loss.?

Chemical Alternatives for Manual Deweeding: Last season we didn't have enough labor for deweeding and due to this we had to spray a selective herbicide Vivayan on our fields. This was expensive and however selective a herbicide is, it still reduces the overall yield of the farm.

Adopting Crops that are Easier to Grow: Though we have access to migrant labor for seasonal high value tasks such as transplanting, finding regular labor is tough. A lot of farmers in our area have shifted to paddy as it requires the least amount of labor. Farmers are unable to farm higher value crops that give better farmer incomes as they do not have access to regular labor on their fields.?

Developed countries like the US, China? and Europe have not managed to fully eliminate labor on their large farms. It is going to be a while before we can eliminate it on fields like ours. Our only fear is this labor shortage should not impact food security and price while we transition to more automation.?

In the last two decades, on an absolute scale, China has lost almost 50% of its agri labor to other industries and India has lost 10% of its agri labor.

Industrialization in China, led to diverting its rural labor to manufacturing and construction. This has resulted in growth in rural household incomes enabling farmers to grow higher value produce. Assured household income or reserve capital is necessary to experiment with crops and increase income from agri.?

To retain or grow India’s agricultural productivity despite declining agri labor, we need favorable reforms–land aggregation, crop insurance, capital infusion to build and manage infrastructure. Technology on the farms will only take us so far.