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SPEAKER_07: Colorado's governor, Jared Polis, is claiming the chili in Pueblo is better than ours. Naturally, New Mexico's governor had no choice but to respond in kind.
SPEAKER_06: This morning, Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham defended our precious crop on Twitter, saying, quote,
SPEAKER_07: If Pueblo chili were any good, it would have been on national shelves before now. In New Mexico, chili peppers are everywhere.
SPEAKER_06: Ristras of dried chilis hang from every doorway. They are prominently featured on license plates. Chili pepper cheeseburgers are part of the standard menu at McDonald's. I can report they are not very good. And New Mexico remains the only state in the union with an official state question. Red or green? It's chili season right now in New Mexico, which means that the state's chili pepper pride is ramped up to the next level.
SPEAKER_11: That's reporter Rose Evelith, host of the Flash Forward podcast.
SPEAKER_06: There are chili scented candles for sale.
SPEAKER_11: The roads are dotted with big white signs that say fresh chili this way. And every parking lot seems to have a roaster going, tumbling green and red chili peppers over a fire. And in September 2019, on an incredibly windy day in Socorro, the New Mexico Chili Association hosted the first ever New Mexico chili taste-off.
SPEAKER_06: And when I asked farmers at the chili taste-off about the rivalry with Colorado, they basically just laughed.
SPEAKER_11: No, Colorado doesn't scare us. Bring it on. She asked us if we were worried about Colorado chili. Oh, not at all. Not at all.
SPEAKER_03: No, if I want to go to Colorado for something, it won't be for chili. I might go skiing. But probably not even that.
SPEAKER_06: Amidst all this Colorado trash talking, the organizers of the chili taste-off also crowned the chili queen of New Mexico. June Rutherford, your royal chili highness, is 95 years old.
SPEAKER_11: June has been in the business since she was a little girl, when her father carried her around in the fields in a pepper sack. There's even a chili pepper variety named after her, the Miss Junie. And she wasn't going to let a little wind stop her from talking up New Mexico chili. Our chili has a better taste than anywhere else. And I'm not bragging. There's nobody.
SPEAKER_04: Texas, Arizona, California, and even Colorado can't beat us. They can't beat us. We have something that nobody's got.
SPEAKER_06: There's no secret ingredient to New Mexico's chili peppers, unless you count tradition. New Mexicans like June have been growing their own varieties for over a hundred years, mostly on small family farms that remain dedicated to this one beloved crop for generations.
SPEAKER_11: But despite these growers' pride in their peppers, all is not well in Miss Junie's kingdom. New Mexico's chili may be the best in the world, but for a while now, the chili business has been in trouble.
SPEAKER_06: New Mexico chili farmers have a problem, one that might soon force them to choose between tradition and technology.
SPEAKER_11: When I started reporting this story, everybody told me I had to talk to a guy named Glenn Duggins. They told me that Glenn was a great, cheery, friendly guy. But when I first called him about chili, and I asked, is this Glenn? He answered, what's left of him. Do you ever get nostalgic about the old chili days?
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I miss them. It was easy. I miss them. Help was easy. Everybody made money. We stayed drunk most of the time. I mean, we had a good time at it. It's not near as fun anymore.
SPEAKER_06: Glenn runs a chili farm called Five Star Chili in Socorro, New Mexico, and he says that every year, things get a little more bleak for the business.
SPEAKER_11: It's not that nobody wants to buy chili. Nationwide demand for chili peppers is at an all-time high. And yet, the economics of being a chili farmer, they're just not working out. It's been wild this year. It was bad weather, but it's more than that.
SPEAKER_02: It was like the perfect storm came together. We had bad weather. You have fewer farmers. You have fewer acres.
SPEAKER_11: To make matters worse, chili grown in Mexico is often trucked over the border, labeled as New Mexico chili, and sold for far cheaper than the farmers in the state can compete with. But Glenn says that there's one thing in particular that has him, and other chili farmers, especially worried.
SPEAKER_06: Chili farmers are used to bad weather, to competition, to all that other stuff. But now, even if they had perfect weather, perfect crop of chilis, and no competition at all, they'd still have a problem. There just aren't enough workers to pick the peppers.
SPEAKER_02: We hire everybody that comes up. Everybody.
SPEAKER_11: When I visited Glenn's farm, he had eight workers out in the field picking chilis. He says on a good year, in the past, he would have had 30, mostly from Mexico.
SPEAKER_02: They would go to one ranch house, work a few days for them, they'd feed them, take care of them, and this and that, and go to the next ranch house, and they would eventually get here. That hasn't happened in years.
SPEAKER_11: Ten years ago, he used to wake up in the morning, at the start of chili season, and have the 30 guys he needed just standing in his driveway. They just show up.
SPEAKER_11: They knock on your door.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah, they know where to go.
SPEAKER_02: And they're not showing up.
SPEAKER_02: They're not showing up.
SPEAKER_11: It's not just Glenn, and it's not just the chili industry. Farms across the United States are reporting shortages of labor. Since 2002, the number of immigrants coming to the United States to work in agriculture has dropped by 75%.
SPEAKER_06: In California, one survey found that 56% of farmers were unable to hire enough workers.
SPEAKER_08: The number of people immigrating to the U.S. for farm labor has actually been going down since 2008, like when the economy crashed here. That's Sarah Tabor, a crop scientist based in Fayetteville, North Carolina, and she says the Great Recession scrambled the familiar labor paradigm, in which migrant workers would arrive in the U.S. looking for work on farms.
SPEAKER_11: A lot of folks were like, wait, I can actually do better for myself just staying home in Mexico.
SPEAKER_08: Increasingly, potential foreign workers are staying put in their home countries to work in places like call centers.
SPEAKER_11: And Sarah points out that the children of immigrants who came to the U.S. and went into agriculture, they're not following suit. So the folks who already came to the U.S. for farm labor, they're getting older, and their kids are not going into that.
SPEAKER_08: They're here to make their lives better, and they're like, please kids, don't go into picking chilis. It's not even that this work doesn't pay well. It does.
SPEAKER_11: Farm laborers in New Mexico's chili fields can make double the state's minimum wage. They can make nearly twice as much picking chili as they could working at a chilis restaurant.
SPEAKER_10: But they still don't want to do it.
SPEAKER_06: In part because picking chili peppers can be especially grueling work, even compared to other crops. Chili plants grow low to the ground, and the chilis themselves often sit close to the stem, nestled deep inside the bush. So workers have to hunch over in the hot sun to get them. All this while wearing gloves to protect their hands from the oils that give chilis their characteristic heat.
SPEAKER_11: And green chili peppers, the kind Glenn and a lot of other New Mexico chili farmers rely on, are especially hard to pick. Green chilis are just unripe red chilis, which means that the seeds inside of them aren't ready to germinate yet. The plant doesn't want to give its fruits up, so its stems won't let go without a fight.
SPEAKER_02: And we hire people every year, like citizens here that need a job and know I can do that. They quit by noon. It's too hard. It's not the money. They don't want to stoop over and pick chili or hoe weeds. They won't do it. I mean, I'm not going to do it. Are you?
SPEAKER_06: In order to stay afloat, small family farms like Glenn's have been planting less and less chili every year in favor of other less labor-intensive crops. In 1997, New Mexico chili farmers planted over 30,000 acres. Last year, there was only 8,400. And now, some younger farmers are opting not to plant chili at all.
SPEAKER_11: As Glenn showed me around his farm, he pointed out into the distance where his son was driving a tractor, raking up hay. Is he going to take over after you retire?
SPEAKER_02: I think, but he won't do chili, I bet. Why not? He sees what I go through. I go through it. I mean, what we have, we made years ago. We haven't done anything in the last six, eight years. Do you think it'll ever get back to that?
SPEAKER_09: No.
SPEAKER_02: Why not? I don't see how the... how?
SPEAKER_06: Glenn genuinely doesn't know the answer to that question, nor do a lot of other chili farmers.
SPEAKER_11: But if you've been paying attention to almost every other industry, you might be wondering, why can't Glenn just get a machine to pick his peppers?
SPEAKER_06: After all, it wouldn't be the first time a machine has replaced human hands in the field. Especially, as Sarah Tabor points out, in a country with abundant land and scarce labor.
SPEAKER_08: It's always been very easy if you are a white person in the United States to get your own land. And as a result, you could get way more land than you could actually work yourself pretty easily. So then what do you do with it? In the South, landowners cultivated more land than they could on their own through the use of slavery.
SPEAKER_11: After slavery was outlawed, the same landowners increasingly rented their land out on unfair terms to sharecroppers, and in the North, to tenant farmers, who would harvest things like grain. So like, grain used to be really, really super labor intensive. You had to cut it by hand, you had to dry it, stack it, thresh it, you know, all of that stuff that was all done by hand.
SPEAKER_06: But then in the 1880s, commercial production began on a combine harvester, a machine that could do it all at once. That's why they call it a combine.
SPEAKER_11: The combine harvester allowed landowners to harvest all their grain themselves, no extra help required.
SPEAKER_10: So they kicked all the tenant farmers off the land and kept the profits for themselves. The American agricultural industry has been busy automating things ever since.
SPEAKER_06: In 1936, the first practical cotton picking machine was demonstrated in Mississippi. That same year, a patent was filed for the first fully automatic hay baler. And in 1963, a team at UC Davis released a machine that could harvest tomatoes.
SPEAKER_11: More recently, machines have started harvesting everything from olives to potatoes to carrots.
SPEAKER_06: So why not chilies? Well, it turns out, it's not easy for a machine to pick a pepper.
SPEAKER_12: In the beginning, I was definitely the optimism of being new at it. So I think I even had growers ask me then, well, how long? And I think I would sit back then five years and I have to laugh. This is Stephanie Walker, a crop scientist at New Mexico State University, who for the past 15 years has been leading a team working on the holy grail of chilies,
SPEAKER_10: figuring out a way to pluck a green chili pepper off a plant with a machine. When Stephanie first started, automatic harvesters for ripe, ready-to-pick red chili peppers were already in the process of being perfected.
SPEAKER_06: But she wanted to figure out a way to have them harvest green chili, the kind farmers like Glenn rely on.
SPEAKER_11: Stephanie says that in those early days, she tried out a bunch of different red chili harvesters and matched them against common varieties of green chili.
SPEAKER_10: But the results were disastrous. When they came up against the unripe green peppers with their tough stems and their hard-to-reach locations, it was like the machine just didn't know what to do.
SPEAKER_06: Instead of picking the peppers off the plant, the machine would literally rip up the entire plant and try to stuff it in its mouth like some kind of mechanical toddler choking on a toy.
SPEAKER_12: There was one I remember where the plants were very, very large and bushy. And what the machine was basically doing was just tearing up the plants and shredding them.
SPEAKER_11: Another machine they tested had the opposite problem.
SPEAKER_12: They had a very gentle combing mechanism through the plants, so the fruit weren't broken, but it was so gentle, we left more than 40 percent of the fruit out in the field.
SPEAKER_06: Stephanie and her team tried machine after machine, but none of them were a match for the chili pepper.
SPEAKER_11: The successful crop automations of the past might make you think that the chili pepper is an outlier, a stubborn holdout against two centuries of agricultural and technological progress. But in fact, chili is just one of many crops that machines still can't harvest as well as humans, if at all. Asparagus, cherries, apples, saffron, chocolate — they're all still harvested by hand. In many ways, automating certain crop harvests is still a lot harder than automating something like, say, a car factory. And the reason for this is actually pretty simple. Crops are not like cars.
SPEAKER_06: It's very easy for a robot to install a windshield or put the lug nuts on a wheel or lift an engine into a chassis because each component is near identical to the component that preceded it.
SPEAKER_11: David Otter is an economist at MIT who studies the interaction of technology and labor. And he says that automation works great when a machine is placed in a highly regulated, highly predictable setting, like an assembly line. However, outside of that setting in the natural world, things tend to have a lot of variety and they tend to be rather delicate.
SPEAKER_01: So it is simply not the case that every heirloom tomato has the exact shape and size of every other heirloom tomato, nor is it the case that the effort that would be required to pluck it off the vine would be identical in all cases. And so that's a very challenging setting to mechanize.
SPEAKER_06: So if you want to automate your harvest, you can't just find a great machine. You have to standardize your plants. In other words, you have to make crops more like cars. So in agricultural mechanization, it's not sufficient to take what the person was doing and have a machine do it.
SPEAKER_01: You actually have to change the way the agriculture is done or even the nature of the crop to be able to do that. And so agricultural mechanization generally takes the form of making the crops kind of tougher and more consistent, where they're more like assembly line objects. And what that means for Stephanie and her quest to automate chili harvests is that even if she found the perfect machine, she would probably continue to have disastrous field tests unless she changed her chili.
SPEAKER_06: Which is why for the past five years, most of Stephanie's work has been about breeding a whole new plant, one that is designed specifically to be picked by machine.
SPEAKER_12: And so we really haven't done anything much to the machine except for a couple minor modifications. Most of my work has been on breeding lines.
SPEAKER_11: Stephanie's ideal chili plant will have to have a few key traits to make it truly machine-friendly.
SPEAKER_10: We want a deeper, better-anchored taproot on the plant.
SPEAKER_11: The roots need to be strong so they don't get ripped out like they did before. Above ground, we want a nice, strong single stem. We want it to grow straight up.
SPEAKER_12: We want the green chili fruit lying on the outside of the canopy. Because if they're nestled too deep in the canopy, the harvester can't reach them.
SPEAKER_06: And let's not forget, they also have to taste good.
SPEAKER_12: And of course, flavor and heat has to have that good flavor at the process they're looking for. And to get a plant with all those things, to get everything on her wish list, takes time.
SPEAKER_06: Especially because lots of farmers are wary of GMOs, so Stephanie isn't using any fancy genetic editing techniques. The traditional breeding process requires rubbing flower parts together in a greenhouse, planting seeds, and waiting to see what you get, year after year. And a lot of what you select that looks really good one year does not look the same the coming season.
SPEAKER_12: So it's a whole lot of looking at plants, tasting chili fruit, and then starting the cycle over again.
SPEAKER_11: But now, after 15 years of searching for the right machine and breeding peppers that the machine can pick, Stephanie and her team have a combination that has been showing some real promise. And when I visited her in Los Lunas, it was time for a final test to see how her special chilis would perform.
SPEAKER_10: If this test went well, Stephanie planned to move on to the next step and eventually start providing farmers with these new and improved seeds.
SPEAKER_10: So what we have basically here is some varieties that Curry Chili and Seed Company has developed that we just want to see how they pick.
SPEAKER_12: We have a couple standard controls, AZ 1904, which is the most commonly grown green chili currently for commercial production. These standard varieties were there to serve as controls to compare against her special strains.
SPEAKER_11: And in the field, I could immediately tell that not all the chili plants there were the same kind.
SPEAKER_10: Some were tall and skinny with big fat peppers. Others were short and bushy with smaller, skinnier peppers.
SPEAKER_11: And at the end of the rows sat her newest machine.
SPEAKER_06: Believe it or not, it's called the Moses 1000.
SPEAKER_11: Perhaps because it was built by a designer in Israel. Stephanie wasn't quite sure. She was more focused on the price. I think he gave us a bit of a deal. I think that we were the first.
SPEAKER_12: How much are they? So we spent I think it was about fifty five thousand. But I think the cost closer to 70. The whole thing was the size of a riding lawnmower, basically, and it had a kind of teardrop shape with the pointy bit of the tear tilted down at the ground.
SPEAKER_11: Inside, there were two really long metal tubes that looked like gigantic drill bits. It was attached to a tractor whose driver maneuvered the whole setup into place. Then a volunteer flipped a big switch. The drill bits started turning and the machine slowly began to move through the first row of peppers. A few rows later, one of Stephanie's collaborators turned to her and said he realized why it's called Moses.
SPEAKER_09: I know why it's called Moses.
SPEAKER_12: Oh yeah. Why is that? Exploding the red center. Oh yeah. Yeah. Hey, that's right.
SPEAKER_11: As it moved along, I could see the metal bits spinning and kind of zhuzhing up each plant, coaxing the peppers off and carrying them up onto two conveyor belts and into buckets waiting to catch the chilies. In other words, Moses seemed to be working. That's what we're looking for right there.
SPEAKER_00: That's the kick right there. That's one of the best things you can do. That's what we're looking for right there. See how good that is? Some perfect chilies. Yeah.
SPEAKER_09: That's what's our machine supposed to do. It's not supposed to make the salsa in the field. Here we go. That was one of the breeding lines.
SPEAKER_06: In addition to not making salsa in the field, Stephanie's breeding lines performed better than her controls.
SPEAKER_11: Which means it wasn't just Moses that was working so well. It was Stephanie's special plants. She's still sifting through the data, trying to figure out exactly how efficiently it all went. But this particular combination of plant and machine might just be it.
SPEAKER_10: The holy grail of chilies.
SPEAKER_06: Next, Stephanie will have to go through what's called a seed increase, which means making a whole bunch of these plants so she can distribute the seeds to farmers. But the bigger challenge will be convincing farmers to give her seeds and machine a shot. Because even if it does taste exactly right and the machine works perfectly, not everybody is ready to turn to automation. Back at the chili taste-off, I asked some farmers if they would ever buy a chili picking machine.
SPEAKER_11: Sally Baker, the owner of Genesis Gardens, said no. So you would never try to invest in a machine to pick the peppers? Oh no. No.
SPEAKER_03: That's not New Mexico and that's not chili.
SPEAKER_11: Oh, okay. So if there was the perfect machine to pick the peppers, you wouldn't go for it? Probably not. That's part of the pleasure and the love of growing chili.
SPEAKER_03: Some chili farmers, like Sally, see hand-picking as part of the tradition they're trying to defend.
SPEAKER_11: It's one of the things that makes it New Mexico chili. So for a lot of them, the idea of bringing a machine into the field doesn't sit right. Back at his chili farm in Socorro, Glenn Duggins was skeptical for a different reason.
SPEAKER_06: He just didn't think a machine would ever work. But then again, he hadn't seen Stephanie's latest test. Do you want to see a video of it? Sure.
SPEAKER_09: Alright, so this is the machine. So it goes through and it's got these like helixes and it goes through the plant and it just sort of like swooshes up and the plant stays behind.
SPEAKER_02: Well that's looking pretty good, really.
SPEAKER_11: Is that worth $70,000?
SPEAKER_02: Yeah. $70,000 is not that much labor.
SPEAKER_06: And the question is, which of these reactions is the future of New Mexico's chili? Is it Sally Baker who won't even consider a machine? Or is it Glenn Duggins willing to try it to save his business?
SPEAKER_11: The answer will come down to what authentic chili actually means in New Mexico. Can a pepper designed by a scientist and picked by a machine really compare to a pepper like a Miss Junie, named after the chili queen, a 95-year-old whose father used to carry her around in the fields as an infant in a chili pepper sack? Maybe Stephanie just needs a really good branding campaign. After all, when her new line of chili comes out, she'll have to call it something.
SPEAKER_06: Do you have any thoughts about the name?
SPEAKER_12: No, no. In fact, I don't. I have some ideas that I'm not very happy with. Like what? Oh, I think, well we looked at Meckinaw, but I don't really like that. I thought about naming it after people, but I just always worry that it's a jinx if you name a variety after somebody in case something goes wrong with it. What about Robocrop? Robocrop? I think you think that I would get any copyright violations for that one or if they sued me, it might be good publicity for the New Mexico chili industry. Exactly, exactly. Now you're talking.
SPEAKER_06: Rose Eveleth is the creator of a podcast called Flash Forward, which combines audio drama and deep reporting to understand the future. Things like how would diplomacy work if we couldn't lie and what would the world look like if we banned cement? The topics are unexpected and mind expanding, and if you're listening to this, it's probably right up your alley. When we come back, we'll be talking with her about how peppers fit into the wider world of agricultural automation, including the story of a machine that picks a different crop, which did not end up helping people much at all. Stay tuned. Green Mountain Gringo even has their own tortilla strips made with stone ground, all natural yellow corn flour. As far as I'm concerned, the secret to life is to have the ingredients to make nachos in your home at all times. Plus, they have a hot sauce with tangy spicy flavor that enhances the simplest of meals. It's perfect for eggs. I like hot sauce on eggs. Visit Green Mountain Gringo dot com and start shopping. Use the store locator to find Green Mountain Gringo products, get inspiration for recipes and purchase products using promo code podcast. Twenty three for twenty three percent off. That's promo code podcast. Twenty three. When you're working on the go,
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SPEAKER_11: Yeah. And it's interesting because it's a story that kind of starts basically the same way as the story of the peppers that we just talked about. So lots of small farmers facing a labor shortage, looking to technology to save them. But it kind of goes to this darker place in that version of the story. So this one starts in the 1950s in California with tomatoes and specifically what are called processing tomatoes. And what does that mean? Basically anything that you don't eat fresh. So tomato sauce, tomato paste, canned, diced, canned, whole, all that kind of stuff that you get in cans basically at the grocery store. Right, the ugly tomatoes.
SPEAKER_06: Yeah, exactly. And this was a big business in California. There were about 5,000 farmers in the Central Valley in California growing processing tomatoes.
SPEAKER_11: And those farmers relied on migrant workers to pick those tomatoes and those workers came mostly through something called the Bracero Program. And what's that? The Bracero Program is a worker program. It started in World War II as a way to replace the labor that went off to war. And it allowed mostly Mexican workers to come up into the U.S. and work on these farms. And the program actually kept going after the war and the California tomato industry was completely reliant on these workers. And then in the 1960s there was this rumor that started going around that the Bracero Program was going to finally end. And basically at that point tomato farmers sort of freak out. They don't really know what they're going to do when they don't have workers. Right, and this sounds exactly the same as the chili pepper problem.
SPEAKER_06: Exactly, and it gets even more familiar because just like with chili peppers there were scientists, two scientists in particular at UC Davis, who had been working on a tomato harvester and a tomato plant for 10 years at that point.
SPEAKER_06: At that point. So they were anticipating the lack of workers at that point? Is that what was going on? Kind of. It's a good question. And you know like the two guys, these two guys at UC Davis, Jack Hanna and Kobe Lorenzen, they were these sort of rogue figures at the time.
SPEAKER_11: They started working on this in the 1950s and everybody thought that their whole plan was basically impossible and also kind of ridiculous because they just thought like of course we're going to have workers. There's no way we're not going to have workers. And there's actually an oral history from the time where they talk about how these two guys are basically the laughing stock of the industry because everyone thought they were like totally out of their minds. But they did kind of see this future of labor shortages. I think they guessed that the Bracero program wouldn't be around forever, right? It was just supposed to be this special stopgap during World War II. So they kind of predicted this. So how did the story turn out differently than the story of the peppers?
SPEAKER_11: Right. So far we're basically on track with peppers. But where a difference is that in the case of tomatoes, this worker shortage actually didn't happen. The Bracero program was eventually terminated, but it wasn't terminated until later. And so the tomato harvesting machine and the tomato actually came first. And even after the Bracero program was terminated, there were still workers who wanted to pick these tomatoes. There was still labor, but the farmers, they had already mechanized anyway.
SPEAKER_06: And that's the nightmare scenario for workers right there.
SPEAKER_11: Totally a nightmare. Yeah. And they lost their jobs, right? There were still workers both in the United States and in Mexico who relied on these jobs in the tomato fields. And they were suddenly replaced by this machine and this new tomato variety. And remember, this is the 1960s, so there's no way for these workers to kind of like know that their jobs are gone. They can't text each other and say, hey, don't come. You know, there's a machine instead. So thousands of farm workers actually showed up at these tomato farms expecting to pick tomatoes.
SPEAKER_13: So you had 30 or 35,000 people with no work, often with their families, and no money to buy food, no money to rent housing. They were homeless and they were penniless.
SPEAKER_11: So that's Bill Horger. He's a retired attorney. And Bill is important in this tomato story because in the 1960s, he worked for an organization called California Rural Legal Assistance. And they actually sued the University of California on behalf of these displaced workers.
SPEAKER_06: So UC Davis got sued for inventing the tomato picking machine?
SPEAKER_11: Yeah, technically the lawsuit wasn't really pinpointing the tomato machine specifically. It was about whether the University of California, which is a public land-grant university, specifically Davis, should be using its funds to work on projects that benefit these big corporations, these bigger farms, at the expense of family farmers and workers. When this lawsuit started, Bill actually didn't even work for CRLA. And the way he actually got involved is that CRLA was trying to recruit him to work for them for a completely different job. But he had this long history of working for marginalized groups and marginalized people. And when he heard about this case, it really spoke to him. So when he was interviewing for this other unrelated job, he sort of was just like, forget about that. I want something else. I said to the then executive director on the phone, I said, look, stop talking to me about this position you're offering me. I don't want it. I do want to come in and take over this lawsuit. And I got hired to do that.
SPEAKER_09: That's exciting.
SPEAKER_13: That was exciting.
SPEAKER_11: And this lawsuit actually got a ton of attention at the time. It was covered in the New York Times, it was on the radio, and for Bill, it was this huge moment in his career.
SPEAKER_13: Frankly, I came back from my honeymoon the night before the opening of the trial. We had a two-day honeymoon because my wedding coincided with the last weekend before the new trial. And I came back from that to walk into the courtroom Monday morning and give this opening statement. And there were probably 15 to 20 television cameras, every network, every radio station, and I had never been in an arena like that. So Bill's main argument in this case was that the tomato harvesting machine not only hurt Californian farm workers by taking away their jobs, but it also hurt small family farmers.
SPEAKER_11: The UC Davis machine, it's really expensive, and to kind of make it work economically for a farmer, you have to have a big farm with a lot of tomatoes to harvest. The funding was being used deliberately in many cases to promote large-scale corporate agriculture, and that was an explicit purpose that one can find in reading research proposals at the time.
SPEAKER_13: So he was trying to show that what automation was in this case was not science making a world more prosperous for everybody, but instead it was this way for big agriculture to grab market share such that everybody but them loses.
SPEAKER_11: So did they end up winning this case?
SPEAKER_06: No. Because they have a good point. They do have a really good point, and in fact, the trial goes forever. It goes on for over 10 years. They go through two different judges, several appeals, and ultimately they lose the case.
SPEAKER_11: But like you say, they have a good point, and Bill was ultimately sort of right. In just five years after the release of this tomato variety and the picker, not only did all of these people lose their jobs, but 4,428 of the 5,000 tomato growers actually went out of business. In their place, these mega farms, they took over the land, and today if you drive along the 99 in Central Valley in California, you can see these giant tomato harvesting machines harvesting tomatoes for processing, and those are a direct descendant of that UC Davis project. So if you put this together with the pepper story, there's really two sides of this argument. Automation could be a good thing to address labor shortages, or it could be a bad thing, and the robots take over jobs that don't need to be taken over.
SPEAKER_06: I know this is unfair to ask, but you do a speculative podcast. Which is it? Which is more true?
SPEAKER_11: The tables have turned. Normally I'm the one asking that question on my show. I do think it's kind of both and neither. In some cases, like in the pepper case, there really is this labor shortage, and in some cases these jobs are bad and dangerous, and if people can find work in better arenas, that is a good thing. In other cases, the good jobs, the well-paying, safe union jobs, those are actually the ones that are being automated. In fact, David Otter, who you heard earlier, coined a term he calls Polanyi's paradox, which is this idea that the hardest jobs to automate are often the ones that people call quote-unquote low skill. Things like McDonald's employee, line cook, dishwasher, those jobs are actually often the things that machines can't do. They're really hard for machines to do. But the easy jobs to automate are often the ones that we call kind of good middle class jobs. Things like accounting, and even a union car assembly line job. Those are the jobs that people actually want, and they're the ones that the robots are really good at taking.
SPEAKER_06: Thank you, Rose. Thanks.
SPEAKER_06: 99% Invisible was produced this week by Rose Evelith, edited by Joe Rosenberg, mix and tech production by Sharif Yousif, music by Sean Real. Katie Mingle is our senior producer, Kurt Kohlstedt is the digital director, the rest of the team is Emmett Fitzgerald, Avery Traufelman, Delaney Hall, Christopher Roubaix, Sofia Klatsker, Vivian Le, and me, Roman Mars. Rose interviewed a bunch of amazing people for this story whose voices we weren't able to fit into the episode, but we want to give special credit and thanks to Sonia Schroeder, the executive director of the New Mexico Chili Association, Brad Tunison, who works with Stephanie on her breeding lines, and Alan Van Dines, who works on pepper breeding at UC Davis, and who told Rose to talk to Stephanie in the first place. We are a project of 91.7 KALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. 99% Invisible is a member of Radio-Topia from PRX, a fiercely independent collective of the most innovative shows in all of podcasting. Find them all at Radio-Topia.fm. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me, at Roman Mars, and the show at 99pi.org. We're on Instagram and Reddit too. But we will make you hungry for chilies, both red and green, at 99pi.org. Radio-Topia from PRX.
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