Could tea production move to the U.S. South?

Tea is grown overseas, not in America, because of how much labor it takes to grow tea, and the fact that labor is cheaper overseas. The vast majority of the world’s tea is grown in China, India, Sri Lanka, and Kenya.

But if tea-picking robots take off, maybe the U.S. could grow its own tea.

A Chinese newspaper notes that “a humanoid robot is learning to pick tender tea leaves under the guidance of workers at a West Lake Longjing tea plantation in Hangzhou, east China’s Zhejiang Province. With AI recognition models and algorithms, the robot is capable of identifying and locating leaves that meet harvesting standards.”

Could America use tea-picking robots to grow the tea we consume? America currently imports 125,000 tons of tea each year.

Lyman Stone of the Institute for Family Studies says that “if we get actually good mechanized picked tea, it’s gonna be a gamechanger. The American south will absolutely wreck global tea production. The labor cost bottleneck has been prohibitive for American tea, and using a cutter to harvest is a big quality loss. An actual leaf-plucker robot would allow capital-deep American farmers to get in the game on a crop which is extremely well-suited to the climate of the southeast– so much so that its close genetic relative, the camellia flowers, grows wild without assistance!”

Robots already are used in agriculture. Researchers have developed robots to pick cotton. That may eliminate the need for cotton farmers to buy mechanical harvesters that cost $1 million and weigh 30 tons, compressing soil and thus sometimes harming soil health. A robot harvests cotton like a lizard’s tongue catches flies.

In the U.S., farming robots now use artificial intelligence to kill 100,000 weeds per hour. A robot saves Dutch tulip fields by spotting diseased flowers early before disease can spread to other flowers.

Drones with artificial intelligence will make farming easier.

Drone swarms could replace farm workers.

Robots are also being use for food preparation, such as the salad-making robot used by the Sweetgreen restaurant chain.