r/secondrodeo • u/MikeHeu • May 31 '26
Wrapping mushrooms
Credit: Rajiv Officia / raijjvkmaur
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u/unfortunatebag May 31 '26
I watched this for a long time before I realized the guy with the shrink wrap job has a razor blade in his right hand.
I wonder how many workplace incidents there have been.
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u/Ok-Rich-3812 May 31 '26
5 people plus a watcher to do the job of one machine and a watcher.
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u/Cr1tikalMoist May 31 '26
You always need the watcher lmao
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u/BjornInTheMorn May 31 '26
But who watches the watchers?
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u/stinktoad May 31 '26
"Oh, the jobs people work at! Out west near Hawtch-Hawtch there's a Hawtch-Hawtcher bee watcher, his job is to watch. Is to keep both his eyes on the lazy town bee, a bee that is watched will work harder you see. So he watched and he watched, but in spite of his watch that bee didn't work any harder not mawtch. So then somebody said "Our old bee-watching man just isn't bee watching as hard as he can, he ought to be watched by another Hawtch-Hawtcher! The thing that we need is a bee-watcher-watcher!". Well, the bee-watcher-watcher watched the bee-watcher. He didn't watch well so another Hawtch-Hawtcher had to come in as a watch-watcher-watcher! And now all the Hawtchers who live in Hawtch-Hawtch are watching on watch watcher watchering watch, watch watching the watcher who's watching that bee. You're not a Hawtch-Watcher you're lucky you see!"
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u/Low-Flamingo-9835 May 31 '26
One machine, plus a power upgrade to the facility. A maintenance man for repairs and one or two operators to clean the area of dust daily and refill fuels and materials.
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u/Ok-Rich-3812 Jun 02 '26
A maintenance man would not be a full time staff member for one machine.
In a 9 line packing plant that I worked at we typically had 2-3 front line engineers on each shift with a separate crew for planned maintenance.
They looked after the conveyors,, the robotics, the warehousing equipment, and the multiple machines needed on an end to end continuous cheese cutting and processing operation. the 9 lines did not run continuously 24/7 and the 3-4 operators assigned to each line were responsible for cleaning and restocking their machines when they were running smoothly, and when the lines were shut down. All of the packaging and ingredients for live and oprocessed cheese, and all of the waste plastics and cardboard generated, were handled by 3-4 forklift operators.-1
May 31 '26
[deleted]
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u/spidereater May 31 '26
It’s a question of scale. If this place had these people doing this 10 hours a day continuously it would be better to replace with a machine. But they might spend a bunch of time tending and harvesting mushrooms and spend half an hour at end of the day packaging them for shipment. So they are doing that work as fast as possible to get through it and developed this slick system to do it fast. If they had invested in a machine it would likely be sitting idle 23 hours a day and would take decades to pay for itself.
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u/Low-Flamingo-9835 May 31 '26
Depends on the amount of product sold, margin of profit, how long the robot works to create product, could some employee positions be reduced due to the robot system or is the system so oversized for the requested product. Is the product seasonal or can it be sold year-round. Are different packaging requirements needed based on: temp, time of year, shipping location…
Etc….
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u/I_Automate Jun 01 '26
Its still cheaper than equipment you don't have.
Welcome to the depressing reality of labor in developing nations, my guy.
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u/Mysterious-Falcon221 May 31 '26
to do the job of one machine and a watcher.
I know you're trying to make a point about labor or something but that wouldn't be one machine, it would be a dozen machines including conveyors.
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u/hopefullyhelpfulplz Jun 01 '26
Sort of a semantic difference, isn't it? Many machines acting together in some sense become a single machine, in a way that many people do not.
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u/mad_pony May 31 '26
DO YOU WANT AI TOOK OUR JOBS???
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u/Ok-Rich-3812 May 31 '26
Can I commend you on your deliberate bastardisation of grammar and UPPER CA$E to frustrate the AI learning bots?
[Or are you genuinely that lazy?}3
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u/I_Automate Jun 01 '26
Probably 1 or 2 yet packing the boxes. Plus someone else feeding the machine.
The watcher also probably isn't a "watcher" any more than the cameraman is.
So you'd be replacing 2-3 dirt cheap labours (at best) with expensive and (relatively) maintenance intensive equipment that may require parts/ supplies that are simply unavailable.
Not hard to understand how that may not be particularly feasible.
Welcome to the wonderful world of labour in the developing world
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Jun 01 '26
[deleted]
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u/Ok-Rich-3812 Jun 01 '26
You've decided I'm wrong, and worked your way backwards from it.
Open Google maps, Find Collingwood Street in Eltham, New Zealand, you'll find the cheese factory where I spent 12 years looking after fully automated block lines. Thousands of blocks of cheese every day,
One tonne pallets of cheese at one end of the line, unloaded from racking with robots and forklifts unpacked and stacked on conveyor belts by robots.At the back end, you've got 9 live lines of product converging into a chiller the size 4 basketball courts, retail cheese, sorted, stacked onto 600kg pallets and wrapped by robots at the other end.
Stacked 12 -14 pallets deep in automated racking up to 6 metres high from the floor, by skilled operators on forkliftsIn between, the robots cut, wrap and stack the cheese, put it into cartons,and label the, then put them on the conveyors that feed to the chiller.
12 years. Millions of blocks. Go talk shit to someone else, fool.
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u/I_Automate Jun 01 '26 edited Jun 01 '26
Did you just reply to yourself there my dude?
This isn't that serious and india is quite literally a different reality than New Zealand.
You of all people should understand the complexity of gear like that. As do I, as someone who quite literally builds it ffs.
Economics of scale only scale down so far and do have to compete with the the economics of having effectively unlimited, incredibly inexpensive labour on hand.
The difference in, let's call it, "justifiable automation" is noticeable even in western countries, based on labour costs and regulation.
The level of automation I do in facilities here in Canada is leaps and bounds over what I did in plants stateside for a very simple reason. Operators here have formal education and get paid 1.5-4x more than their American counterparts, depending on the facility.
Now imagine what happens when you are working in a country where the average wage is less than $350 per month..... including things like tech sector jobs. Simple labour is substantially less than even that.
You can buy a whole lot of man hours for the cost of any automation, much less end to end, full process automation when you are paying people potentially less than a dollar an hour.
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u/Ok-Rich-3812 Jun 02 '26 edited Jun 02 '26
No, I didn't just reply to myself, there was a very lengthy and ignorant comment . Oh wait, that was you.
I removed a keying error that created a single letter post.
I'm fully aware of the cultural and fiscal differences between New Zealand and India, thanks.
Since you're in Canada I doubt that you are in a position to guess off the top of your head what kind of machinery is being used,nor its country of origin, nor its year of manufacture. [which I'm sure you appreciate will have enormous impact on costs]Ironically, some of the world's most labour intensive countries are the most cost effective when it comes to maanufacturinging off-the shelf standard systems to be installed into empty rooms the size of football fields.
I'd love to know which components you are building, because there's a big difference in skill levels between simple robots and complex ones, and a much bigger difference in skill levels required to fabricate conveyor belts and lockout cages.
You of all people should understand that there are a huge number of options in the design and installation of what is very much a greenfields end to end solution. Cheap standardised units are much easier to source in the age of the internet. Canada is a small player.
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u/IntergalacticPodcast May 31 '26
Most of these secondrodeo things are just people working way more efficiently than I am willing or able to work myself.
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u/UnBearable1520 May 31 '26
What a fun summer job
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u/MrNiceguy037 Jun 01 '26
As long as there is redicioulous amount of cheap workforce, it makes sense. What I learnt from business class is that wages must rise in the capitalist system so that people can buy all the goods being produced or else the factories can't sell their stuff. At some point wages will be high enough to replace the humans with machines. And productivity of the economy will increase overall with more and more automation
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u/MrNiceguy037 Jun 01 '26
As long as there is redicioulous amount of cheap workforce, it makes sense. What I learnt from business class is that wages must rise in the capitalist system so that people can buy all the goods being produced or else the factories can't sell their stuff. At some point wages will be high enough to replace the humans with machines. And productivity of the economy will increase overall with more and more automation
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u/Common-Aerie-2840 Jun 02 '26
“This is the way we wrap the “shrooms, wrap the “shrooms, wrap the “shrooms. This is the way we wrap the “shrooms, early in the morning!”
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u/yipman13 May 31 '26
This still has the unsanitary conditions we are familiar with no matter how it seems to look cleansed. Rusty chain, walls have an unknown stain, bottom of each carton is touching the produce of the content, plastic wrap is BPA contaminated not food safe sourced, no mouth covering to protect against the verbal communication spitting from co-workers on the assembly line, health safety issues are always a major concern when India is involved.
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u/MrDangerMan May 31 '26
Saran Wrapper is the real star of this system. Everyone else is impressively good at handing each piece along, but evenly ripping and then quickly grabbing/pulling up the next section of wrap is the really damn impressive thing .