What is it Like to Work on a Farm?
Updated: Oct 1
Exploring design solutions to make weed removal and harvests far less taxing and exhausting for farmers at the Young Writers' Club.
None of us at the Young Writers’ Club have experience working on a farm. Hence we had to observe, raise questions to find more information about the kind of physically demanding work that needs to get done on the farms. Amidst the innumerable tasks that must be completed on the farm, we zeroed in on the task of weed pulling and harvest of produce. Both these tasks involves bending over for an extended period of time. One could only imagine how difficult and painful that must be.
Determined to brainstorm ways to ease this physical strain, our discussion began with structural ideas:
Could we raise the crop beds? That would eliminate the need to bend. While practical for backyard setups or small polyhouses, doing this on an industrial or multi-acre scale introduces massive irrigation hurdles.
Could drip irrigation solve that? Possibly, but elevating water pipes across acres drives up installation costs and requires significantly more pumping power. Raised structures also reduce overall plantable surface area.
What about hiring more labor to rotate shifts? Extra hands could mean frequent breaks, shared burdens, and rural employment. But that assumes labor is plentiful, affordable, and readily available.
This led us to a crucial design insight: context dictates the solution. Farm realities differ vastly across geography, topography, and socioeconomic conditions.
Naturally, we couldn’t ignore automation. Here is where we hit a wall.
We had to go down this road just to make sure we weren’t ignoring anything obvious.
Here is what we discovered:
Humans make many decisions in mini seconds about what to pull based on look and texture. Robots can’t feel.
Different weed stems need different pressure which again is determined by feel. A robot might pull out a weed by it’s stem and leave the root behind.
Harvest of strawberries and the like rely on feel and look.
Produce could be hidden under leaves and robots cannot search through leaves and make decisions based on feel.
Turning our attention to human-centered mechanical aids, we discovered how ingenuity flourishes across different parts of the world:
A video clip introduced us to a German field rig—the "cucumber plane" (Gurkenflieger)—where workers lie face-down on padded, suspended wings just above the crop canopy, their hands free to pick cucumbers as a slow-moving tractor crawls forward.
We further discovered low-cost grassroots innovations across Indian farms:
Low-slung wheeled garden trollies and stool carts: Simple, mobile seats built low to the ground that allow farmhands to weed along rows seated, propelling themselves with their feet without ever putting strain on their lower backs.
Hand-cranked and compact motorized rotary weeders: Inventions like the SRI cono-weeder, which churn soil between rows with rotating blades while the operator stands upright or walks steadily behind.
Seeing how a single design challenge yields entirely different answers—from high-clearance motorized beds in Europe to agile wheeled rolling carts in India—reminded us that good problem-solving is never one-size-fits-all. It is about matching resources, cultural habits, and human comfort.
Every week at the Young Writers’ Club program, teen writers gather to write in a free space that offers room for experimentation in creative expression. As an added bonus we also have a short group discussion about subjects varying between the news to exploratory activities such as this one.
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The Young Writers' Club is a specialized writing program designed to transform teenagers from hesitant writers into confident writers and critical thinkers.
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