原文标题：
Asparagus
Getting picky
British harvests are in trouble. Robots might help
Which vegetable is the easiest for a robot to pick?
The answer has been trundling across a British field
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Asparagus is a very odd vegetable. Part treat, part triffid, in its pomp it can grow up to 2cm (0.8 inches) in an hour. Cut a field one afternoon, return the next morning, and with almost sinister speed it will be back. It is minimalist, too. Whereas other vegetables spend time producing accessories such as foliage, asparagus grows as single spears: an army of Excaliburs emerging from the soil. These things make asparagus strange. They also make it superbly suited to robotic pickers.
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In late June a small white object slowly makes its way along a field of asparagus in Gloucestershire. When it passes over a group of spears it pauses, whirrs then clunks: the asparagus has been sliced. This robot—a prototype called Sprout that is being developed by a London startup called Muddy Machines—is unprepossessing. It will not prompt bucolic poets to write odes to it, or painters to capture it resting by a hay wain. It is more fridge on wheels than Ex Machina android. However John Chinn, Britain’s largest asparagus producer, regards it with enthusiasm. For him, he says, it could be “fantastic”.
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The world is suffering from a shortage of seasonal workers. Those tides of toilers which for centuries have ebbed and flowed across countries with the seasons, bending and crouching and picking and sorting, were weakened by the pandemic. Last summer Mr Chinn needed 1,300 workers. He got around 800. Trying to find labour is, for a farmer, “the thing that stops you sleeping”. The shortage of workers is particularly acute in Britain, where Brexit has been spoiling harvests as well as growth. In Sussex peas rotted in fields; in Cornwall daffodils wilted where they grew.
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In Gloucestershire, Mr Chinn started up his tractor. To everything in farming there is a season: a time to plant and, if you are an English farmer post-Brexit, a time to fasten a chain to the back of your vehicle and plough the crop that you have grown for the past year back into the field. The process, appositely enough, is called “harrowing” and it was, says Mr Chinn, “devastating”. A time to weep.
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Now, it is a time to innovate. Mr Chinn is inadvertently fortunate in his crop. Moravec’s paradox states that computers find things simple that humans find hard—and vice versa. Differential calculus? Not a problem. Differentiating between a ripe strawberry and a stone? Really hard.
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Harvesting is especially ripe for robotic puzzlement. Leaves confuse them; bumps baffle them; colour stymies them. In 2015 Joe Jones, a roboticist whose inventions include the Roomba, a vacuum cleaner, was considering new areas to explore, and started to make a list of which crops a robot might be able to pick most easily. He considered different variables that “would make it easy for a robot to handle” such as squidginess, colour and foliage, then scored each crop out of 12. Aubergine was bottom (it’s delicate, for one thing, and foliage gets in the way). “And what crop,” he wrote on his blog, “came out on top?”
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In the fields of Gloucestershire, the answer. Sprout crawls forward; pauses. Another whirr, whoosh, clunk. It is a prototype, but Mr Chinn is optimistic. His dream would be to see a herd of 100 in his fields next year. He needs them. The stress is now so bad that “If we can’t find a solution we’ll all give up soon.” A time to plant. And a time to stop even bothering.
（恭喜读完，本篇英语词汇量约681左右）
原文出自：2022年7月2日《The Economist》Britain版块。
精读笔记来源于：自由英语之路
本文翻译整理:Fei Min
本文编辑校对: Irene
仅供个人英语学习交流使用。
【补充资料】（来自于网络）
扫地机器人Roomba的发明者乔·琼斯(Joe Jones)又研发了一款能帮助人们除草的机器人Tertill。这款借助轮子前行的机器人不受雨雪天气影响，靠太阳能驱动。Tertill内置的电容式传感器还能使其避开高大的成熟作物或其他障碍物。以人为本的设计理念，终将成为智能发展新趋向。
【重点句子】（3个）
These things make asparagus strange. They also make it superbly suited to robotic pickers.
这些特点使得芦笋变得很特殊，也让它们很适合成为机器人的采摘对象。
It will not prompt bucolic poets to write odes to it, or painters to capture it resting by a hay wain.
它不足以成为田园诗人歌咏的对象，也无法激发画家为它在干草车旁的样子作画。
Now, it is a time to innovate. Mr Chinn is inadvertently fortunate in his crop.
现在是创新的时候了。钦恩在庄稼的事上无意间走了运。
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