[ ♪♪♪ ] MAN: My rappel!
MAN: Oh, my gosh, it's beautiful.
MAN: Good morning, everybody.
Woo!
Let's do it again!
MAN: Nicely done!
MAN: Oh, yeah!
Fourteen and a half.
Yes, that was awesome!
[ people cheering ] There you go, up, up... ED JAHN: Next, on Oregon Field Guide: The robot invasion is coming... to an orchard near you.
Then, at least in this part of Oregon, the old ways are still alive.
MAN: The traditions go back centuries, and yet the tools have not been improved upon.
But first, it's a delightful trip down the Deschutes River, with a twist.
Hundreds of thousands of people come to play along the Deschutes River every year.
And here's a fun fact: They all poop.
Which would be a really big problem in a place as beautiful as this if everyone just did their business anywhere they wanted.
Fortunately, this river has a superhero keeping things tidy, and his name is 2-Ply.
MAN: It's just so quiet and peaceful in the morning.
It's the best time of day to be on the water.
Everything's quiet, things are just waking up.
The birds are waking up, the critters are waking up.
[ birds chirping ] Some days, the bathrooms are easy.
Some days, they're not.
IAN McCLUSKEY: Jerry Christensen has a job perhaps few folks would want.
Every week of the spring and summer, he cleans 13 outhouses along the Deschutes River.
Some are pit toilets, some are composters.
And we just need to get down here, and the only way to do it is with a boat.
The Deschutes is perhaps Oregon's most popular river for recreation, loved by rafters and anglers alike.
Jerry deliberately picks quiet, mid-week Wednesdays to run this 40-mile section of the lower Deschutes.
But come on a typical summer weekend, and it's a different story.
The Deschutes' popularity creates the need for Jerry's job, the weekly river trip he calls the Poo Patrol.
It's a unique place to have the bathrooms down here on a river, because any other river, it's pack it in, pack it out.
And it's the only river in the state that regularly maintains bathrooms along the way.
Jerry's reputation has grown along the river, and it has a lot to do with his signature choice of toilet paper.
I was a heavy user of the river down here, and I never really appreciated one-ply paper.
Sensitive, you know?
So as soon as I got the contract, that was the first thing I did.
And people picked up on it right away.
Within the first couple months, I pulled into a campsite, and the guy hauling gear sees me come around, and he just stands up in his boat, looks at me, and he goes, "2-Ply!"
And I just started laughing, the people in my boat started laughing, and it stuck.
All the guides know me.
There's a hundred of them, there's one of me.
And they're always happy to see me.
There's nobody more known down here than 2-Ply, than Jerry, because he-- he-- [ chuckles ] Some people make people upset and some don't, but he-- he makes everybody happy.
He just kind of keeps the world going round and round down here.
And because of him, it's a better, cleaner place.
Cleaning outhouses every week can be monotonous and even lonely work.
And Jerry has two front seats in his boat.
He likes to fill those with old friends and new.
On this trip, Jerry's guests are Jan and Jon.
While Jerry goes to scrub the outhouses, Jon gets to do some fishing.
As the guest of 2-Ply, I, uh... You know, we make 13 stops.
There's good fishing water at all 13 of them.
Yeah, it's pretty sweet to just chill out in the boat while Jerry's up there cleaning.
JERRY: We just make a day of it.
And I spend three or four hours cleaning bathrooms and six or seven hours having fun on the river.
Jerry's guests get to ride in the hand-crafted wooden drift boat that he built through the High Desert scenery and fun rapids that have made the Deschutes River so popular.
And Jerry gets to use the Poo Patrol as a way to share his passion for the river that has been part of his life for more than 20 years.
I mean, this year I'll probably take-- Of the 30 trips, I'll take 40 or 50 people.
For Jerry, it's just every week with a new guest has just got to be so entertaining.
And, you know, people don't understand just how awesome this canyon is until they get down-- you know, it's like, "Oh, the Deschutes, yeah," but...
I mean, we're not in the Grand Canyon, obviously, but this is pretty grand for Oregon, you know?
So... it's pretty awesome.
His skills at the oars and his intimate knowledge of the rapids have proven a Poo Patrol job requirement.
JERRY: We're going to get real close to this rock on the right.
When I got this contract from the BLM, I'd already spent 15 years on the water.
And 10 years of that was in that boat.
When we roll into the upper part of Whitehorse, there's always a couple of really deep breaths, because there's-- it's tight in there.
And that's where people have problems.
And if they have a problem, that's not a place to swim.
The old BLM contract that had this before me, they had a rough season, and when I came down on a steelhead trip in October, I happened to see a boat upside down in the middle of Whitehorse, and the BLM contract sign was on the side of it.
And that's when I decided that I could give them a call because, "I have a feeling that contract might be open."
Sure enough, it was.
[ laughs ] The traditional pit toilets along the Poo Patrol route can be emptied every year or two.
But parts of the river are so inaccessible that human waste cannot be removed and must be treated on-site.
Oh, boy.
Newer composting toilets solve this problem, but they require more routine labor to make them work.
This is the first of the composters that we're coming to.
This one gets loved to death.
[ laughs ] It's going to be good.
Well, when I left it, there were 16 rolls of toilet paper here, of which now there are none.
And I bet the poo is just... right up in there.
Only one way to find out.
Oh, yeah, that's super.
Five hundred people is what they allow on this river per day between Warm Springs and Harpham Flats.
That's a lot of people.
That's a lot of use.
I came down here one time and it was full to the top.
Speaking of volume, the average person would visit one of Jerry's outhouses once a day to do their business and deposit less than a pound of poo.
But with as many as 500 visitors to the river in a single day, that can add up to more than 400 pounds.
And that adds up to more than a ton a week.
And that's a lot of poo that otherwise might pollute camp areas and the river itself.
[ sighs ] Now's when I really earn the money.
Here we go.
[ sighs deeply ] Oh, yeah, that's awesome.
Oh, man.
This is the composter.
It's got three different stages down below, the upper one, a middle one, and then they drop into to the bottom one.
I asked him what that stuff looks like, and he says, "Well, it looks like that Black Gold you get at Home Depot."
So they work.
It's just this one is taxed.
[ breathing heavily ] Voila.
You see the river change over years.
People change.
The seasons change.
Beginning of the season, everything down here is green.
By the end of the season, everything's brown.
It's a magical place.
This river runs through the middle of the desert, and it's just a green stripe running through it.
It just feeds the soul.
You can't really go faster, you can't really go slower.
The river sets the pace.
I care about this river.
I want it to keep going.
And my goal is to keep doing it as long as the contract is there and it doesn't get much worse than it is now.
I'm all in until I can't do it anymore.
And that'll be a sad day... for everybody else.
[ laughing ] [ ♪♪♪ ] Everybody loves the taste of a crisp apple.
But what if you found out the apple you just bought from the local farmers' market was picked by a robot?
MAN: You ready?
I'm going to fire her on, and then you can go.
[ engine starts, rumbling ] What is this thing?
And what is it doing in the middle of an apple orchard?
Agriculture today isn't the quaint, low-tech pastime you remember from storybooks.
In the orchards of central Washington, the future is here.
Each robot has stereo cameras on it, and it's live-looking at every apple, and it's ranking the candidates based off a number of components.
It's looking at, "Okay, what's the ripeness of this apple?"
It's also looking at, "How difficult do I think it will be to pick this apple?"
MAN: It's the future.
So if you didn't adopt and you didn't make changes, we'd still have horses and carts and those other things, and so you have to change with the times, and the times are technology.
The state of Washington produces a lot of crops, but none more than apples.
In fact, nearly 12 billion apples are harvested each year, making Washington the number one producer of apples in the U.S. MAN: We do produce more apples than anywhere else in the nation, and each and every one of those pieces of fruit is picked by hand.
Concerns over the availability of skilled harvest laborers remain at the top of most growers' minds.
And industry has looked for solutions: guest-worker visa programs, improvements in production efficiency, and, of course, the interest in potential robotic solutions.
One of those solutions is taking the form of a 14-foot apple-harvesting robot.
MAN: On the front of the harvester, you'll notice a main computer.
And it's coordinating the motion of the six robots and also keeping the harvester itself tracking in the middle of the row.
When it's ready to pick, it will come out, and you'll notice that it can go in and out, side to side, it can twist up and down, and then when it sees an apple it wants, it'll go into the canopy and pick the apple with a suction cup and then return.
Once all the robots say, "All right, I don't have any more apples, I need to find more apples," then it'll start to move forward and the robots will continue to scan and identify more targets.
And you can see, as each robot picks an apple, it will take that apple to the back and drop it into the conveyance system, and that's the motion that you see after each successful pick.
So right now, all six robots are feeding into these conveyers.
That's all the apples you can see coming up.
And then I take this clipper, I come in here and clip the stem.
This is something that we're hoping to automate in the future, but it's one of the many examples of how impressive the human is at identifying an apple, reorienting it, placing a trimmer in the proper spot, and clipping the stem.
It seems really simple, but it's an incredibly complicated task, and it's something that we're going to need to solve going forward, but there's a whole lot more work to do.
I run it again... Students at Washington State University are working behind the scenes to bring these robots to life.
Uddhav is programming a robotic arm to trim flowers using a mock-up orchard.
Let's see if it moves at all this time.
Needless to say, programming requires a bit of trial and error.
[ whirring, then branch snaps ] Uh-oh.
That's the wrong thing.
[ chuckles ] [ whirring ] Flower-thinning is an essential component of apple cultivation.
Not only does it improve apple quality, but it significantly increases the probability of an annual crop.
So this is giving us, like, what is the position and orientation of the flower clusters.
[ whirring ] MAN: I think 10 years from now, a good vision would be the machines could harvest maybe some majority of the fruit, and then there'd be a smaller labor crew that could feasibly just finish up the rest.
So I think a combination of both humans and machines would be a great future.
So, will these robots that can work 24/7 eventually replace human labor?
How do the actual laborers feel about giant robotic harvesters rolling through the orchard?
MAN: I know the machines are coming.
Makes me surprised, because we've never seen that before.
Ain't no bruise.
The opinion of the pickers, they say, "Well, in the future, we're not going to have a job because they're trying to put another thing to start picking, you know?"
Currently, humans are still faster and more efficient than most robot pickers, but that gap narrows with each passing year.
Some manufacturers are testing the limits of robotics technology by developing robots that are ungrounded, literally.
The system consists of eight autonomous drones, all picking simultaneously.
MAN: This robot can work 24 hours a day, and it just is something that can help us get the job done, because the younger generation doesn't aspire to be an apple picker.
Right now, I kind of say maybe we're treading water, trying to figure out how we can keep enough employees to get our crops picked until this technology evolves.
One thing is clear: robots are here to stay.
And with increasing labor shortages, they're becoming more common in orchards and farms across the country.
RAFAEL: We've been short on help.
This is not like before, where everybody wants to work.
Right now, it's more young kids, they're looking for a lot of easy jobs.
So I think the robots are going to help more doing the labor, you know, in the orchard.
[ ♪♪♪ ] It'd be fair to say that in the 21st century, all of our lives and work have been changed by digital technology.
But here in central Oregon, I met a man whose work really hasn't changed that much in, well, about 500 years.
MAN: Personally, I have no idea how many horses I've ridden in my life or worked with in some capacity.
As far as starting out, I hear tell that my riding days began first trimester.
My mom rode while she was pregnant with me and my two sisters.
WOMAN: They grew up on horses.
They all loved them.
At a young age, when you do that, you just have an innate feeling of what the horse is going to do and how to ride, and it just comes with the territory if you grow up doing it.
Clint Surplus' life work has changed a lot of horses.
In the process, horses have changed him.
CLINT: I started my first colt when I was, I want to say, about 11.
Then I rode my first colt for hire, must've been when I was 12 or 13.
But until you've ridden a horse that has a more sophisticated training level, you don't know what that feels like.
When Clint was a young man, he worked for a large ranch in southeast Oregon.
There, he discovered horses trained to a high degree for the roping and riding of ranch work known as bridle horses, trained in the vaquero tradition.
Vaqueros were expert riders in the era of the Spanish haciendas.
Their name came from the word vaca, Spanish for "cow."
They were the original cowboys of the West.
The traditions go back centuries, and yet the tools have not been improved upon.
The ornate spade bit is the symbol of the bridle horse.
This is what the horses are ultimately being trained to use.
The large, flat part of the bit is shaped like a shovel or a spade.
In the wrong hands, it can apply a harsh pressure to the horse's mouth.
But the vaquero tradition is not about using force on a horse's mouth to make it move.
Rather, to form a connection with the horse's mind.
This subtle melding of minds involves no bit at all and begins in the round pen.
The round pen helps you to connect with the horse's mind.
We're not forcing the horse to stop or turn or go fast.
We're communicating in a very subtle and nearly imperceptible way to the horse.
Being a prey animal and a herd animal gives them a very complex set of instincts, and we have to learn how to work with them within their instincts.
I want to build the kind of bond between me and my horse where my horse doesn't want to leave me.
Drawing the horse in and letting them be with us and be comfortable develops trust from the horse.
[ cows mooing ] Ride right in tight behind me.
The vaqueros' skills came from cattle work.
Clint's daughter Sadie and son Kasen help move cattle to new pasture.
Sadie, you stop about right there at that dry spot.
Kasen, you start riding along the fence there, trying to peel them off the fence.
When I was about to become a father, I was confident that my experience with horses was going to help me better raise my kids.
Watch that one in the back, Sadie.
But what I didn't anticipate was that being a father helped me become a better horseman.
[ cows mooing ] I softened.
And just let 'em file through.
And that softness goes farther with a horse than harshness.
[ whistles softly ] When you're riding a horse that you're just really in sync with, it's harmony.
And that's the essence of a vaquero-style bridle horse.
My horses don't have the sting they once had.
They don't have the snappiness that they once had.
But they have a calmness and a confidence that they didn't once have.
And there's a beauty in that.
[ ♪♪♪ ] You can now find many Oregon Field Guide stories and episodes online.
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