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Showing up with a knife to a gun fight
Imagine you are standing in a California farm in the 1960s. There are a few animals grazing nearby. It is a hot California day. A farmer and other farm workers are busy at work in the field.
The farmer puts the tractor in gear, with the trailer in the back of the tractor. He pops the clutch, puts in first gear, sets the throttle, and then jumps off the tractor.
The farmer starts feeding hay to cows off the tractor, while he is loading some pumpkins onto the trailer. The tractor, without an operator, keeps moving slowly. As it nears the end of the row, the farmer runs back, jumps into the tractor and then turns it around, and repeats the same action again.
The farmer is able to do the work of two people by jumping off the running tractor, and is able to increase his productivity for the time when he is off the running tractor.
Well, regulators and work safety administrators at the time got together and said, we cannot have farmers jumping off tractors, and tractors running without an operator in the field from a safety standpoint. So they worked on regulating the operation of a tractor and after a few modifications came up with a new rule under the California Code of Regulations.
The rule is under Title 8, Section 3441(b) and it originated as a safety standard for the technology of its time. The 1977 rule says (from 48 years ago),
"All self-propelled equipment shall, when under its own power and in motion, have an operator stationed at the vehicular controls"
This rule, which made sense in the 1960s and 1970s, is actually a big hindrance to alleviating some of the labor challenges in agriculture in California.
The impact of this single regulation on California's agricultural sector is material. California is the country’s largest producer of vegetables (40%of national production), fruits, and nuts (70% of national production). The rule explicitly and legally prohibits California farmers to benefit from autonomous technologies.
Efforts to repeal the rule
Efforts to repeal the rule have not been successful so far.
The most significant recent effort to modernize this outdated rule was Petition 596, submitted to the Cal/OSHA Standards Board in December 2021 by Monarch Tractor, a California-based developer of an electric, driver-optional tractor.
The petition was not a call for deregulation, but rather a proposal to replace the simple, prescriptive ban with a modern, performance-based safety standard. Petition 596 included: