Autonomous technologies are coming to agriculture. What will this mean for crops and the workers who harvest them?

HOMESTEAD, Florida. Jeremy Ford hates wasting water.

As a mist of rain drenched the fields around him in Homestead, Florida, Ford complained about how expensive it was to run a fossil-fuel-powered irrigation system on his five-acre farm—and how bad it was for the planet.

Earlier this month, Ford installed an automated underground system that uses a solar-powered pump to periodically saturate the roots of its crops, saving “thousands of gallons of water.” While they may be more costly up front, he sees such climate-friendly investments as a necessary expense—and more affordable than expanding his two-person staff.

It’s “much more efficient,” Ford said. “We were trying to figure out, ‘How do we do this?’ with the least amount of extra labor.”

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EDITOR’S NOTE: This story is a collaboration between The Associated Press and Grist.

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More and more companies are introducing automation into agriculture. This could ease the sector’s growing labor shortage, help farmers manage costs and protect workers from extreme heat. Automation can also improve yields through greater precision in planting, harvesting and farm management, potentially mitigating some of the challenges of growing food in a warming world.

But many small farmers and producers across the country aren’t convinced. Barriers to adoption go beyond high prices to questions about whether the tools can do the job nearly as well as the workers they would replace. Some of those same workers are wondering what this trend could mean for them and whether the machines will lead to exploitation.

How autonomous is farm automation? Not completely – yet

On some farms, driverless tractors are working acres of corn, soybeans, lettuce and more. Such equipment is expensive and requires the development of new tools, but row crops are quite easy to automate. It is much more difficult to pick small, patchy and easily damaged fruits such as blackberries, or large citrus fruits that require a little strength and dexterity to pluck them from the tree.

That’s not stopping scientists like Xin Zhang, a biological and agricultural engineer at Mississippi State University. Working with a team at Georgia Tech, she wants to apply some of the automation techniques used by surgeons, as well as the object recognition capabilities of modern cameras and computers, to create robotic berry picking arms that can pick fruit without creating a sticky residue. purple mess.

Scientists have collaborated with farmers to conduct field tests, but Zhang is unsure when the machine will be ready for consumers. Although robotic harvesting has not become widespread, a small number of products have hit the market and can be seen working from Washington orchards to Florida farms.

“I feel like this is the future,” Zhang said.

But where she sees promise, others see problems.

Frank James, executive director of the grassroots agricultural group Dakota Rural Action, grew up on a cattle and crop farm in northeastern South Dakota. His family once had several workers, but they had to cut back on their jobs, partly due to a labor shortage. His brother and sister-in-law now do most of the work, with his 80-year-old father pitching in from time to time.

They trust the tractor’s autosteer, an automated system that communicates with a satellite and helps the machine stay on track. But it can’t detect moisture levels in fields that can damage tools or cause tractors to get stuck, and requires human supervision to function properly. Technology also makes maintenance difficult. For these reasons, he doubts that automation will be the “absolute” future of agricultural work.

“You build a relationship with the land, with the animals, with the place where you produce it. And we’re moving away from that,” James said.

Some farmers say automation solves labor problems

Tim Butcher grew up on a farm in Northern California and has worked in agriculture since he was 16 years old. Dealing with weather problems such as drought has always been a fact of life for him, but climate change has brought new challenges as temperatures regularly reach triple digits and plumes of smoke destroy entire vineyards.

The impacts of climate change, compounded by labor challenges, inspired him to combine his background in agriculture with his engineering and Silicon Valley startup experience to found AgTonomy in 2021. The company works with equipment manufacturers such as Doosan Bobcat to produce automated tractors and other tools.

Since launching pilot programs in 2022, the company has been “inundated” with customers, mostly vineyard and orchard growers in California and Washington, Bucher said.

Those who follow the sector say farmers, often skeptical of new technologies, will consider automation if it makes their business more profitable and makes their lives easier. Will Brigham, a dairy and maple farmer in Vermont, sees such tools as a solution to the nation’s farm labor shortage.

“A lot of farmers are struggling with labor,” he said, citing “high competition” for jobs where “you don’t have to deal with the weather.”

Since 2021, Brigham Family Farm has been using Farmblox, an artificial intelligence-powered farm monitoring and management system that helps them prevent problems like leaks in the tubing used to grow their maple trees. He joined the company six months ago as a senior sales engineer to help other farmers adopt similar technology.

Workers worry about losing their jobs or their rights due to automation

Corn detasseling used to be a rite of passage for some young men in the Midwest. The teenagers waded through seas of corn, removing tassels—the yellow panicle-like pieces at the top of each stalk—to prevent unwanted pollination.

Extreme heat, drought and heavy rainfall have made this labor-intensive task even more difficult. And now it’s more often done by migrant farmworkers, who sometimes work 20-hour days to keep up. That’s why Jason Cope, co-founder of agricultural technology company PowerPollen, says it’s critical to mechanize difficult tasks like detasseling. His team has created a tool that a tractor can use to collect pollen from male plants without removing the panicle. It can then be stored for a future harvest.

“We can explain climate change by precisely timing pollen delivery,” he said. “And it takes a lot of labor, which is hard to find in the equation.”

Eric Nicholson, who used to work as a farm labor organizer and now runs Semillero de Ideas, a nonprofit focused on farm workers and technology, said he has heard from farm workers concerned about job loss due to automation. Some have also expressed concerns about the safety of working alongside autonomous machines, but are hesitant to raise issues for fear of losing their jobs. He would like to see the companies that make these machines and the farm owners that use them put people first.

Luis Jimenez, a dairy farmer from New York City, agrees. He described one farm using technology to monitor cows for disease. Tools like this can sometimes detect an infection earlier than a dairy worker or veterinarian.

They also help workers learn how the cows are doing, Jimenez said, speaking in Spanish. But they could reduce the number of people needed on farms and put further pressure on remaining workers, he said. This pressure is intensified by increasingly automated technologies, such as video cameras, used to monitor worker productivity.

Automation could be “a tactic or a strategy for bosses to keep people afraid and not demand their rights,” said Jiménez, who advocates for immigrant farmworkers in the grassroots organization Alianza Agrícola. After all, robots “are machines that don’t require anything,” he added. “We don’t want to be replaced by machines.”

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Associated Press reporters Amy Taxin in Santa Ana, California, and Dorani Pineda in Los Angeles contributed. Walling reported from Chicago.

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Follow Melina Walling on X at @MelinaWalling.