This story is a collaboration between The Associated Press and Grist.
Jeremy Ford hates to waste water.
As a mist sprinkled the fields around him in Homestead, Florida, Ford complained about how expensive a fossil fuel-powered irrigation system was on his 5-acre farm — and how bad it was for the planet.
Earlier this month, Ford installed an automated underground system that uses a solar pump to periodically saturate the roots of his crops, saving “thousands of gallons of water,” he estimated. While it may be more expensive upfront, he sees such climate-friendly investments as a necessary expense—and more affordable than expanding his workforce of two.
It’s “much more efficient,” Ford said. “We tried to figure out ‘How do we do this?’ with the least additional labor.”
Ayurella Horn-Muller / Grist
A growing number of companies are bringing automation to 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 by bringing greater precision to planting, harvesting and farm management, potentially mitigating some of the challenges of growing food in an increasingly warming world.
But many small farmers and producers across the country are not convinced. Barriers to adoption extend beyond steep price tags to questions about whether the tools can do the job nearly as well as the workers they will replace. Some of those same workers wonder what this trend could mean for them, and whether machines will lead to exploitation.
On some farms, driverless tractors churn through acres of corn, soybeans, lettuce and more. Such equipment is expensive and requires the mastery of new tools, but row crops are quite easy to automate. Harvesting small, non-uniform and easily damaged fruits such as blackberries or large citrus fruits that require some strength and dexterity to pull off a tree will be much more difficult.
That doesn’t deter scientists like Xin Zhang, a biological and agricultural engineer at Mississippi State University. Working with a team at Georgia Institute of Technology, she wants to apply some of the automation techniques used by surgeons and the object-recognition power of advanced cameras and computers to create robotic berry-picking arms that can pick the fruit without touching a sticky to create. , purple mess.
The scientists have been working with farmers for field trials, but Zhang is not sure when the machine might be ready for consumers. Although robotic harvesting is not widespread, a slew of products have hit the market, and can be seen from Washington’s Orchards on Florida’s produce farms.
“I feel like this is the future,” Zhang said.
But where he sees promise, others see problems.
Frank James, executive director of the grassroots agriculture group Dakota Rural Action, grew up on a cattle and seed farm in northeastern South Dakota. His family once employed a handful of farm workers, but had to downsize, partly due to the lack of available labor. Much of the work is now done by his brother and sister-in-law, while his 80-year-old father steps in from time to time.
They swear by tractor autosteering, an automated system that communicates with a satellite to help keep the machine on track. But it can’t identify the moisture levels in the fields, which can jam tools in the thigh muscle or cause the tractor to jam, and it requires human supervision to work as it should. The technology also complicates maintenance. For these reasons, he doubts that automation will become the “absolute” future of farm 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.
Charlie Neibergall / AP Photo
Tim Bucher grew up on a farm in Northern California and worked in agriculture since he was 16. Dealing with weather issues such as drought has always been a fact of life for him, but climate change has brought new challenges, as temperatures regularly hit triple digits and blankets of smoke destroy entire vineyards.
The toll of climate change compounded by labor challenges inspired him to combine his farming experience with his Silicon Valley engineering and startup background to found AgTonomy in 2021. It works with equipment manufacturers such as Doosan Bobcat to make automatic tractors and other tools.
Since pilot programs began in 2022, Bucher says the company has been “flooded” with customers, mainly vineyard and orchard growers in California and Washington.
Those who follow the sector say farmers, often skeptical of new technology, will consider automation if it will make their business more profitable and their lives easier. Will Brigham, a dairy and maple farmer in Vermont, sees such tools as solutions to the nation’s agricultural workforce shortage.
“A lot of farmers struggle with labor,” he said, citing the “high competition” for jobs where “you don’t have to deal with weather.”
Since 2021, Brigham’s family farm has been using Farmblox, an AI-powered farm monitoring and management system that helps them prevent issues such as leaks in tubing used in maple production. Six months ago, he joined the company as a senior sales engineer to help other farmers embrace technology like this.
Charlie Neibergall / AP Photo
Picking corn used to be a rite of passage in the Midwest. Teenagers will wade through seas of corn, removing tassels — the bit that looks like a yellow feather duster at the top of each stalk — to prevent unwanted pollination.
Extreme heat, drought and intense rainfall made this labour-intensive task even more difficult. And it is now more often done by migrant farm workers who sometimes put in 20-hour days to keep up. That’s why Jason Cope, co-founder of farm technology company PowerPollen, thinks it’s essential to mechanize difficult tasks like pollination. His team has created a tool that can use a tractor to collect the pollen from male plants without removing the tassel. It can then be stored for future crops.
“We can account for climate change by timing pollen perfectly as it is delivered,” he said. “And it takes a lot of that labor that’s hard to get out of the equation.”
Charlie Neibergall / AP Photo
PowerPollen intern Evan Mark prepares a pollen applicator, Thursday, Aug. 22, 2024, near Ames, Iowa. Charlie Neibergall / AP Photo
Charlie Neibergall / AP Photo
The machine harvests corn brush pollen, which collects in a container. Charlie Neibergall / AP Photo
Charlie Neibergall / AP Photo
Erik Nicholson, who previously worked as a farm labor organizer and now runs Semillero de Ideas, a nonprofit focused on farmworkers and technology, said he has heard from farmworkers who are worried about losing jobs to automation. Some have also expressed concerns about the safety of working alongside autonomous machines, but are reluctant to raise issues for fear of losing their jobs. He would like to see the companies building these machines, and the farm owners who use them, put people first.
Luis Jimenez, a New York dairy worker, agrees. He described one farm that uses technology to monitor cows for disease. Those kinds of tools can sometimes identify infections sooner than a dairy worker or veterinarian.
They also help workers know how the cows are doing, Jimenez said in Spanish. But they could reduce the number of people needed on farms and put extra pressure on the workers who remain, he said. This pressure is increased by increasingly automated technology such as video cameras used to monitor workers’ productivity.
Automation can be “a tactic, like a strategy, for bosses, so people are afraid and won’t demand their rights,” said Jimenez, who advocates for immigrant farm workers with the grassroots organization Alianza Agrícola. After all, robots are “machines that don’t ask for anything,” he added. “We don’t want to be replaced by machines.”
Associated Press reporters Amy Taxin in Santa Ana, Calif., and Dorany Pineda in Los Angeles contributed to this report. Walling reported from Chicago and Horn-Muller reported from Homestead, Florida.
