Editor’s note: This is the latest story in a series exploring the current state of labor in the fresh produce industry. This is the second of two pieces exploring the role of technology and its relationship to ag labor.
Technology’s role in farming is nothing new.
From the advent of plowing to autonomous equipment, it’s easy to think of ag tech as human versus machine. But some in the fresh produce industry say the relationship between technology and labor is more nuanced.
“There is a well-established and well-founded focus on agricultural technology as labor-replacing,” says Peter O’Driscoll, executive director of the Equitable Food Initiative. “As workers were trying to improve their wages and conditions, they saw mechanization as a direct threat as a labor replacement.”
Now the circumstances are different; it’s easy to think automation is a threat to ag workers today, but that’s not the case, he says. There’s an ag labor shortage due to an aging workforce not being replaced by the next generation, and there’s more dependency on the H-2A guest worker program.
“Many growers are thinking, ‘If I get robots, I won’t have to hire workers,’” O’Driscoll says. “But when you get into the details, it’s never that simple.”
Instead, he sees the future of ag tech as more supporting of labor versus being an outright labor replacement.
“It’s inevitable, it’s obvious in a labor shortage, why the industry can and should be focusing on introducing new agricultural technologies,” he says. “But how often is that question asked around the difference between investing in labor-replacing versus labor-enhancing?”
And ag labor will play a very different role in the future of these new technologies, says Gabriel Youtsey, chief innovation officer for University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources.
“The question is, as new tech comes, who is going to pick the food?” he says. “It’ll be different than what it’s been, and what is the nature of the workers’ relationship to technology going to be on the farm?”
Different workforce
Tim Bucher, CEO and co-founder of agricultural technology company Agtonomy, says that while the future might look bleak for growers with a dwindling labor pool, there will be a significant shift in how the work will be done in the future and who will do the work.
Bucher says in lieu of advertising for tractor drivers, some of his customers who struggle to fill roles advertise for ag tech operators with video game experience.
“What automation is doing is bringing a new labor force into the picture that the technology now excites them,” he says. “It’s Farmville for real.”
And that’s exactly what Steve Mantle, founder and CEO of innov8.ag, an agricultural technology company providing data-driven solutions for growers, sees too. Mantle says he and innov8.ag have been working with a Ph.D. candidate from MIT on some really interesting predictive modeling for labor. But what’s interesting is this student didn’t grow up on a farm and is still interested in tackling the challenges facing agriculture. He says there’s a bright future in agriculture for a different type of workforce.
“I feel like there is so much of an opportunity to take your gaming type kids and your kids that came out of the womb with an iPad,” he says. “It comes back to how they think in data, even though they don’t necessarily think about it in these games and tactics and how many points do I have, and so on. How do we help them?”
Training
Tyler Niday, CEO and co-founder of Bonsai Robotics, says as more and more automation becomes available and accessible, so too does the question of the labor needed to run this equipment.
“A lot of growers actually say: ‘Hey, who do I need to hire to run these machines? Do I need a foreman with a college degree who knows a little more, who’s a little more tech savvy?’” Niday says.
And, O’Driscoll says, even if agriculture moves more toward labor replacement, there’s still going to be a strong need for human labor.
“Who’s going to train that robot? Who’s going to manage that robot?” O’Driscoll says. “So, the reality is, we’ve got a shrinking domestic workforce, we’ve got increasing demand for the product and so whatever we do in the form of automation, even if it’s labor replacing automation, you’re still going to need a workforce that has the skills to interface with this new technology.”
Youtsey says this is one of the goals of the newly formed California AgTech Alliance: to establish training and curriculum to educate the next generation of ag laborers with more of an emphasis on technology. He says it’s taking the form of drone training and general ag tech classes at different colleges in the state with the goal to offer certifications for different aspects of ag tech.
“As new skills like drone flying and robotic weeding and handling start to come online, and that gets added into the stackable certificate program, along with very basic things like English, mechanics, diesel mechanic, basic math proficiency, which are actually the three top things cited by ag employers as the things that they need from their workers,” he says. “They’ll be able to demonstrate higher-order skills that will translate into technology.”
Youtsey says, however, there’s a bit of an art to predicting the next emerging solutions and the skills needed to operate that technology.
“We’re sort of trying to skate to where the puck is going to be while we’re also supporting the now needs, which are English, basic math and mechanics,” he says.
And, Youtsey says, there’s also a focus on artificial intelligence and, therefore a greater need for AI-proficient workers.
“We’ll start to see the replacement of different kinds of workers with AI-based solutions, so we also actually need an AI-enabled workforce that knows how to use AI tools,” Youtsey explains. “We will have to learn how to harness those tools to be super producers. And if done right, they’ll create outsized productivity for one person.”
Easy Tasks
Mantle says a lot of what he sees in the immediate future with labor is the ability to streamline efficiencies throughout the farm with different types of automation. It’s not necessarily going to be the addition of a large piece of equipment, but more the ripple effect of smaller changes.
“A lot of the work that we’ve been doing, it’s useful and it’s not super sticky, is what are growers truly tossing and turning about at night, and it’s their finances,” Mantle says. “And what’s the biggest part of their finances? It’s their labor. There’s all this noise around tech and how it can help save the world for them. So, in a grower’s mind, what’s the role of human labor? How do we evolve it on the farm, given all this technology?”
He likens this to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. He says it’s a little different for growers with bankers and payroll as the most basic need, working up to fertility and automation, but he says many growers can’t get to those higher needs because of the extreme cost of labor.
“I can think back to sitting down with some of these CFOs, where they literally have all these spreadsheets and looking at all these different data points and trying to connect the dots,” he says. “And they’re just trying to figure out how do I unlock efficiencies in this, and how do I use labor, including even their own labor, planning to improve or basically better manage their costs.”
And so, Mantle says innov8.ag has focused on bridging the skills gap in the C-suite as well as in the skills future workers will need.
“It comes back to the gains, the lower hanging fruit, meeting the growers where they are in that Maslow’s hierarchy, bringing that data into the actionable results, where they have the intrinsic pain points that are actually adoptable and then along the way it unlocks where they can start rising back up this pyramid,” he says. “What can I implement now for better labor management on things like labor planning for next year?”
O’Driscoll says labor management goes back to the ultimate question of labor assist versus labor replacement, with labor-supporting technology helping make the existing workforce more productive and efficient, which he says will be more beneficial in the short-to-medium term.
“Some of the really impressive new technologies are labor-supporting,” O’Driscoll says. “For example, in strawberries, having these mobile platforms means workers don’t have to run up and down the rows with their boxes. The robots will carry their boxes to the end of the row. They can be more productive, especially if they’re piece rate and there’s less risk of slip and fall injuries or time lost in running to the end of the row or anything else. So those kinds of efficiencies are good for everybody, right? They’re good for workers, and they’re good for the employer, and they’re much less sort of pie in the sky than when will we actually get the robot hand to learn to twist the berry before they pull it.”
With ag labor being such a tough job, investing in technologies that can reduce repetitive motion injuries benefits the whole of agriculture.
“That’s the perspective we bring based on innumerable conversations with workers who actually want to stay in the industry, but for whom it’s not going to be sustainable absent some sort of an investment,” he says. “That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be investing in technological innovation in strawberries, but if it makes the folks who are doing the work now want to stay and makes their work easier and more productive, that’s better for the grower and better for the work, and that’s the win-win.
Involving Employees
Any addition of a new piece of technology is an interruption of existing work processes, O’Driscoll says.
“So, however efficient or effective this technology is, it’s still going to have to be integrated,” he says. “It’s going to create change in the work processes and systems change produces unintended consequences up and down the line. So, the simple introduction of technology that doesn’t account for the changes, that doesn’t integrate the workforce in the introduction of that in the design and introduction of the technology is probably destined to fail, even if it’s a really effective robot.”
O’Driscoll points to Semillero de Ideas, an organization that trains farmworkers as consultants to help in the creation and introduction of automation.
“Workers actually advise technologists and employers on the design of the technology,” he says.
O’Driscoll says involving the workforce in the design and introduction of technology maximizes the likelihood of success.
“Our experience in general is that people tend not to destroy things they helped to build,” he says. “Is this the 1960s battle between workers and mechanization, or is this a collaborative opportunity to integrate technologies that actually improve the productivity and the lives of workers, that introduce opportunities for skill development to workers that they feel actually helped to design?”
He says he sees this as the latter, where this will help create new opportunities for workers and offer better quality jobs. Workers, too, feel respected as a part of the process and are more likely to stay at that operation.
“The introduction of new technologies creates all kinds of new opportunities for better quality jobs,” O’Driscoll says. “This ought to be a win-win opportunity, but it’s all going to depend on whether the willingness is there to formally recognize, not just say, ‘Workers are skilled.’ But let’s go beyond saying it’s skilled labor to actually documenting the different kinds of skills that are involved and giving workers a chance to demonstrate those skills and to progress professionally. And then let’s figure out how we formally integrate their perspective and their skill into the design and integration of these new technologies.”
As for the future, Youtsey says it’s going to take creativity and patience. He says a bright side to the ag labor crisis is the investment in ag tech being made by California and others to really seek solutions. And that’s exactly what will be needed in the future.
“It’s going to take a lot of actors with a lot of creative solutioning, working together to move these solutions forward,” he says. “[Venture capital] is not going to solve it. Startups alone aren’t going to solve it. We’ve got to work in a holistic, collaborative networked way to move it forward.”
And, he says, much like what Mantle says with small introductions, the future of technology and labor will likely be a combination of a lot of different ideas.
“We’re going to have to stack some of these solutions,” he says. “It’s just going to take time. It’s going to take continuous runs at it. It’s going to take the turn of innovation to solve these things. And it’s not going to be fast.”
Your next read in this series:
- Will Autonomous Harvest Reach the Goal Line?
- What You Need to Know About the DOL’s New H-2A Updates
- What Workers Think of the Dignity Act
- Farmworkers Say Their Role Is Essential ‘All the Time’
- ‘Crisis’ Point: Urgency Builds for Immigration Reform in Agriculture
- Overtime laws make it almost impossible to farm, growers say
- Growers say the current state of H-2A is untenable
- Much work remains to solve ag labor issues
- How 2025 Policy Shifts Will Define Farm Labor in 2026
