In recent decades, U.S. farmers in certain segments of the sector have been scrambling to deal with the implications of a declining pool of migrant workers. Back in May 2024, I wrote a blog on this topic, which discussed how the overall estimate of undocumented persons in the United States fell between 2018 and 2022, while during the same period, During that period, the under 18 years of age and over 55 years of age cohorts both increased, while the numbers of undocumented persons in their prime working years fell.
The continued stalemate over immigration reform in Congress persisting over the last several decades–no significant legislation has been enacted in this area since 1986–has forced employers to look for alternative solutions. In particular, employers in the agricultural sector, both on the farm and in the post farm-gate processing and handling segments have been looking for ways to replace the dwindling supply of workers with technology allowing them to mechanize or automate functions previously performed with manual labor on a cost-efficient basis. This blog will focus on on-farm developments in this area.
Among the earliest research into automating agricultural activities beginning in the 1960’s was the effort to develop autonomous steering systems for combines and tractors involved in conducting field work for row crops using guidance from GPS information about the geographies of the fields being cultivated. The concept and early prototype of autonomous steering was invented decades earlier without the benefit of GPS guidance by Nebraska farmer Frank Zybach, who patented the automatic tractor wheel guide in the 1920’s, who later came up with the idea of center pivots for irrigation. In 1940, Frank Andrew, an Illinois farmer and University of Illinois extension engineer, invented a driverless tractor system that consisted of a barrel or fixed wheel placed in the center of the field, and it would wind a cable that was attached to the steering arm of the front of the tractor.
As of 2019, tractors with autonomous driving features were used on more than 50 percent of the acreage planted to corn, soybeans, winter wheat, and cotton in the United States, according to data collected under USDA’s Agricultural Resource Management Survey (ARMS). A fully autonomous tractor that does not need a driver at all once it is placed in the proper field was first introduced to the farming public by John Deere at the 2022 Consumer Electronic Show (CES) held annually in Las Vegas, with limited commercial sales the following year.
Traditional dairy operations are very labor intensive, requiring workers to move the animals into position to be milked at least two or three times daily. Systems in which suction cups were placed on cows’ teats to withdraw the milk by vacuum rather than by a human sitting on a stool were first used in the middle of the 19th century, but the innovation of having a robotic arm to put the cup in place was first used in experimental settings in 1985. The first fully robotic milking systems were introduced in Europe in the early 1990’s, and made their first appearance in a U.S. dairy operation in 2000 in Wisconsin. The current systems allow dairy producers to track the productivity of individual animals in their herd on a real-time basis. As of 2021, 13 percent of U.S. dairy farms reported using such technology in USDA’s ARMS survey, but they accounted for 45 percent of total annual U.S. dairy production, indicating that it is overwhelmingly the larger operations which have adopted this technology.
More recently, engineers and scientists have been working on mobile robotic technology which can operate autonomously within fields to sow seeds, distribute chemical inputs, and harvest crops. U.S. farmers raising specialty crops (fruits and vegetables) have been hit hard by the shortfall in migrant labor availability, with numerous public reports in recent years of farmers being forced to leave portions of their crops unharvested due to labor issues. A 2021 op-ed in the Washington Post described the dilemma of an Idaho producer who had to leave 150,000 pounds of asparagus unharvested in that year due to bureaucratic delays in obtaining H2-A visas for immigrant workers who would have otherwise picked the crop.
A 2023 survey of producers by Western Growers found that 70 percent of growers had invested in automation in the previous year, spending an average of $475.000 for these services. The growers were cited as spending the bulk of their investments on weeding robots and those that can assist with harvest.
In order to make this technology more useful for specialty crop producers, plant breeders at land-grant universities have been working on developing varieties that are less prone to being damaged by mechanical handling. At the University of Florida, work is underway to develop tomato varieties with thicker skin to withstanding mechanical harvesting and handling while still being attractive to consumers as fresh produce in grocery stores.
