HOMESTEAD, Fla. – Jeremy Ford hates wasting water.

As rain fog sprinkled the fields around him in Homestead, Florida, Ford lamented how expensive it was to run a fossil fuel-powered irrigation system on his five-acre farm. it was bad for the planet.

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

“It’s much more efficient,” Ford said. “’How do we do this?’ We tried to solve the question. with the least amount of added labor.

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

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A growing number of companies are bringing automation to agriculture. This could ease the industry’s deepening labor shortage, help farmers manage costs and protect workers from extreme heat. Automation can also bring greater accuracy to planting, harvesting and farm management, increasing yields and potentially easing some of the challenges of growing food in an increasingly hot world.

But many small farmers and producers across the country are not convinced. Barriers to adoption extend beyond high price tags to questions about whether the vehicles can do their jobs nearly as well as the workers they replace. Some of these same workers wonder what this trend means for them and whether machines will lead to exploitation.

How autonomous is farm automation? Not completely – yet

On some farms, driverless tractors are turning through acres of corn, soybeans, lettuce and more. Such equipment is expensive and requires mastering new tools, but row crops are fairly easy to automate. It would be much more difficult to harvest small, non-uniform and easily damaged fruits like blackberries, or large citrus fruits that require some strength and dexterity to pluck from a tree.

That doesn’t deter scientists like Xin Zhang, a biological and agricultural engineer at Mississippi State University. Working with a team at the Georgia Institute of Technology, he wants to create robotic fruit-picking arms that can pick fruit without creating a sticky layer, by applying some of the automation techniques used by surgeons and the object recognition power of advanced cameras and computers. purple mess.

Scientists have collaborated with farmers for field trials, but Zhang isn’t sure when the machine will be ready for consumers. Although robotic harvesting is not widespread, several products have come to market and can be seen to work. Washington’s orchards with 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 crop farm in northeastern South Dakota. His family once employed a handful of farm workers, but was forced to cut back, partly due to a lack of available labor. His brother and aunt do most of the work now, with his 80-year-old father stepping in from time to time.

They rely on tractor autosteering, an automatic system that communicates with the satellite to help the machine stay on track. However, it cannot detect moisture levels in the fields that could cripple tools or jam a tractor, and it requires human supervision to work as it should. Technology also makes maintenance more difficult. For these reasons, he doubts that automation will be the “absolute” future of agricultural work.

“You form 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 is the solution to workforce problems

Tim Bucher grew up on a farm in Northern California and has been working in agriculture since the age of 16. Dealing with weather issues like drought has always been a fact of life for him, but climate change has brought new challenges as temperatures regularly reach triple digits. Blankets of smoke devastate entire vineyards.

The toll of climate change combined with workforce 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 implements.

Since the pilot programs began in 2022, Bucher says the company has been “swamped” with customers, primarily vineyard and orchard growers in California and Washington.

Those who follow the industry say farmers, who are often skeptical of new technology, will consider automation if it will make their business more profitable and make their lives easier. Will Brigham, a dairy and maple farmer in Vermont, sees such tools as a solution to the nation’s agricultural 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’s family farm has been using Farmblox, an AI-powered farm monitoring and management system that helps them overcome issues such as leaks in pipes used in maple production. Six months ago, he joined the company as a senior sales engineer to help other farmers adopt such technologies.

Workers worry about losing their jobs or benefits due to automation

Detasseling corn was a rite of passage for some teenagers in the Midwest. The young ones would navigate the seas of corn, lifting the yellow feather pollinator-like tassels at the top of each stalk to prevent unwanted pollination.

Extreme heat, drought and heavy rains made this labor-intensive job even more difficult. And it’s now done more often by migrant agricultural workers, who sometimes work 20 hours a day to keep up. That’s why Jason Cope, co-founder of agtech company PowerPollen, thinks it’s important to mechanize tough tasks like detasseling. His team has developed a tool that a tractor can use to collect pollen from male plants without having to remove the tassels. It can then be stored for future products.

“By perfectly timing when pollen is transmitted, we can explain climate change,” he said. “And it requires a lot of labor, which is hard to take out of the equation.”

Erik Nicholson, who previously worked as a farmworker organizer and now runs Semillero de Ideas, a nonprofit focused on farmworkers and technology, said he has heard farmworkers’ concerns about losing their jobs to automation. Some have expressed concerns about the safety of working with autonomous machines, but they are reluctant to raise issues for fear of losing their jobs. He wants to see the companies that make these machines and the farm owners who use them put people first.

Luis Jimenez, a New York dairy worker, agrees. He described a farm that uses technology to monitor diseases in cows. Such tools can sometimes detect infections earlier than a dairy worker or veterinarian.

It also helps workers know how the cows are doing, said Jimenez, who speaks Spanish. But he said they could reduce the number of people needed on farms and put extra pressure on the remaining workers. This pressure is exacerbated by increasingly automated technologies, such as video cameras used to monitor employee productivity.

Jimenez, who advocates for migrant agricultural workers with the grassroots organization Alianza Agrícola, said automation “can be a tactic, like a strategy for the bosses, so people are afraid and do not demand their rights.” After all, robots are “machines that don’t want anything,” he added. “We do not want to leave our place to machines.”

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

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Follow Melina Walling on X @MelinaWalling.

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