Automation Comes to Farming. Not Everyone Is Thrilled

Jeremy Ford hates wasting water. As a mist of rain sprinkled the fields around him in Homestead, Florida, Ford bemoaned how expensive running a fossil fuel-powered irrigation system on his 5-acre farm was—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 his crops, saving "thousands of gallons of water." Although they may be more costly 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," says Ford.

A growing number of companies are bringing automation to agriculture, reports the AP in a broad look. It could ease the sector's deepening labor shortage, help farmers manage costs, and protect workers from extreme heat. Automation could also improve yields by bringing greater accuracy to planting, harvesting, and farm management, potentially mitigating some of the challenges of growing food in an ever-warmer world. But many small farmers and producers across the country aren't convinced. Barriers to adoption go beyond steep price tags to questions about whether the tools can do the jobs nearly as well as the workers they'd replace. Some of those workers wonder what this trend might mean for them. A few examples of the tech:

• Frank James grew up on a cattle and crop farm in northeastern South Dakota that has had to cut back on farmhands due, in part, to lack of available labor. They swear by tractor autosteer, 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 hamstring tools or cause the tractor to get stuck, and requires human oversight to work. "You build a relationship with the land, with the animals, with the place that you're producing it. And we're moving away from that," says James.
• Extreme heat, drought, and intense rainfall have made detasseling corn in the Midwest even harder. Jason Cope, co-founder of farm tech company PowerPollen, created a tool a tractor can use to collect the pollen from male plants without having to remove the tassel. It can then be saved for future crops. "We can account for climate change by timing pollen perfectly as it's delivered," he says. "And it takes a lot of that labor that's hard to come by out of the equation."

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