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| Pro-immigrant demonstrators in Omaha, Nebraska. Photo Credit: NBC News |
In June 2025, President Trump paused immigration raids on agricultural workplaces after Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins warned that farmers were growing uneasy about the crackdown. As this blog noted at the time, the pause was short-lived. By October, the Labor Department’s own filing in the Federal Register admitted the crackdown risked “supply shock-induced food shortages.”
Then the federal government made matters worse by lowering wages. A new H-2A rule (the program sets a federal minimum pay rate for employers hiring foreign agricultural workers) cut the pay rate for guest farmworkers across the country. In California, the rate for unskilled workers dropped from $19.97 to $13.45 per hour, and the United Farm Workers sued. The Economic Policy Institute estimated that farmworkers stand to lose $4.4 to $5.4 billion annually.
This is the context in which agricultural automation is arriving in rural California. The question is who does it serve and who does it displace?
The Salad Bowl goes synthetic
Salinas Valley, California (the “Salad Bowl of the World”) produces the majority of the nation’s lettuce, broccoli, and strawberries. Located in Monterey County, Salinas Valley is over 60% Hispanic or Latino, and the local economy depends on agricultural labor.
In 2025, a nonprofit called the Reservoir opened Reservoir Farms, the first on-farm robotics incubator in California, on 40 acres in Salinas. Backed by companies like John Deere and Driscoll’s (the berry company), the incubator provides startups with fabrication shops, pre-planted test fields, and access to commercial growers. It has since expanded to Sonoma County for vineyard automation.
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| A “vineyard robot” at work. Photo credit: Cornell Agritech |
The startups coming to Salinas Valley build machines designed to do what farm workers currently do by hand. Israeli startup DailyRobotics is deploying robotic strawberry harvesters in California starting April 2026, claiming it works at two to three times the speed of human pickers.
One analysis estimated that strawberry automation alone could eliminate nearly 30,000 farmworker positions in California. The machines, which cost around $300,000 each, are priced for large-scale operations and out of reach for small family growers.
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| Fast advances in robotics means automated strawberry picking. Photo Credit: DailyRobotics |
A manufactured crisis
The labor shortage driving this transition is real, but it is not natural. Over 40% of U.S. farmworkers are undocumented, according to the USDA and the Kaiser Family Foundation. The Trump administration’s immigration enforcement has removed workers from the labor pool while cutting wages for the legal guest workers who remain. In Minnesota, for example, H-2A visa numbers dropped 12% in the first half of 2025.
A prior post on this blog documented this pattern through the 2008 Postville, Iowa raid: 389 arrests in a town of 2,500, the departure of another 1,000 immigrants, the loss of 7% of the county’s workforce, and the bankruptcy of the local factory. The void was eventually filled by a new immigrant workforce from Palau.
The pattern holds internationally. Another post on this blog examined Italy’s “Agro-Mafia,” where restrictive immigration policy has not reduced agricultural dependence on migrant labor but has driven it underground into exploitative networks where workers earn as little as 3 to 4 euros an hour. Punitive enforcement produces either exploitation or automation, depending on who has capital.
Who benefits?
Reservoir Farms says the right things about workforce transition. Its CEO has stated that “automation should augment the workforce, not replace it,” and the Reservoir has partnered with Hartnell College on retraining programs. But as one community organizer in Salinas noted: “We support training, but we also know not every displaced worker will become a robot mechanic.”
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| Farmworkers harvest strawberries at Lewis Taylor Farms in Georgia. Photo Credit: Lance Cheung |
The farmworker communities that have sustained Salinas Valley for generations face a displacement that is social and cultural. Lisa R. Pruitt and Marta R. Vanegas have written about “urbanormativity,” which is the tendency for legal and policy frameworks to render rural populations invisible. Farmworkers in Salinas are doubly invisible: rural and immigrant, performing labor the nation depends on but does not want to see.
This echoes what I wrote about in a previous post on AI data centers in rural Arizona. In both cases, Silicon Valley capital arrives in rural spaces to solve what might be seen as urban problems. Data centers serve urban tech consumers, and harvesting robots serve urban grocery consumers. The costs (labor displacement and strained local resources) fall on the rural communities that host the infrastructure.
The choice ahead
Agricultural automation is probably inevitable. Some of these technologies could genuinely improve conditions for farmworkers. But the federal government that paused immigration raids in June, reversed course days later, cut guest worker wages in October, and admitted to “supply shock-induced food shortages” in a Federal Register filing has offered farmworker communities in places like Salinas no reason to believe help is on the way.
The robots are coming to the Salad
Bowl. The question is whether anyone in Washington has thought about what
happens to the people already there.
4 comments:
I'm curious about how this wave of agricultural automation will compare to historical waves of automation in agriculture. Automated grain harvesting has existed for a while, but the automation you discuss here would obviously have a massive impact of farm labor. While to some degree automation may prevent health-burdening manual labor, there is clearly a concern of what jobs farm laborers will be able to move to if they cannot work in agriculture.
The fact that these robots cost $300,000 also shapes the discussion around this. As the article mentions, they’re out of reach for small family farms, but those are increasingly disappearing as large agricultural giants buy them up. I could see these new robots accelerating that cycle. Additionally, the loss of economic base industries often lead to towns shrinking. That could have a really devastating effect on the local economy in these areas.
As you indicate - when a sector relies heavily on a politically vulnerable labor force (immigrants) it seems to make it easier for technological displacement to occur without much political resistance. I wonder whether the political response will look differently if/when AI / automation threatens to displace professional/managerial occupations
I'm struck by just how invisible immigrant are in these conversations. I believe this is the first thing I've read that articulates concerns around immigrant laborers losing their jobs due to automation. So often their presence is an assumed negative. I am not optimistic that even a more liberal administration would identify these automation efforts as potentially harmful.
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