The robots are coming to the Salad Bowl

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.”

The federal government’s response was to lower wages. A new H-2A rule 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. 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 it serves and who it displaces.

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 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.

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 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 cost around $300,000 each, priced for large-scale operations out of reach of small family growers.

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.”

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 urban problems. Data centers serve urban tech consumers, and harvesting robots serve urban grocery consumers. The costs 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 exactly nothing in return.

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.