While we’re all obsessing over whether ChatGPT will take our office jobs, something far more revolutionary is happening in our fields. Agriculture is quietly experiencing a robotic renaissance that makes our chatbot anxiety look quaint.
Last month, I visited a strawberry farm in California where robots now handle 40% of the harvesting. But these aren’t the humanoid machines science fiction promised us. They’re more like smart platforms on wheels with specialized appendages, designed for one specific task: identifying and picking ripe strawberries without bruising them.
What struck me wasn’t just their efficiency (though picking 25,000 strawberries per day without breaks is impressive), but how they’ve changed the nature of agricultural work. The farm now employs fewer pickers but more technicians and data analysts—people who monitor, maintain, and optimize these berry-picking bots.
Here are some agricultural robots already working while we’re still debating AI’s impact on knowledge work:
Weed Assassins John Deere’s See & Spray technology uses computer vision to distinguish between crops and weeds, then applies herbicide only to the weeds with surgical precision. This has reduced herbicide use by up to 77% on farms where it’s deployed. One farmer told me, “It’s not just saving money on chemicals—it’s fundamentally changing our environmental impact.”
Diary Baristas Modern dairy farms now employ robotic milking stations that cows voluntarily visit (turns out cows enjoy consistent, gentle milking). These systems identify each cow individually, adjust the milking process to her specific needs, and track health metrics in real time. A dairy farmer in Wisconsin showed me how his phone alerts him when a cow’s milk composition indicates potential health issues before visible symptoms appear.
Drone Shepherds In New Zealand, drones are increasingly handling sheep herding duties on large ranches. Using AI to identify stragglers and programmed flight patterns that mimic traditional herding dogs, these aerial shepherds can cover vast, difficult terrain that would exhaust human shepherds and their canine companions.
Greenhouse Guardians In Dutch greenhouses, autonomous robots patrol between rows of vegetables, using hyperspectral imaging to detect plant diseases before human eyes can see symptoms. These robots can monitor thousands of plants daily, allowing for targeted treatment of individual sick plants instead of blanket spraying.
The irony? While tech workers worry about AI replacing them, many farms struggle to find enough people to operate and maintain these new systems. The agricultural robotics company Iron Ox has dozens of open positions they can’t fill for technicians who can bridge the gap between traditional farming knowledge and robotics expertise.
As my strawberry farmer host said: “Everyone’s looking at Silicon Valley to see the future of work, but they should be looking at Central Valley farms instead.”
What agricultural robot application do you find most interesting? The field is, if you’ll forgive the pun, ripe for innovation!