With Farm Labor Getting Scarcer, Big U.S. Farms Are Preparing To Turn To Robots

Buoyed by an inexpensive migrant workforce, California has been the United States’ agricultural mainstay for nearly a century, currently producing about 60 percent of the nation’s fresh produce. But as the state’s minimum wage approaches $15 an hour and competition from a growing Mexican economy mounts, producers face unprecedented operating costs and a workforce that has dropped by 60 percent since the 1990s.  Add to this President Trump’s moves to restrict immigration, which threatens to significantly curtail the sector’s already depressed labor supply. Leading California-based growers like Driscoll’s Berries and Taylor Farms are feeling the immediacy of Trump’s executive orders, as millions of dollars of specialty crops are growing right now that will require a workforce to pick them at the end of the season. Together they spend over a billion dollars on labor each year. “Nothing short of our businesses are at risk here,” said Kevin Murphy, CEO of Driscoll’s. And yet, unlike the CEOs of Tesla, Under Armour, and Johnson & Johnson, agribusiness leaders have not received their invitation to the White House to discuss agriculture’s place within the administration. Murphy and Taylor Farms CEO Bruce Taylor are both looking to automation – ie robots – to tackle their sector’s labor problems. “Everyone in this industry sees the limited nature of labor and its increasing cost, and I believe Driscoll’s Berries is in a position to accelerate the kinds of advancements we need so that people can pick twice as fast- and hopefully make twice as much as they do today.” Murphy said. “We can’t spend the next 10 years doing this, we’ve got to get this going in the next two to three.”