Labor costs continue to mount. Regulatory drivers such as minimum wage and overtime increase hourly rates. Meanwhile, labor scarcity driven by immigration enforcement, and demographic factors such as shrinking rural populations further decrease the supply of potential farm employees. When the cost and availability of workers increases, conversations turn increasingly to automation and ways that technology might replace human labor in agriculture. High costs and difficulty finding labor makes the price of labor-saving technology relatively more attractive.
Two recent articles from Choices, the magazine of the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association shed some light on technology adoption in agriculture. Automatic Milking Systems: Labor-Savings Route or Costly Gamble for Dairy Farmers shares results of survey of Wisconsin farms who have and have not adopted automatic milking systems. Overall, the findings are inconclusive, highlighting the weakness of survey research in understanding decisions as complex as whether or not to adopt expensive, labor-saving technologies. In the specialty crop sector, Balancing Challenges of Scale and Scope Economies in the Development of Labor-Saving Technology for Specialty Crop Production, does a good job exploring the differences between scale and scope in farm automation. A machine that scales well can handle a lot of volume but may only do one thing, like a combine. While a machine with wide scope may do many things, like a general purpose tractor. Financial economies can be achieved from either high scale or high scope, but specialty crop producers, especially smaller ones, tend to need machines that can do different tasks if they are hoping to replace human labor. Scope remains difficult for farm automation in specialty crops.
The bottom line remains the same. Farm automation and technology will be a significant part of the farm future in the U.S., but it is not a quick and easy solution to the labor challenges the industry will face in the near future.
By Richard Stup, Cornell University. Permission granted to repost, quote, and reprint with author attribution.
The post Automation won’t replace farm labor anytime soon appeared in The Ag Workforce Journal.
