155. The Labor Dilemma — Rhishi Pethe

“Software is Feeding the World” is a weekly newsletter about technology trends for Food/AgTech leaders.

I (Rhishi Pethe) am a rational techno-optimist. I believe technology will play a role to bend the arc of future food and agriculture systems to be more sustainable.

Last week, I published a report on challenges in adoption of software in agtech, and how AI could potentially address some of the challenges. The report was a collaboration with Sarah Nolet and Matthew Pryor of Tenacious Ventures. The report focuses on three main issues: trust, business models, and user experience. You can get the report for free over here. It would be great if you can forward the link to your friends and colleagues.

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Availability of labor in farming and food systems is a huge issue worldwide. This week's edition is a guest post by my good friend Austin Lyons. I am very excited to have Austin here as he breaks down the labor dilemma in agriculture in very simple terms and highlights some of its implications.

Here is Austin in his own words.

Austin Lyons is a Senior Product Manager at Blue River Technology where he uses his MBA, engineering background, and entrepreneurial spirit to shape the future of autonomous agriculture. Outside of work, this Iowa dad of four trains for marathons and writes about the semiconductor industry at Chipstrat.

The Labor Dilemma

When I talk to farmers, the conversation inevitably turns to the struggle of finding and keeping reliable workers. They're competing for local talent with industries like retail, warehousing, and even work-from-home jobs. Even family farms see their kids choosing other paths. One farmer summed it up:

I have a great team, but am I overwhelmed with job applications? No. Not even in my little agricultural town.

Government data reveals a shrinking American farm workforce. Surveys by the USDA's National Agricultural Statistics Service show a decline in the number of workers, while the Economic Research Service reports a shift in demographics. Farms are employing fewer family members, with a growing share of the workforce being older and foreign-born. With the world’s population expected to reach 9.7 billion by 2050, farmers need to find ways to produce 50% more food amidst a labor shortage globally.

The core challenge facing global agriculture is this: how to feed a growing population with a shrinking agricultural workforce?

Productivity Must Increase

Let’s dig into the key implication of a shrinking workforce. If we assume a relatively fixed total amount of land in the US, then the decrease in farm workers implies the average worker must cover more acres per season.

*A decreasing labor supply demands an increase in average productivity per worker (*Chart by Austin Lyons)

The agricultural industry has a history of meeting the challenges of a shrinking workforce by increasing productivity through mechanization – larger tractors, wider implements, and greater speeds.

*Productivity has consistently increased by scaling equipment size* (Chart by Austin Lyons)

This strategy has enhanced productivity for decades, yet there will come a time when relying on scaling alone will not suffice. Fortunately, recent software and hardware innovations have opened the door for new productivity-increasing tools: automation and autonomy.

Let’s explore how automation and autonomy enhance agricultural labor productivity.

Automation

Automation is any technology that automates tasks on behalf of the operator. The classic example is automatic steering, where GPS guides the tractor instead of the farmer's hands on the wheel.

Recent advances in computer vision and machine learning give machines the ability to "see". This unlocks the automation of tasks previously impossible. For example, front-facing cameras on combines can adjust ground speed based on crop density – essentially creating "adaptive cruise control" for harvesting.

Cameras and computers solve agricultural problems in ways never before possible. For example, cameras inside a combine can analyze grain quality in real-time, allowing the machine to automatically adjust its settings for optimal results. This can increase the quality of harvest while simultaneously offloading a task from the combine operator.

Automation Eases Labor Difficulties

The rising adoption of automation in agriculture holds promise due to its potential to boost worker satisfaction and enhance productivity.

First, a great way to hedge against labor issues is to retain employees. Farming involves physically and mentally demanding work, with equipment operators facing long hours and multitasking over extended periods. Automation technology that offloads tasks helps reduce operator fatigue, keeping employees on the farm day after day and season after season.

Secondly, even the most skilled operators see a decline in focus and efficiency after many hours in the saddle. Automation reverses this trend by maintaining peak productivity throughout the day.

Finally, automation can increase the pool of available labor by lowering the learning curve for inexperienced workers. For example, grain cart automation takes the pressure off new help. The cart automatically matches the combine's speed during unloading, letting the combine operator guide the whole process and creating a smoother, less stressful experience for everyone.

Autonomy

Autonomy removes the operator from the cab entirely. Driverless systems help tackle labor shortages by enabling farmers to reallocate staff and boost the equipment-per-worker ratio.

Autonomy frees operators from the cab, allowing farms to reallocate employees to higher value tasks. For example, tillage autonomy enables customers to address grain hauling bottlenecks during harvest by reassigning operators from tillage tractors to semi trucks and letting the autonomous tractor handle tillage.

This ability to flex employees to the highest value task across the farm is incredibly valuable, especially for operations with multiple businesses such as livestock or seed dealers. One farmer remarked,

Our cows don’t care if it’s the busiest day of harvest – they are still going to give birth. With autonomy we can attend to our livestock and still keep the row crop business moving.

Freeing an employee from the cab of a tractor with autonomy also enables the farm to scale the output of an employee. Autonomy enables a single operator to manage multiple machines. Take the tillage example from earlier, where a single employee was effectively doing two jobs - tillage (monitoring) and driving a semi. In the future, scaled scenarios could include an operator manually planting while monitoring an adjacent autonomous planter, or a single out-of-cab operator overseeing multiple autonomous grain carts.

From a labor perspective, autonomy also helps operations manage workforce disruptions. Consider the temporal nature of disruptions, which may last for hours (doctor appointment), days (paternity leave), or weeks (surgery). With autonomy, the tractor can keep running even when down an employee for hours, days, or weeks.

Finally, autonomy relaxes the one-to-one human to machine constraint, enabling farms to scale or operate in new ways. For example, an operation may want to acquire more acres, but is currently sized such that they would need another machine and therefore another operator. With autonomy, adding more acres and another machine doesn’t necessarily require another hard-to-find employee.

Why Not Both?

Automation and autonomy are not mutually exclusive; a farm can employ both productivity tools as they see fit. There’s no one-size-fits-all in farming, and automation and autonomy are simply more tools in the farmer’s toolbelt to increase productivity.

Here's a simple thought experiment to illustrate. Imagine someone wants to maximize the number of acres they can plant within a limited time. Our first instinct might be to advise a classic scaling approach: a wider planter to cover more rows simultaneously, and a faster planting speed to cover more ground.

For even greater efficiency beyond larger, faster equipment, steering automation offers smaller, yet significant gains by keeping the tractor moving at optimal speed all day.

Autonomy takes this a step further, allowing a single farmer to manage multiple tractors. For example, the farmer could drive a tractor with steering automation in one field while monitoring a fully driverless unit working the next field over.

Automation and autonomy offer flexible solutions, not rigid "all or nothing" choices. A farmer could strategically use a second autonomous tractor during the peak planting window, especially in large or adjacent fields. However, for smaller fields where a single planter is already efficient, they have the option to operate as usual. Automation and autonomy add valuable tools to the farmer's toolkit, empowering them to increase productivity in ways that best suit their operation.

Future Labor Dynamics

While automation and autonomy help mitigate today’s labor issues, we’re also beginning to see glimpses of interesting longer-term labor implications.

I’ve talked with farmers who envision a new role on the farm: autonomy manager. This position would optimize the use of autonomous machinery across the farm and ensure maximum uptime.

Key responsibilities for such a position could include:

Pre-season Planning: Integrate autonomy logistics into the season's agronomic plan, ensuring machines will be deployed strategically. Develop digital autonomy plans including field boundaries, autonomy preferences, and so on. Address machine maintenance and upgrades based on past autonomy performance.
In-season Management: Orchestrate autonomous machine deployment, monitor real-time fleet performance, track progress against the plan, and resolve downtime issues swiftly.
Post-season Analysis: Conduct deep dives into autonomy performance vs. targets, identifying areas for improvement. Refine strategies for the next season.

The autonomy manager would be a strategic leader on the farm, maximizing the potential of autonomy through a data-driven approach. This role could unlock new levels of productivity and efficiency, ensuring the farm continues to thrive.

This hypothetical autonomy manager role is intriguing because it offers a unique blend: it's tech-driven and analytical, yet firmly rooted in agriculture. This marriage of worlds could be highly attractive, particularly for a younger generation who grew up on the farm and are seeking a tech job, but not a desk job. Tech-centric and data-driven roles in farming could attract a new generation of talent to the ag industry, offering exciting career opportunities within the local community.

Summary

The shrinking agricultural workforce demands innovative solutions to continue feeding a growing world. While mechanical scaling has been the industry's mainstay, automation and autonomy are additional tools to drive continued productivity growth. Automation reduces operator fatigue, boosts worker satisfaction, and smooths the path for new employees. Autonomy frees workers to tackle higher-value tasks and enables farms to scale without a proportional increase in headcount. These technologies address the immediate labor crisis while laying the groundwork for a future where tech-savvy generations find fulfilling careers in agriculture.

PS

If you have friends or family who work in high tech and are looking to make an impact, forward them this email. It’s worth noting Blue River and John Deere have been running deep-learning inference on NVIDIA GPUs for quite some time as discussed on this NVIDIA blog. We have large autonomous robots in production as seen at CES. Please reach out if you or someone you know are interested in working on automation or autonomy. For anyone in the Bay Area, Blue River and John Deere are at World Agritech in San Francisco this week.

Note: You can connect with Austin on LinkedIn.

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