Farmerless farms are on the horizon
Robotics – the last nail in rural America’s coffin
(Editor’s Note: Suzan Erem publishes Postcards from The Heartland, a radical in rural America project on Substack.)
By SUZAN EREM
Guest Columnist
Ten years ago, the Sierra Club published cute illustrations with an article about how robots were picking lettuce in vertical farms, asking if “eco-bots” could save the world.
Ten years later, John Deere announced plans to go 100% robotic by 2030. (Bloomberg News, Jan. 6, 2025) Killing our world, not saving it.
That’s just 4 years from now, folks.
Read it again: In 4 years, the world’s largest tractor manufacturer plans to replace every corn and soybean farmer with robots. Commodity farmers who enjoy watching the game from their cab better get ready, because tractors won’t even come with cabs.
More time off sounds pretty good ‘til it starts sounding like unemployment. Farmers won’t own the machines, of course. Right now they can’t even repair a machine because the software is only licensed to them like a book on your Kindle. And with consolidation, they don’t own their choice of seed, fertilizer, pesticide or herbicide anymore. They don’t have much choice where to sell what they grow, either.
So who will own it all? Who will control the entire system?
Recently, I was part of a small group of Iowa Farmers Union members invited to meet with U.S. Sen. Peter Welch, D-Vermont in Ames. As my fellow farmers talked about tariffs and consolidation, I realized all of this would be moot in a few years. I mentioned that farmerless farms were on the horizon. Seeing skeptical looks around the table, I said it reminded me of Kodak.
“They planned to go digital in 10 years. They were bankrupt in 2.”
We can focus on federal policy affecting our commodity farmers now, but without a dramatic change in our approach, those policies will affect only a handful of very rich and powerful people who are buying out everyone else.
California and Ecuador, which grow our table food, are already headed down this row. Companies like Agrobot and Tortuga Agri-tech are selling robots that pick fruit and vegetables and weed bots that can tell baby ragweed from baby carrots, god bless ‘em. In fact, it’s hard to find an article that isn’t absolutely glowing about “agritecture” and “agri-tech.” And it seems everyone, including the Europeans, seem eager to reassure farmers they’ll still be needed.
AI makes that unlikely. It’s called “intelligence” for a reason.
Deere, which acquired drone company Sentera this year, Built-In, Green Robotics and too many to name boast that they solve the labor shortage. Farm “operators” can’t find enough Brown people to super-exploit these days, thanks to Trump’s mass deportation policies.
If you consider your big problem climate change instead, they’ve got that pitch down too. Weed bots are sustainable because they reduce the need for synthetic chemicals, for example.
But labor shortages are an excuse. Climate change won’t be solved by satellite-driven, rare-earth-fueled robots. Policy is just a catalyst. They’re not the cause of what’s about to happen on our landscape. The cause is unfettered profit-mongering at the expense of rural America in the name of feeding the world.
Licensed software for every piece of machinery. Satellites deployed with public funds to serve private industry. Corporate land grabs disguised as family LLCs. The sheer impossibility of making a living as a commodity farmer anymore. This has been building for decades.
But now, get big or get out is on steroids, sped up exponentially by Big Tech. The table is set. It’s just a matter of who’s for dinner.
What does that mean for rural America?
Fully robotic farming translates into tech so expensive that it requires so much debt the last remaining farmers will have to fold. They’ll move south to retire or into cities looking for a decent day job, not one that just holds them over winter. That means more people searching for fewer good jobs.
At the very least, they’ll stay and become a permanent leasing class – leasing land, leasing equipment. Suffering all the risk with no reward, gaining no equity in land or equipment. They’ll be nonunion workers disguised as yeoman farmers. We’re most of the way there already but instead of out-of-state kids of a dead neighbor owning the land it’ll be Syngenta or the Mormon Church using algorithms to set the rental rate.
If you think this is just dystopian BS, take a look at the most recent “farmer bailout.” Let’s be honest. It was a bank bailout! Nearly all of that government money went to pay farmer debt, not pad farmers’ pockets. The farmers were just the middlemen. Big Tech will take care of that.
Commuters and remote workers will make up the remaining residents. In the 82nd House District in Iowa where I live, more than 80 percent of our jobs are outside the district. Most folks commute a half hour to Iowa City, Davenport, Muscatine or Cedar Rapids.
That means that the lion’s share of our paychecks not sent to China online are spent in those cities. Almost all of our groceries, home repair, clothes and healthcare are spent there, not in Mechanicsville, Clarence or Bennett. We are contributing to the death of rural America, but again, we’re not the cause of it.
The machine itself was built by corporate ag over the last century. Just imagine the “improved bottom line” and “upside” of finally getting the rest of us off our land.
Massive machines driving themselves down the gravel with no fear of hitting a pickup truck.
Drones spraying pesticides, herbicides and fungicides across millions of miles of the same crop without fear of property lines or lawsuits.
Self-driving trucks to deliver the grain where it needs to go.
Taxes will pay only for roads and storage facilities that support these machines.
No more schools, bars, churches. No more downtowns, Rotary or Lions clubs. No more FFA or 4-H. No more fire or police departments, except as needed to protect this high-tech property from vandals.
I can just imagine the CEO bonuses for finally pulling this off.
Rural residents are like face flies harassing a bull, buzzing about cancer rates and noise, pesticide drift and tractor-car accidents. Small towns are obsolete. There’s little profit to be made off community. Starve these little burgs senseless by pushing taxes and user fees onto local governments and soon folks see the benefit of moving into the city.
Governments worldwide have been moving people off their land for decades. Americans are not the exception and we are not immune. It might take one more generation, but then we’ll be dead. Our kids who’ve left for better places will sell at auction to the highest bidder, some corporate lawyer in flannel and jeans. Our homes and orchards will be bulldozed.
Eventually, folks will be able to say about displaced rural Americans what we’ve been saying about displaced Thai and Chinese peasants – “They should be glad they have a job. Now they’re part of the modern economy.”
We’ll actually be a part of a growing economic, social and cultural poverty. We’ll be right where corporations want us – desperate and alone.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
(Suzan Erem is a lifelong working writer and organizer. She hosts free events and grows Asian pears, chestnuts and honeyberries at Draco Hill Nature Farm in rural Cedar County. She is also the founder of the Sustainable Iowa Land Trust, a former newspaper editor and publisher, the author of 7 books and currently publishes Postcards from The Heartland, a radical in rural America project on Substack.)
ABOUT THE IOWA MERCURY
(Douglas Burns, founder of The Iowa Mercury and a fourth-generation Iowa journalist from Carroll, is a member of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative. Read dozens of the most talented writers in Iowa in just one place. The Iowa Writers’ Collaborative spans the full state. It’s one of the biggest things going in Iowa journalism and writing now — and you don’t want to miss. This collaborative is — as the outstanding Quad Cities journalist Ed Tibbetts says — YOUR SUNDAY IOWA newspaper. )
Hard to "like" this. But I did anyway. Thanks.
This analysis is solid. However, I'm more optimistic. If nothing changes, you've laid out the path. But change is possible. I remember when getting my masters in Rural Sociology at Iowa State more than a couple of decades ago, I noticed that Iowa had several thousand acre farms before the financial panics in the 1890s. There wasn't another 1000 acre farm until after WWII. I wish I could remember how I found that historical census of agriculture. Things are only invertible until they aren't. There are many reasons why social movements and economic consequences could set us on a different course. I'm not saying we're going to find that different course. But I do believe it's possible. Cleared eyed insights like this are important to building the movements needed.