Will AI and robots replace farmworkers in Arizona? Growers experiment with new technology

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16-05-2025

GOODYEAR — A sizzling sound and a charred smell wafted from the rows of crops at Duncan Family Farm west of Phoenix. On the flattened planting bed, by the side of arugula seedlings smaller than a fingernail, the weeding machine moved forward, sparking a constellation of little fires.
Twenty feet wide, weighing nearly five tons, the LaserWeeder is trained with a data set of tens of millions of images to tell a crop plant from a weed. It kills the weeds with lasers, the tiny sparks and sizzle erupting from purslane catching fire.
The machine is one of many investments made by large-scale leafy green and vegetable growers in Arizona, both conventional and organic, to reduce labor costs and improve operations. Yuma, where much of the nation's winter vegetables are harvested, has a front row to the expanding ag tech market.
While the technology is expensive, proponents say automation will help U.S. farms stay ahead in the market.
'The only way you can really compete when you are talking about $20 an hour versus $4, is automation,' said Walter Duflock, vice president of innovation at Western Growers, comparing top farm wages for H2-A visa holders in the U.S. versus wages in Mexico.
With laser weeding, there's less chance that Duncan Family Farms, one of the leading organic growers in the country, will have to send a 20-person crew to walk the rows and weed by hoe later in the season. The artificial intelligence technology is especially beneficial for high-density crops like arugula, spinach, onions and carrots.
Not all improvements involve new tech, and human labor is far from being dispensable. In many cases, investments go into fine-tuning the use of herbicides, pesticides and fertilizers, increasing yields and making agriculture more precise.
On their newest micro-greens operation, Duncan Family Farms added an automated seeder and harvester, which didn't eliminate jobs but increased consistency, eliminated work hazards and freed up work hours so employees can attend to other tasks.
That tech isn't as "glittery" as the laser weeder, but it was transformative, said Courtney Boyer, supply chain manager for Duncan Family Farms.
One of the barriers to automation is that the newest technologies haven't been widely tested.
"We're trying to make slow, educated decisions," she said. "The (tech) companies, a lot of them are startups, there is a chance they might fail. It's just such a severe cost if something goes obsolete or hasn't been proven enough."
That's one of the reasons why, late last year, the Yuma Center for Excellence in Desert Agriculture, a donor-funded branch of the University of Arizona, opened a 'wireless farm' to serve as a test bed for agricultural tech companies, which can then troubleshoot and showcase their products to growers.
The project goes hand in hand with recently acquired county-wide connectivity from a high-speed fiber optic network, and the upcoming installation of 27 towers to get broadband to farms, said Connor Osgood, the center's AgTech research manager.
'We're not building it for today's technology, we are building it for tomorrow's technology,' he said, 'and we have no idea what that's going to look like.'
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Matt McGuire bought his first lettuce thinner in 2013, back when they were rare to nonexistent in Yuma. A tractor attachment with sensors, camera vision and nozzles sprayed fertilizer, acids or herbicides with precise accuracy on overcrowded rows of lettuce.
Until then, thinning, removing some lettuce plants to improve the growth of one, was done exclusively by workers using a hoe. Today, virtually every Yuma farm uses thinning machines to some degree. Those who don't own a thinner lease it or hire services.
Like all new technology, it went through several generations of refinement.
The first machine 'went out to the scrap pile after about three years,' said McGuire, chief agricultural officer of JV Smith Companies, which grows around 8,000 acres of veggies and greens in Arizona.
Now, he owns version four of the thinner developed by Agmechtronix, a New Mexico company that about 13 years ago designed the machine specifically for Yuma lettuce growers, said Agmechtronix owner Ryan Herbon. Multiple new players have jumped into the market of automation and cutting-edge technology since then, with company giants like John Deere buying startups for nine-digit sums.
Western Growers, representing fresh produce farmers in Arizona, California, Colorado and New Mexico, launched an initiative to automate 50% of fresh produce activity by 2031. The market is already responding to that trend, and competition is growing fast among developers.
'We are talking about half a billion dollars of equipment sales in a large region over 2.5 years,' said Duflock, with Western Growers.
Agriculture was an 'ideal opportunity and uncrowded market space' back in 2017 when Hylio decided to build drones specifically for spraying, fertilizing and scanning crops, said co-founder Arthur Erickson. The company has sold three drones in Arizona in the past two years, and hundreds more in other states.
Recent changes in Federal Aviation Administration regulations, allowing drones of 55 pounds or more to fly under certain waivers, also helped that market grow. Hylio's biggest drone weighs 470 pounds when fully loaded and ready to take flight.
To operate these systems efficiently, farms need connectivity. AI-driven technology takes a lot of data and a lot of bandwidth, and because many places in rural U.S. still lack broadband, tech companies found a workaround so farmers and service providers can collect data from the machine, then drive out of the farm to where they can upload it.
In Yuma County, that technology would have a real-time response. Last month, with $6 million awarded under the American Rescue Plan Act, the county board of supervisors approved the installation of broadband towers to serve 180,000 acres of farmland, which could make a network of devices, software and cloud systems run smoothly.
The "real holy grail," McGuire said, would be if farmers could run soil sensors on a tractor, measuring nutrients in real time and mapping the field by one-inch increments, and tie that data to a fertilizer injector in the back, which would deliver the "prescription." An automated thinner in which cameras assess plant health would send that information to a secondary spray system with fertilizer.
Years ahead, there could be 'swarms' of automated technology working farmland in the same space, at the same time, ventured Osgood, the research manager at YCEDA.
Yuma is the ideal testing site for these technologies, Osgood said. The area has "tightly choreographed" year-round crop production and extreme heat conditions, which provide both logistical and operational challenges. The various soil types and crops grown in the area also give companies diversity for their tests.
'If it works here, it'll work anywhere,' he said.
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Proponents of automation in agriculture say it can address labor shortage challenges, increase yields, save money on fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides, and reduce some environmental impacts.
Instead of spraying by aircraft, JV Farms now relies mostly on drones. The technology is quiet and reduces off-site drift — when sprayed chemicals move beyond the farm — because it has the control to fly to the edge of the field, stop, and turn around.
"I don't get phone calls at two in the morning for planes flying over," said McGuire about the drones' perks. Like with the aircraft sprays, drones also fly at night to avoid exposing crews to the chemicals, he explained.
The greatest advertisement for automation, however, is still that it reduces labor costs. As migrants who have worked in the agricultural industry for decades grow older and border enforcement toughens, growers have increasingly turned to an expensive visa program known as H-2A.
Using a thinner, one operator can do the work of 45 people, estimated McGuire. For JV Farms, that technology adoption meant that in four years, they went from hiring 22 farmworker crews to eight.
There are two kinds of technology: labor-augmenting and labor-replacing. The first is complementary to the effort of farmworkers; the second substitutes machines for human labor. The first one is currently more common in agriculture, but the landscape is changing.
Nearly half of the respondents of a 2022 Western Growers survey said they'd be increasing their spending on automation anywhere between 10% to 50% over the next three years. Nearly a third of respondents expected to spend over 50% extra.
Eliminating jobs with automation is not exclusive to the agricultural industry, but it carries similar moral dilemmas. Businesses improve their bottom line, while many livelihoods can be compromised. That is particularly true of farmworkers who have some of the weakest labor protections in the U.S. and often have limited job mobility.
"The technology is morally neutral," said Antonio de Loera, communications director for United Farm Workers. "The question is, how is it deployed? Is it used to dispose of workers?
"On the flip side, you could see a world where technological progress allows these jobs to be safer and more dignified."
In the past, automation has also led to industry consolidation. In the 1960s, tech companies released a commercial tomato harvester for California's cannery industry and a tomato variety engineered to withstand mechanical picking. The transition eliminated tens of thousands of farmworker jobs and reduced the number of tomato farmers in California by 82% in five years. Four companies held nearly full control of the market.
Depending on who is at the table, de Loera said, "the technology will be deployed only with their interest and bottom line in mind."
In Goodyear, around a small automated seeder, six women worked in a tiny assembly line. Two moistened and turned over a big pile of soil substrate and fed it into the machine; others lined and inspected the trays on the belt, and piled them after trays had been evenly seeded and watered.
Preparing micro-green trays is now done three to four times faster than the rudimentary process when employees had to seed trays by hand. It has increased yields and resulted in a more consistent product. Months later, Duncan Family Farms bought a microgreen harvester, so after the trays had produced tender leaves in the greenhouse, they could be evenly cut by the machine and dumped into shipping boxes.
That last change also meant that now the six employees don't have to use knives to cut 3-inch plants.
The whole process of taking care of microgreen production is like running a daycare, said Patricia Guzman, assistant supervisor for the crew. Coriander, kale, cabbage, arugula and radishes take a maximum of 20 days from seeding to harvest, and under the high-humidity conditions of the greenhouse and the dense planting, can catch mold if not inspected. A spot of decay can contaminate a line of microgreens.
The whole operation is reliant on them being watchful, Guzman said. "(The machines) streamline the process, but could never fully replace human work."
Clara Migoya covers agriculture and water issues for The Arizona Republic and azcentral. Reach her at [e-mail].
This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Arizona farmers experiment with AI to improve crop harvests