As labor costs rise, AI is learning to farm

Chicago Tribune

a day ago

A century ago, orchards were the primary source of income for Parker Flamm's grandfather and many others in Cobden, a 1,000-person town in southern Illinois. Today, Flamm Orchards is one of the last standing.
'Right now, it's pretty much just us,' said Flamm, a sixth-generation orchard owner whose primary customer is a Kroger distribution center in Louisville that buys their peaches and apples.
He blames the mass exodus of orchards on the challenges rising labor costs and a shortage of workers pose to an industry where the standard is to do everything by hand, from pruning trees and harvesting to packing and shipping.
'For every dollar we make, you can safely say that half of it goes back into labor expenses,' he said.
At peak season in June and July, Flamm Orchards employs about 90 workers from Oaxaca, Mexico, with temporary visas to do agricultural work. Flamm spends tens of thousands of dollars to get the workers into the country for just a few months at a time. The Tribune is launching a series of special reports analyzing the hurdles many farmers face in trying to be good stewards of the land as climate change intensifies. Experts preach growing a variety of crops as weather resilience and food security strategies. But Illinois farmers report that the labor demands of fruits and vegetables and the rising cost of that labor are deterrents to growing anything but corn and soybeans.
While most produce must be handpicked from trees, vines and bushes, expansive and uniform rows of corn and soybeans cater to repetitive processes that are relatively simple to automate. Combines have been used to harvest grain and beans since the 1930s.
Engineers are betting that, one day, artificial intelligence will provide a means of meeting the more delicate labor demands of specialty crops.
'You identify the fruit, reach the fruit and put it in a container. You need a brain and vision or you need a computer and cameras to see the fruit and complete the process,' said Yuzhen Lu, an assistant professor of biosystems and agricultural engineering at Michigan State University.
Drawing on advances in facial recognition technologies and autonomous vehicles, Lu and his team aspire to develop an AI-powered robot that can recognize and harvest fruits and vegetables.
Meanwhile, Juventino Garcia Chavez, 44, has been working at the orchard from March to October for over a decade. He makes the majority of his income during these seven months, then returns home to his wife, 14-year-old son and 5-year-old daughter in Oaxaca.
'I miss my family, but I need to work,' he said in Spanish. Chavez learned about the H-2A temporary agricultural worker program from several neighbors who have also used it to secure steady jobs.
As domestic interest in farm work has declined, specialty growers are increasingly reliant on migrants who enter the country legally with an H-2A visa. So far, despite the Trump administration's aggressive crackdown on immigration, it has not targeted this program.
The number of visas requested and approved ballooned eightfold from 2005 to 2024, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture data.
Three local residents applied to work for Flamm Orchards this season. One quit after a day.
The labor is physically demanding and the conditions can be grueling: seven days a week, rain or shine, under the blazing hot sun or in freezing cold winds.
With little success recruiting and retaining Americans, Flamm said he has been forced to turn to Mexico to fulfill his orchard's needs.
On an early May morning, Chavez was packaging strawberries in a warehouse, hand selecting the fresh ones and discarding the rotten ones — a relatively painless activity. His least favorite task is picking cucumbers, which requires him to bend over for hours on end under the July and August sun.
'It can be hard because we work in the heat and the rain, but we go forth,' Chavez said.
The demographic makeup of workers on Flamm's farm is emblematic of a larger trend in American agriculture. According to the latest data from the USDA, 55% of farm workers are Mexican, compared with 12% of the entire workforce.
Before recruiting H-2A workers, farmers must prove that they've made a serious effort to advertise the job openings domestically.
'We feel like we have some of the best help in the country,' said Flamm, likening the 90 workers he employs every year to professional athletes. 'Outside the expense of the whole program, we cannot say a single bad thing.'
Farmers who use the visa program must provide migrant workers housing, transportation and a minimum salary called the adverse effect wage. These expenses are on top of more than $300 per worker in administrative and processing fees farmers pay to the federal government and brokers.
The federal government averages farmworkers' gross hourly earnings collected via annual surveys to set this salary floor. The adverse effect wage, which varies regionally, is meant to ensure farmers don't outsource labor at the expense of domestic job seekers. But farmers say it's prohibitive.
The salary for visa holders is $19.57 per hour this year in Illinois, whereas the state's minimum wage is $15 per hour. And this adverse effect wage has been steadily rising, jumping more than $1 from 2024 to 2025 and over $5 since 2020.
'It's really scary and unsustainable,' said Flamm. 'A lot of people look at all those hoops and expenses that you have to jump through and decide (farming is) not worth it. So (rising H-2A expenses) definitely play a big part in the decline in farms.'
Fifteen years ago, the Flamms also grew 400 acres of zucchini. Today, they've scaled zucchini down to 50 acres and just farm it to fill the void between peach and strawberry season in June. They can't afford the workers needed to sustain a larger operation.
Elizabeth Wahle, a commercial agriculture specialist with the University of Illinois, said politicians must face the reality that farming will become increasingly dependent on foreign labor.
'Short of us having a whole new generation of people who just really love working outside year-round, I don't know if that's going to change,' she said.
As many worry about labor shortages, others are looking to artificial intelligence to fill the void.
'We're living in very exciting times for AI and agriculture,' said Baskar Ganapathysubramanian, director of the AI Institute for Resilient Agriculture housed at Iowa State University. 'We're going to see significant progress in the next decade.'
AI is already being used to scan fields for weeds and pests and then share that data with farmers to support decision-making. It's becoming increasingly good at making recommendations too, such as suggesting when and how much to fertilize, he said.
The next step, according to Ganapathysubramanian, is having AI make decisions and take action using robotic limbs, essentially replacing human labor.
These processes will have to be tailored to the unique care regime of each fruit and vegetable, adding a layer of complexity. Tomatoes need to be planted in mid-May and twisted off the vine before the first frost. Broccoli prefers chillier temperatures, so it can be planted as early as February and harvested as late as November, but the heads have to be hand-cut from the base of the stalk. Both can be frozen but should be eaten within six months for optimal freshness.
In general, technology is further along for row crops because hundreds of acres of corn and soybeans are relatively simple to tend to en masse. Ag-tech conglomerates such as John Deere and CNH Industrial have also historically catered to the needs of row crop operations since they're such a large share of the nation's agricultural sector, accounting for $21 billion of agricultural production in Illinois alone. Specialty crops haven't received as much attention from corporate America. 'We don't have that kind of interest, at least here in the United States, for specialty producers,' said Dennis Bowman, a digital agriculture specialist at the University of Illinois Extension.
He's leading a team of researchers training artificial intelligence to identify horseradish by feeding it photos of the root vegetable at different stages of maturity. Anything unrecognizable is assumed to be a weed, which activates a pinpoint sprayer or mechanical tool that targets the weed but doesn't harm the horseradish. The mechanical tool could be used to farm organic produce, Bowman said.
Once the AI model is refined, Bowman said it could easily be modified to identify other crops.
He expects this weeding technology will be on the market within three years and relatively affordable since his team is largely modifying pre-existing technologies.
Lu, the Michigan State professor, said the harvesting technology he's working on is much further from commercialization.
A robotic arm may, one day, be able to pick different fruits and vegetables, according to Lu. The team must first overcome significant challenges, including getting the AI to recognize a ripe crop under varying light conditions and developing a portable, powerful battery that can withstand long hours in a hot field.
Farm labor is notoriously strenuous, and the migrant workers who are increasingly doing it are often vulnerable.
'The law isn't on their side,' said Alexandra Sossa, chief executive officer of the Chicago-based Farmworker and Landscaper Advocacy Project.
Even though they're in the country legally, H-2A visa holders cannot unionize under federal law and are not eligible for overtime pay in Illinois.
Still, many rely on this seasonal work to provide for their family year-round. The five months per year that Chavez is home in Oaxaca, he picks up odd jobs as available. Flamm Orchards provides his steady income.
Sossa advocates for stronger worker protections as well as streamlining the application process to reduce the administrative burden on both workers and employers.
Migrants can currently only stay in the country for up to 10 months at a time and their employer must reapply to bring them back the next year, a process that can take months.
The federal government should consider reducing application fees and allowing multiyear visas, Sossa said.
Many of the workers Flamm employs have returned several years in a row.
Chavez, who arrived in March, reported having no problem renewing his visa and plans to return next year, as long as political conditions allow.
At a Cabinet meeting in April, President Donald Trump reportedly expressed interest in expanding the visa program, according to an NBC News report, including creating avenues for the approximately 40% of U.S. crop farmworkers in the country illegally to reenter with H-2A status.
However, Sossa expects the president's anti-immigrant rhetoric and recent actions — including his recent deportation of several Venezuelan migrants in the United States legally — will have a cooling effect on foreign interest in working in the U.S.
This, combined with a lack of domestic interest in farm work, could negatively impact American farmers' ability to get food to market. But, more immediately, the Trump administration's tariffs have sent shockwaves through Midwestern farming communities.
Soybean and corn farmers worry Trump's tariffs could hurt their businesses. China and Mexico have historically been two of the largest consumers of Illinois' No. 1 and No. 2 commodities.
Flamm, however, is in favor of the administration's strategy. Even though it means he'll have to pay more for foreign-sourced supplies such as fertilizers and seeds, he said higher tariffs on produce from Mexico will make it easier for his relatively small operation to compete.
'From our standpoint, he can slap a tariff on Mexico for Mexican grown produce. We're all about it, even if it raises our inputs somewhat. To stop the Mexican produce coming into the country for next to nothing is invaluable to us,' he said.
On the flipside, he also wants it to be easier for Mexican workers to enter the United States.
The old white house where Hans Bishop's H-2A workers lived is falling apart.
Bishop, 41, grew vegetables on his farm in central Illinois until 2023, when rising labor costs and unfavorable lease terms pressured him to pivot. Today, he exclusively grows corn and soybeans.
In early April, down the road from the ramshackle house, dry corn shot from one of Bishop's grain silos into a semi-truck headed for Kentucky. Luke Darrow, a 32-year-old from a neighboring town and Bishop's only employee, monitored the loading process from the sidelines.
The corn was collected last year with a mechanical harvester called a combine and has been stored in a metal silo for months. Truckloads of this dry grain have been leaving his farm all winter, providing him with a steady income year-round.
Bishop grows organically on the majority of his acres, meaning he doesn't use any fertilizers or pesticides, which are often made with petroleum. It's widely considered an environmentally friendly practice. But, since he doesn't use pesticides, he has to take several passes through his field with a diesel-powered tractor to get rid of the weeds.
'Then we're burning a bunch of fuel to harvest corn and soybeans, and to truck it from the farm to the elevator, and to truck it from the elevator to the end user. It's just a system that's completely dependent on a non-renewable resource,' Bishop reflected.
AI, however, doesn't promise to be much cleaner. It demands a staggering amount of power. While carbon emissions from AI used in agriculture are yet to be determined, just a simple search query on an AI-powered enginesuch as ChatGPT uses 10 times as much electricity as a basic Google search.
Trends suggest that even when it's ready, AI won't penetrate farming communities quickly. Technology adoption in farming has lagged compared to other sectors, said Adee Athiyaman, a professor of agricultural marketing at Western Illinois University.
Technologies that use sensors to monitor field conditions and apply chemicals precisely where and when needed have been available since the 1990s, but a 2023 USDA study found that only 27% of U.S. farms and ranches used them.
Bishop, for example, just got a GPS this year and all three of his diesel-powered tractors are second-hand: one is from his grandfather, another is from his father and he bought the newest used. For him, the biggest barrier has been cost. The margins on his 700-acre operation haven't been enough to justify the expense.
The adoption rates of technologies 'increase sharply' with farm income, according to another federal study, suggesting that AI could widen the gap between small and large farms. Large farms could get larger and small farmers could get smaller as they struggle to compete, hollowing out the middle.
'Small-scale farmers don't really want to spend time and energy and money on technology, but technology is the way to go if you want to really keep up,' Athiyaman said.
Flamm is ready to experiment. He and his family have seen too many neighboring orchards shutter as their own expenses continue to rise.
'Whenever the technology is there, it's going to require some serious looking into because if we could cut down on the labor expense, that would be huge,' he said.
But Chavez isn't worried about AI taking his job any time soon.
'There are jobs that cannot be done with a machine at 100%. The hands of people are needed to be able to do this job,' said the migrant worker.