Opinion: Stop asking if robots will take farm jobs — start asking why we're still making people do them

There’s a version of this story on farms across America: a farmer who spent decades doing work nobody else wanted to do, showing up before sunrise and finishing after dark, only to have the job wear down his body long before he was ready to stop.

That’s the conversation agriculture isn’t having.

Whenever a major story about AI in farming appears, the same questions follow: "Are you using it? Should we be worried? What does this mean for workers?" Those are the wrong questions — or at least the second questions.

The first question is simpler: Why are we still asking people to do jobs that are dangerous, physically punishing and mind-numbingly repetitive in the first place?

I've spent years on farms. I know farm labor isn't the romantic version portrayed in advertisements and calendars. It's spending eight hours on a tractor in the heat, making the same pass through the same rows until your body feels more punishment than motion. It's doing physically demanding work season after season because someone has to and no better solution exists.

When a robot takes over those tasks, workers aren't losing something valuable. They're gaining time. They're preserving their bodies. In some cases, they're getting years of their lives back.

So when growers call after reading the latest AI headlines, wondering where to begin, my advice is always the same: don't start at the top of the mountain.

The question isn't, "How do I automate everything?" The question is: "What's the most repetitive, physically demanding, and least rewarding task my people are doing today, and can I start there?"

The technologies that succeed aren't usually the ones doing the most impressive things. They're the ones doing basic tasks reliably, day after day, without drama. Start on the bunny slope. Build confidence. Then expand.

Too often, growers hear "AI" and immediately jump to the most complex use cases imaginable: autonomous harvesting, drone-powered precision picking or entirely new workflows. The ambition is understandable, but it's rarely how successful adoption happens.

The farms that have successfully integrated autonomous technology typically started with something unglamorous: moving product through rows, hauling bins or handling repetitive transport tasks that consumed hours of labor every day. They solved a simple problem first, proved the technology worked, earned trust from their teams and then looked for the next opportunity.

The farms that tried to start at the summit often never made it off the ground.

Another misconception is that automation is an all-or-nothing proposition. The debate is usually framed as a binary choice: robots either replace workers or they don't.

History tells a different story.

ATMs didn't eliminate bank tellers. They changed how tellers spent their time. Combine harvesters didn't eliminate farm labor; they transformed it. Automated milking systems didn't replace dairy farmers. One Pennsylvania dairy farmer I know now gets up at 5:30 a.m. instead of 2:30 a.m., using the hours he recovered to manage his herd rather than simply service it.

Agriculture has always evolved this way. Technology removes specific tasks, not the need for human judgment.

We see this on farms using autonomous transport systems today. When robots take over hauling and movement tasks, workers don't disappear. They shift to scouting, quality control, crop management and other responsibilities that require experience, observation and decision-making.

In many cases, those are better jobs: more skilled, more varied and far less physically taxing.

The labor isn't eliminated. It's upgraded.

None of this means the transition is frictionless. Workers who have spent years mastering a physical skill can understandably feel uncertain when a machine begins performing part of it. Managers accustomed to running crews a certain way may resist change. Those reactions are real and deserve acknowledgment.

The answer isn't to ignore the disruption. It's to be honest about what the technology is actually doing — and what it isn't.

It isn't replacing farmers.

It isn't eliminating the human judgment at the center of agriculture.

At its best, automation takes the jobs that wear people down, consume countless hours and provide little opportunity for growth, and makes them the machine's responsibility instead of the worker's.

That's the conversation agriculture should be having.

The real concern isn't whether robots are coming. It's whether they're arriving quickly enough to relieve people from work that never should have depended solely on human backs, knees and shoulders in the first place.

For decades, we've accepted that some farm jobs simply had to be exhausting. Today, for the first time, that assumption deserves to be challenged. The goal of agricultural automation isn't replacing people. It's ensuring that people spend more of their time doing the work only humans can do — and less of it doing the work that machines should have been doing all along.

Charlie Andersen is the CEO of Burro.