Farms without farmers are likely coming to a county near you
A version of this story first appeared in The Iowa Mercury.
Ten years ago, the Sierra Club published cute illustrations with an article about how robots were picking lettuce in vertical farms. The pressing question: Will “eco-bots” save the world with farmerless farms?
Ten years later, in January 2025, John Deere announced its plans to go 100% robotic by 2030.
That’s just 4 years from now, folks. And it would be killing our world, not saving it.
Read it again: In four 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 till it starts sounding like unemployment. Farmers won’t own the machines, of course. Right now they can’t even repair a machine they own because the software is only licensed to them, like a book on your Kindle. And with industry 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?
Recently, I was part of a small group of Iowa Farmers Union members invited to meet with U.S. Sen. Peter Welch (D-Vt.) in Ames, Iowa. 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 was reminded of Kodak.
“They planned to go digital in 10 years,” I said. “They were bankrupt in two.”
We can focus on federal policy affecting our commodity farmers now, but without a dramatic change in our approach, in the future those policies will affect only a handful of very rich and powerful people who are currently 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, are eager to reassure farmers they’ll still be needed.
Artificial intelligence makes that unlikely. It’s called “intelligence” for a reason.
Deere—which acquired drone company Sentera this year, along with GUSS Automation and too many others to name—boasts that robotics solve the farm labor shortage. I suppose farm “operators” can’t find enough brown immigrants to 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. Bots that weed are “sustainable” because they reduce the need for synthetic chemicals.
But labor shortages are an excuse to justify the corporate agenda. Climate change won’t be solved by satellite-driven, rare-earth-fueled robots. Robots are not the cause of what’s about to happen on our landscape. The cause is unfettered profit-mongering at the expense of rural America under the banner of feeding the world. And corporate-friendly policy is the catalyst.
Think about where we’re at: 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. This has been building for decades.
Earl Butz’s maxim “Get big or get out” is now 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 and requiring so much debt that 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 those 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 bullshit, take a look at the $12 billion “farmer bailout” announced by Trump and the U.S. Department of Agriculture in December. 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.
In the robotic future commuters and remote workers will make up the remaining residents of rural America. In Iowa’s 82nd House District, where I live, more than 80% of our jobs are outside the district. Most folks commute a half hour to Iowa City, Davenport, Muscatine or Cedar Rapids.
That means the lion’s share of our paychecks—at least those not sent online via Amazon to China—are spent in those cities. Almost all of our groceries, home repair, clothes and health care 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 cause is the steady march of corporate ag across our landscape over the last century. That march has become an AI-accelerated sprint that terrifies those of us who see it heading straight at us. Just imagine the “improved bottom line” and corporate “upside” of finally getting the rest of us humans off our land:
I can just imagine the CEO bonuses for finally pulling this off.
Today, rural residents are like face flies harassing a bull, buzzing about cancer rates and noise, undrinkable well water, 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 shade trees will be bulldozed.
Eventually, folks will be able to say about displaced rural Americans what we’ve been saying about displaced—and landless—Thai and Chinese peasants: “They should be glad they have a job. Now they’re part of the modern economy.”
What we’ll really be part of is a phenomenon of growing economic, social and cultural poverty. We’ll be right where corporations want us—desperate and alone.
That can be the last chapter, but it doesn’t have to be. Throughout America’s history, working people have always come to the same conclusion—that the best weapon, their greatest strength, is joining together.
In the distant past, coalminers and meatpackers had to lose a lot of strikes before realizing that their co-workers from different backgrounds were not the enemy the boss said they were. More recently, health care professionals wanting better working conditions had to learn that service workers are not the insignificant people the boss makes them seem.
We are rural and urban, born American and new American, white, Black, old-timer and newcomer, straight, gay and in between. We can continue to define ourselves as such and continue to lose. Or we can enjoy not only comfort but power in finding and defending our common interest.
Oligarchs do it all the time. So can we.
Suzan Erem writes the Substack Postcards from The Heartland. You can subscribe here.
Suzan Erem is a fruit and nut farmer, working writer and community organizer in rural Cedar County, Iowa. Her Substack is Postcards from the Heartland. Her farm can be found at DracoHill.org.
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