Understanding the social implications of farm automation requires taking a step inwards, to see which farm tasks are automated and how they relate to other tasks. It also requires looking outwards, to see how farm production interacts with upstream and downstream nodes in agrifood systems and the broader economy. At any given point in time, automation affects individual tasks on some farms. It releases labour from those specific tasks to other, more labour-intensive tasks on the farm, as well as to other activities up and down the agrifood chain and in other sectors of the economy.
It is easy to imagine automation creating unemployment and depressing farm wages. Such an outcome is indeed possible in some scenarios. However, past experience suggests that innovation and adoption of labour-saving technologies tends to be a long process. It is not easy to create machines that emulate the dexterity and skill of humans in performing agricultural tasks. There are many examples in which the automation of one farm task (e.g. soil preparation using a tractor) increases the demand for workers in other tasks (e.g. sowing, weeding, thinning, harvesting). In this way, automation can stimulate agricultural employment by enabling farms to expand their production in response to growing domestic and global food demands.
There is evidence that growth in agricultural production, facilitated by automation, stimulates job creation at other nodes of agrifood systems – in input-supply activities upstream and in logistics, storage, processing and marketing activities downstream from farms. In addition, it creates new entrepreneurial opportunities to develop new businesses.
How the development and adoption of labour-saving agricultural technologies affect employment and wages depends largely on what drives farm automation. Market signals – specifically, changes in wages relative to other factor prices – create incentives or disincentives to adopt labour-saving methods on farms. On the supply side, massive advancements in research and development will continue to place new farm automation solutions for new tasks within reach of farmers, and at a gradually decreasing cost. In the end, the overall impact remains an empirical question, hinging also on the importance of agriculture in the economy and the possible economy-wide impacts that agricultural automation may trigger.
This is good news from the perspective of raising global food production as farm workforces around the world contract. At the same time, very rapid development of farm automation, or government policies that promote automation before its time, could result in abrupt changes in labour demand and break the link between automation and labour availability. This could result in automation concurrent with rising unemployment and falling or stagnant wages on farms in some places and at some times. The obvious policy response should be to avoid creating market distortions that encourage premature automation, and instead immediately begin to prepare workers with the skills necessary to access new, higher-skilled jobs. This is especially important for young people and women, for whom a number of technical, economic and cultural barriers hinder full participation in these benefits. Given the risk that small-scale producers are forced out of agriculture as a result of technology adoption by commercial farms, it is important to protect their livelihoods and ensure that they are not left behind.
This chapter has provided suggestions for initiatives to promote inclusive agricultural automation that more fully engages women, youth and small-scale producers. Government policies on agricultural automation have a role to play in this regard, in addition to ensuring that agricultural automation is a driver of the transformation of agrifood systems. The role of government policy and legislation is discussed in more depth in Chapter 5.
