Abstract
Media outlets, industry researchers, and policy-makers are today busily extolling new robotic advances that promise to transform agriculture, bringing us ever closer to self-farming farms. Yet such techno-optimist discourse ignores the cautionary lessons of past attempts to mechanize farms. Adapting the Social Construction of Technology framework, we trace the history of efforts to replace human labor with machine labor on fruit, nut, and vegetable farms in California between 1945 and 1980—a place and time during which a post-WWII culture of faith in the beneficence of technoscience applications to agriculture reached an apex. The degree to which and forms whereby mechanization gains momentum hinges on whether, how, and among whom a technological frame for mimicking human capabilities and supplanting workers coalesces. These frames, we find, vary considerably across crops, reflecting complex interactions of biology, farmer and farm worker behavior, industry supply chains, agricultural research and development, financial flows, and beliefs about labor, race, gender, and immigration. To tease out these complex dynamics, we draw directly from archival evidence to follow the development of cultivation and harvest machines through four cases spanning a spectrum of outcomes—tomatoes, nuts, peaches, and lettuce. In comparing across these cases, we find that although agricultural engineers, scientists, and their boosters framed mechanization as a triumphal narrative of progress in ‘human vs. nature’ conflicts, this techno-optimist rhetoric camouflaged deeper ‘human vs. human’ conflicts, particularly among agribusiness, farmers, and farm workers. We conclude with several insights that this historical study brings to the study of agricultural automation today.
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Reproduced with permission from Western Grower & Shipper
Reproduced with permission from Western Grower & Shipper
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Notes
This time period also witnessed a more general national embrace of a “social contract for science” and its attendant rhetoric equating technoscience with the public good (for a brief review, see Guston 2000).
Speaking of tomatoes bred for machine harvest, as we discuss below, Friedland et al. note that this meant “another sort of vine was not designed… one which would produce maximum potential earnings to workers over an extended period” (1981, p. 22, emphasis in original).
A marked decline in trade articles and agricultural experiment station reports reporting on mechanization research and development efforts suggests that interest in this topic slowed greatly across the 1970s. Tellingly, in 1979, Loren Tukey asked: “Is interest dwindling in the U.S. in the development of new mechanical harvesting systems for deciduous tree fruits?… Have fruit growers lost their enthusiasm for mechanical harvesting, especially since adequate hand harvest labor can still be obtained? Based on research activities, the availability, design, and sales of commercial harvesters, and the general labor situation, one would have to answer these questions in the affirmative.” [77].
These included nuts (almonds and walnuts), citrus (lemons and oranges), stone fruit (peaches and plums/prunes), olives, grapes, lettuce, tomatoes, asparagus, and melons.
In September 1958, Western Grower and Shipper proudly proclaimed, “Western ‘business farmers’ lead U.S. trend,” going on to report that, “Row crop growers of Arizona and California are far in the lead of what is rapidly and inevitably becoming the trend for all agriculture across the nation... a trend characterized by broad operations, ample capital and extremely skillful management.” [78].
“Farm Tool Need Put to Bankers,” read the headline for this November, 1953 article in The New York Times. “State’s Tomato Growers Must Use Machines to Get Bank Financing,” read the headline for an article in the Los Angeles Times on November 8, 1965.
“There is no use trying to talk about domestic labor since there is actually not enough in the country to talk about. Southwestern agriculture has always needed and used some kind of supplemental labor in the harvesting of crops. Chinese, Indians, Filipinos, Japanese, Hindus, and, of course, Mexicans have been used” [5].
By 1952, University of California researchers predicted that growers could cut harvest costs by 20–30% through mechanization, worth about $50 million to growers (in today’s dollars), saying, “Our present responsibility is to try and cut the cost of harvesting” [79, emphasis added].
According to Valdes (1994), the tomato growers association also lobbied the state for an approximately seven-fold increase in public R&D funding for the UC-Blackwelder partnership starting in 1959.
As of 2011, iceberg lettuce was still harvested by hand in much the same way as in 1955 (Turini et al. 2011).
The Arizona and California lettuce sectors were and remain closely linked. Many packers and processors coordinate across both states to achieve nearly year-round supply through seasonal shifts in production location.
Thomas (1985) showed that, a decade or so later, growers viewed the purpose of the mechanical wrapping machine much the same way, even noting how workers would still sometimes “attempt to appear busy by remaining stooped” (p. 176), harkening back to the surveillance culture of the short-handled hoe.
Abbreviations
- R&D:
-
Research and development
- SCOT:
-
Social construction of technology
- UC:
-
University of California
- UCCE:
-
University of California Cooperative Extension
- UFW:
-
United Farm Workers
- USDA:
-
United States Department of Agriculture
Primary documents
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Acknowledgements
We would like to acknowledge undergraduate research assistants Ayla Peters and Brenly Stapley, without whose dedicated hours digitizing print records in the University of California library archives this work would not be possible. We would also like to acknowledge the four anonymous reviewers whose comments and suggestions helped us strengthen the article.
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Baur, P., Iles, A. Replacing humans with machines: a historical look at technology politics in California agriculture. Agric Hum Values 40, 113–140 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-022-10341-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-022-10341-2