Will AI replace Agricultural Equipment Operators?
AI reaches little of this job’s work.
0/100
Low exposure
More exposed to AI than 2% of US workers.
- AI already used in
- 0% of the work
- As AI tools mature: up to
- 0% of the work
What the job involves
Drive and control equipment to support agricultural activities such as tilling soil; planting, cultivating, and harvesting crops; feeding and herding livestock; or removing animal waste. May perform tasks such as crop baling or hay bucking. May operate stationary equipment to perform post-harvest tasks such as husking, shelling, threshing, and ginning.
Where AI reaches the work
The job’s main tasks, heaviest first, by how far AI reaches them.
Out of reach(17)
- Observe and listen to machinery operation to detect equipment malfunctions.
- Operate or tend equipment used in agricultural production, such as tractors, combines, and irrigation equipment.
- Attach farm implements such as plows, discs, sprayers, or harvesters to tractors, using bolts and hand tools.
- Manipulate controls to set, activate, and adjust mechanisms on machinery.
- Mix specified materials or chemicals, and dump solutions, powders, or seeds into planter or sprayer machinery.
and 12 more
Also called
Farm Equipment Operator · Equipment Operator · Hay Baler · Baler · Broomcorn Thresher · Combine Operator · Custom Harvester · Fertilizer Applicator
Related jobs
- Extruding, Forming, Pressing, and Compacting Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders9/100
- Farmworkers and Laborers, Crop, Nursery, and Greenhouse8/100
- Milling and Planing Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders, Metal and Plastic7/100
- Machine Feeders and Offbearers9/100
- Separating, Filtering, Clarifying, Precipitating, and Still Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders8/100
What these numbers mean
The score is the share of this job’s work, weighted by how important and frequent each task is, that AI could do in half the time: tasks an AI model could do alone count in full, tasks that need software built on AI count half.
“AI already used” is the share of the work in tasks where people are recorded using AI today. “As AI tools mature” counts every task AI could halve, with or without extra software.
The percentile compares the score with every job’s, weighted by how many people in the US do each one. Exposure means AI could change how the work is done, not that the job goes away. These are estimates for the typical job, not predictions.
Sources
- O*NET 31.0 Database, U.S. Department of Labor, Employment and Training Administration
- GPTs are GPTs: Labor market impact potential of LLMs (task labels), Eloundou, Manning, Mishkin & Rock (2023), OpenAI and University of Pennsylvania
- Anthropic Economic Index: labor market impacts (task penetration), Anthropic
- Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025 (national and metropolitan areas), U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics