Will AI replace Farmworkers and Laborers, Crop, Nursery, and Greenhouse?
AI reaches little of this job’s work.
8/100
Low exposure
More exposed to AI than 17% of US workers.
- AI already used in
- 3% of the work
- As AI tools mature: up to
- 16% of the work
What the job involves
Manually plant, cultivate, and harvest vegetables, fruits, nuts, horticultural specialties, and field crops. Use hand tools, such as shovels, trowels, hoes, tampers, pruning hooks, shears, and knives. Duties may include tilling soil and applying fertilizers; transplanting, weeding, thinning, or pruning crops; applying pesticides; or cleaning, grading, sorting, packing, and loading harvested products. May construct trellises, repair fences and farm buildings, or participate in irrigation activities.
Where AI reaches the work
The job’s main tasks, heaviest first, by how far AI reaches them.
Already happening(1)
- Provide information and advice to the public regarding the selection, purchase, and care of products.
Within reach(3)
- Record information about crops, such as pesticide use, yields, or costs.
- Inform farmers or farm managers of crop progress.
- Record information about plants and plant growth.
Out of reach(23)
- Harvest plants, and transplant or pot and label them.
- Direct and monitor the work of casual and seasonal help during planting and harvesting.
- Repair and maintain farm vehicles, implements, and mechanical equipment.
- Participate in the inspection, grading, sorting, storage, and post-harvest treatment of crops.
- Operate tractors, tractor-drawn machinery, and self-propelled machinery to plow, harrow and fertilize soil, or to plant, cultivate, spray and harvest crops.
and 18 more
Also called
Harvester · Orchard Worker · Cane Cutter · Carrot Harvester · Citrus Picker · Corn Picker · Cotton Picker · Crop Picker
Related jobs
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