Time Machine

Farmers, Ranchers, and Other Agricultural Managers

Scrub through 336 years of this role's history, from when it first emerged, through every wave of technology that reshaped it, to the cited forecasts for where it's heading next.

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1700172517501775180018251850187519001925195019752000now

2026

Known today as Farmers, Ranchers, and Other Agricultural Managers (SOC 11-9013)

US Employment

789K

National Employment Matrix total for 2025 from the BLS 2025-35 projections cycle. It counts all jobs in the occupation, including self-employed workers (66.9% of this occupation in 2025), so it is on a different basis from OEWS wage-and-salary estimates and is not a like-for-like point beside them.

Median Annual Wage

$89,900

≈ $87,595 in 2024 prices (derived by us, CPI-adjusted)

Each dot is a cited figure over time; the dotted line only links them (values between aren't measured). Hollow dots are estimates.

Tools of the era

The tools that defined the work

Select an era to see how it reshaped the work.

Mechanical reaper and steel plow
Cyrus McCormick tested his horse-drawn reaper in Virginia in 1831, and after his patent lapsed rival makers multiplied, more than a hundred of them by 1850. With a reaper, grain could be cut when it was ready, in less time and with less labor. John Deere's plow, made in his Grand Detour, Illinois blacksmith shop by 1838, scoured clean in the sticky prairie soil that clogged older plows. Together they let one farm family work far more land, and they pulled farming west onto the prairie.
Land-grant colleges, homesteads and public farm research
In 1862 Congress passed the Morrill Act, which funded state colleges to teach agriculture and the mechanic arts, and the Homestead Act, which offered 160 acres of surveyed public land to families who would live on and farm it. The Hatch Act of 1887 and the Smith-Lever Act of 1914 further expanded the public role in agricultural research. Running a farm began to draw on public science and schooling, not only on what a family had learned for itself.
Gasoline tractor replaces horses and mules
The Fordson, introduced in 1917, quickly became the most popular tractor in America. In 1930 US farms still kept 18.7 million horses and mules and only 920,000 tractors; by 1960 they had 4.7 million tractors and 3 million work animals. The 1954 Census of Agriculture found almost 3.5 million horses and mules had left farms in just four years. USDA concludes that tractors had essentially replaced animal power by 1970, and with it went much of the hired and family labor that animal farming needed.
Effect on the work
Over the same years the share of the US workforce employed in agriculture fell from 21.5 percent in 1930 to 4 percent of the employed labor force in 1970 (USDA ERS). This is a description of the period, not a measured effect of the tractor alone.
Hybrid seed, chemical fertilizer and pesticides
The first company to produce hybrid corn seed commercially was organized in 1926, and production took off in the early 1930s. By 1960, 95 percent of US corn acres were planted with hybrid seed, which farmers had to buy fresh each year. Cheap chemical fertilizers and pesticides spread after 1945. Farm productivity grew an average of 1.9 percent a year from 1948 to 1999, and the farmer's job shifted toward buying inputs, managing credit and choosing what to plant.
GPS guidance, precision agriculture and genetically engineered seed
Genetically engineered seed for major field crops went on sale in 1996, and today more than 90 percent of US corn, upland cotton and soybeans are grown from GE varieties. In the same years farmers adopted yield maps, variable-rate application and GPS guidance, which began with lightbars in the mid-1990s. Auto-steer was used on 5.3 percent of planted corn acres in 2001 and 58 percent in 2016.
Effect on the work
In a USDA sample of Midwestern corn fields (2010 and 2016), adopters of guidance systems worked 49 percent fewer hours per acre than nonadopters. USDA cautions, in the same passage, that larger operations also tend to adopt other labor-saving practices and equipment, so such gaps are not mainly attributable to one technology; an earlier USDA study found no significant difference in labor hours per bushel for guidance adopters.
Farm data platforms, smartphones, autonomy and AI
Running a farm has become a data job as well as a field job. In 2023, 82 percent of US farms had a smartphone and 85 percent had internet access, according to USDA. Telematics and software now handle routine farm record keeping, and guidance and section control already automate much of the steering. USDA cautions that AI and machine learning have not yet been deployed at scale on farms, so their effect on the work is still unproven.

Cited forecasts · present → 2035

Published forecasts and AI exposure research

Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, we show the disagreement rather than an average.

What published forecasts say

Forecast change in the number of people doing this work, as published by each named source. Bars share one scale on every role, centred on zero and reaching the end at ±30%. Grey means within ±3%, which BLS calls little or no change.

BLS Employment Projections 2025-35

→ 2035

-3.4%

BLS National Employment Matrix, 2025-35 cycle, line for SOC 11-9013 (Farmers, ranchers, and other agricultural managers): 788.7 thousand jobs in 2025, projected 762.2 thousand in 2035, a change of -26.5 thousand (-3.4%). Matrix employment counts all jobs in the occupation, including self-employed workers (66.9% of this occupation in 2025). The average for all occupations in this cycle is +3.5%.

How exposed is this work to AI (research measures)

Scores as published by each study. Each row says what it measures. These measure what AI could technically do, not forecasts of jobs lost.

Eloundou et al. (2023), "GPTs are GPTs"

2023 study · Share of tasks exposed to LLMs (β, human-rated)

24.5%

of tasks

Published occupation-level exposure from the paper's occ_level.csv for O*NET-SOC 11-9013.00 Farmers, Ranchers, and Other Agricultural Managers. Shown: human-rated β = 0.245, the share of the occupation's tasks an LLM could do in at least half the time at equal quality, counting tasks that need LLM-powered software at half weight (β = E1 + 0.5 × E2). Other published measures for this occupation: human-rated α (LLM alone) 0.102 and γ (all LLM-assisted) 0.388; GPT-4-rated β 0.367. This measures how much of the work an LLM could touch, not how many jobs disappear.

Frey & Osborne (2013), "The Future of Employment"

2013 study · Probability of computerisation (2013 model)

4.7%

probability

Published appendix value for SOC 2010 11-9013 Farmers, Ranchers, and Other Agricultural Managers: probability of computerisation 0.047, rank 137 of 702 (rank 1 is least computerisable). Frey and Osborne estimated in 2013, with a Gaussian-process classifier on O*NET variables, how likely the whole occupation is to be technically automatable over "some unspecified number of years, perhaps a decade or two". It is a probability for the occupation, not a share of tasks and not a forecast of jobs lost.

Today, in this role

What's shifting in the work right now

The historical view above shows how this role has moved. This is the present-day detail: which AI tools are picking up which tasks, where the edge still is, and the natural directions this work can grow.

What's changing in your day

Three parts of your work where AI is already doing real lifting, and what stays yours.

AI is sitting alongside you hereCollect and record growth, production, and environmental data.

Collect and record growth, production, and environmental data.^[2]

Where your edge is

AI is sitting alongside you hereManage nurseries that grow horticultural plants for sale to trade or retail customers, for display or exhibition, or for research.

Manage nurseries that grow horticultural plants for sale to trade or retail customers, for display or exhibition, or for research.^[2]

Where your edge is

AI is sitting alongside you hereDirect and monitor trapping and spawning of fish, egg incubation, and fry rearing, applying knowledge of management and fish culturing techniques.

Direct and monitor trapping and spawning of fish, egg incubation, and fry rearing, applying knowledge of management and fish culturing techniques.^[2]

Where your edge is

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The data behind this timeline

On record since1700

Latest tracked employment788,700 (US, 2025)

Latest median pay$89,900 (2025)

Outlook-3.4% by 2035 (BLS Employment Projections 2025-35)

View all 27 cited data points

Year	US employment	Annual pay (median unless marked)	Source
1870	3,127,715	n/a	Decennial Census
1880	4,301,412	n/a	Decennial Census
1890	5,382,037	n/a	Decennial Census
1900	5,763,000	n/a	Decennial Census
1910	6,163,000	n/a	Decennial Census
1920	6,442,000	n/a	Decennial Census
1930	6,032,000	n/a	Decennial Census
1940	5,362,000	n/a	Decennial Census
1950	4,375,000	n/a	Decennial Census
1960	2,526,000	n/a	Decennial Census
1970	1,350,000	n/a	Decennial Census
2010	n/a	$60,750	BLS OEWS
2011	n/a	$64,660	BLS OEWS
2012	n/a	$69,300	BLS OEWS
2013	n/a	$70,110	BLS OEWS
2014	n/a	$68,050	BLS OEWS
2015	n/a	$64,170	BLS OEWS
2016	n/a	$66,360	BLS OEWS
2017	n/a	$69,620	BLS OEWS
2018	n/a	$67,950	BLS OEWS
2019	n/a	$71,160	BLS OEWS
2020	n/a	$68,090	BLS OEWS
2021	n/a	$73,060	BLS OEWS
2022	n/a	$75,760	BLS OEWS
2023	n/a	$83,770	BLS OEWS
2024	n/a	$87,980	BLS OEWS
2025	788,700	$89,900	BLS Employment Projections, BLS OEWS

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See all roles in Management

Mechanical reaper and steel plow

Land-grant colleges, homesteads and public farm research

Gasoline tractor replaces horses and mules

Hybrid seed, chemical fertilizer and pesticides

GPS guidance, precision agriculture and genetically engineered seed

Farm data platforms, smartphones, autonomy and AI

What's changing in your day

See the same long-arc view for your own profession.

The data behind this timeline

More in Management