Farmworkers
Official title Farmworkers and Laborers, Crop, Nursery, and Greenhouse (SOC 45-2092)
Also called Crop laborer, Field worker, Nursery worker, Greenhouse worker, Agricultural laborer
In brief
In May 2025, BLS counted 265,500 US farmworkers, with median pay of $35,660 a year. Of the BLS counts since 2003, the highest was 295,520, in May 2019. The earliest figure here is an estimate of 1,800,000 from 1900, not measured the same way as today's count. The current technology era for farmworkers: Precision ag-robotics, since 2018.
What the sources say
Official outlook
BLS projects employment to decline 2.4% from 2025 to 2035.
AI exposure studies
- 7.1% of this job's tasks are exposed to large language models. Not a forecast of job losses. Eloundou and others, 2023
Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. BLS publishes these counts as yearly survey snapshots and cautions against reading them as a precise trend. In May 2021 BLS changed how it estimates these counts (a model-based method using three years of survey data) and moved fully to the 2018 occupation codes, so part of a change across 2021 can come from the method rather than the work.
Last updated .
Cite this page
Future History. (2026, October 11). Farmworkers: jobs and pay since 1900 [Data set; data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35]. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/45-2092
Future History. "Farmworkers: jobs and pay since 1900." Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. Last modified October 11, 2026. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/45-2092.
@misc{futurehistory_45_2092, author = {{Future History}}, title = {Farmworkers: jobs and pay since 1900}, year = {2026}, month = oct, howpublished = {\url{https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/45-2092}}, note = {Last updated 2026-10-11. Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35}, }
The access date is today's date on your device.
≈ $34,746 in 2024 prices (derived by us, CPI-adjusted)
May 20, 1862: President Lincoln signs the Homestead Act, distributing 160-acre plots of surveyed public land to 1.6 million claimants over the following 72 years. The Act's design assumed family-scale farming: a household could work 160 acres with its own labor. But commercial crop production in California, Texas, and the Midwest quickly developed at scales requiring seasonal hired labor that no family could provide. The structural mismatch between the Homestead Act's small-farm ideal and the agribusiness reality of California's Central Valley created the demand for a large seasonal hired labor force that has never since been satisfied by domestic workers alone.
May 6, 1882: President Chester Arthur signs the Chinese Exclusion Act, the only US law in history to bar immigration on the basis of race and national origin. In California, where Chinese workers had become the backbone of Central Valley fruit and vegetable agriculture, the Act strands existing workers while cutting off future recruitment. Growers pivot immediately to Japanese workers, beginning a century-long pattern of agricultural labor markets organized around successive waves of legally vulnerable immigrant workers. The Act is not fully repealed until the Magnuson Act of 1943, when China is a wartime ally and the racial exclusion becomes a diplomatic liability.
August 4, 1942: The United States and Mexico sign the Mexican Farm Labor Agreement, the Bracero Program. The immediate justification is wartime labor shortage; the structural function is the institutionalization of what growers had been doing informally since the 1920s: importing Mexican workers on terms that gave employers maximum flexibility and workers minimum protection. Over 22 years, approximately 4.6 million contracts are issued to Mexican men: the largest organized labor-import program in US history. When the program ends on December 31, 1964, under pressure from the AFL-CIO, civil rights organizations, and domestic farm workers (organized into the UFW by Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta in 1962), the migration networks, remittance patterns, and labor-market dependencies it created persist as undocumented migration. The Bracero Program does not end; it goes underground.
September 8, 1965: Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta lead the United Farm Workers in joining a strike of Filipino grape workers in Delano, California, the beginning of the Delano Grape Strike that would last five years and produce the first major union contracts in US agricultural history. The UFW's tactics (consumer boycotts, marches, hunger strikes) were effective precisely because agricultural workers had been excluded from the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, which gave other workers the right to organize. The 1965-1970 grape boycott, which eventually drew support from 17 million Americans who refused to buy California table grapes, produced contracts with major grape growers in 1970. The UFW represented a peak of approximately 50,000 members in the mid-1970s before declining under grower counter-pressure and California political shifts.
November 6, 1986: President Reagan signs the Immigration Reform and Control Act. The Special Agricultural Workers (SAW) program, a late-stage compromise added to get the bill through Congress, legalizes approximately 1.2 million workers who had been picking perishable crops. It is the largest agricultural-worker amnesty in US history. IRCA simultaneously creates the modern H-2A temporary agricultural visa, splitting the older H-2 program. The SAW program briefly transforms the documented status of a large share of the crop workforce, but within a decade, most SAW beneficiaries have moved out of agriculture: into construction, food service, and other industries. They are replaced by new undocumented arrivals, and the cycle begins again. By 2020-22, USDA data shows 42% of crop workers lack work authorization: a higher share than before IRCA.
The H-2A temporary agricultural worker visa program issues 65,345 visas: already double the FY 2005 level. Growers in North Carolina, Washington, Florida, Georgia, and California are driving the growth, responding to increased interior immigration enforcement that has reduced the undocumented labor supply. H-2A workers arrive with contracts, housing guarantees, and Adverse Effect Wage Rates that are typically higher than what undocumented workers accept. The program has no annual cap, unlike the H-1B technology visa, and grows continuously as growers discover it is the only reliable legal mechanism for hiring foreign crop workers. By FY 2024, H-2A positions certified will reach 385,000: a roughly 6x increase in 12 years.
Carbon Robotics is founded in Seattle and begins developing the LaserWeeder: a GPS-guided machine that uses computer vision to identify weed plants in crop rows and fires precision carbon dioxide lasers to kill them thermally without herbicide. The LaserWeeder enters commercial deployment around 2020 and reaches approximately 100 units in the field by 2024. Carbon Robotics targets organic vegetable growers and specialty crop producers where hand-weeding can cost $500-$1,500 per acre per season. At $300,000-$400,000 per machine, the unit economics work for large organic farms with high hand-weeding labor costs. This is the first ag-robotics platform to achieve measurable commercial adoption in crop farmworker tasks, not harvesting, which remains technically too hard, but weeding, which is repetitive, high-frequency, and does not require fragile-produce handling.
January 4, 2022: John Deere unveils the 8R Autonomous Tractor at the Consumer Electronics Show, a 410-horsepower tractor equipped with six stereo cameras, GPS, and an AI system capable of operating fields without a driver. Deere begins commercial sales later in 2022, making it the first fully autonomous large agricultural vehicle available for purchase from a major manufacturer. The 8R handles primary tillage operations (plowing, cultivating, and planting) in open field conditions where terrain is predictable and obstacles are rare. It does not handle the harvesting, transplanting, weeding, or pruning tasks that constitute the majority of hired crop-worker hours. But it establishes that autonomous agricultural vehicles are commercially available, not just prototypes.
USDA data shows hired farm employment at 1.18 million total workers in 2024, up from 1.07 million in 2010. H-2A program reaches 385,000 certified positions, approximately 315,500 actual visas issued, since roughly 80% of certified positions result in a visa. NAWS demographic data for 2020-22 shows the workforce composition: 32% US-born, 7% naturalized citizens, 19% authorized immigrants, 42% unauthorized. Real wages for nonsupervisory crop workers have risen at an average of 1.2% per year since 1990, reaching $18.13/hour in 2024, compared with $30.13/hour in non-farm occupations. The 40% farm/non-farm wage gap is the persistent structural explanation for why domestic workers do not fill agricultural positions and why growers depend on immigration for labor supply.
Will AI replace farmworkers? What the research says
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.
Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, the spread is the honest signal.
What's changing day to day for farmworkers
Three parts of your work where AI is already doing real lifting, and what stays yours.
AI is sitting alongside you hereRecord crop-production data including pesticide applications, irrigation volumes, yields, and labor hours in farm management software or paper logs to support compliance, cost tracking, and agronomic decision-making.
Record crop-production data including pesticide applications, irrigation volumes, yields, and labor hours in farm management software or paper logs to support compliance, cost tracking, and agronomic decision-making.[1],[6]
Learn digital farm management platforms (Granular, Climate FieldView, AgWorld) to transition from paper-log entry to data-verified agronomic recordkeeping roles with greater responsibility and pay.
AI is sitting alongside you hereScout fields on foot or using AI-assisted drone imagery platforms to identify pest infestations, disease outbreaks, and nutrient deficiencies, then report findings to farm supervisors or agronomists for treatment decisions.
Scout fields on foot or using AI-assisted drone imagery platforms to identify pest infestations, disease outbreaks, and nutrient deficiencies, then report findings to farm supervisors or agronomists for treatment decisions.[6],[7]
Train on precision-ag scouting platforms (Taranis, Climate FieldView) to interpret AI-generated threat maps; pursue a Certified Crop Adviser credential to formalize the agronomic knowledge gap.
AI is sitting alongside you hereOperate tractors and tractor-drawn machinery for tillage, planting, cultivation, and spraying, following GPS-guided field paths and monitoring on-screen prescriptions for variable-rate seed and chemical application.
Operate tractors and tractor-drawn machinery for tillage, planting, cultivation, and spraying, following GPS-guided field paths and monitoring on-screen prescriptions for variable-rate seed and chemical application.[8],[1]
Complete manufacturer training on GPS auto-steer and autonomous-kit operation; learn to read and troubleshoot machine telematics dashboards to position yourself as an equipment operator rather than a manual operator.
Where farmworkers go next
Natural next steps for someone with your foundation: not exits, evolutions.
- First-Line Supervisors of Farming, Fishing, and Forestry WorkersNo timeline for this role yet
- Agricultural InspectorsNo timeline for this role yet
- Agricultural Equipment OperatorsNo timeline for this role yet
What each move takes
First-Line Supervisors of Farming, Fishing, and Forestry Workers
First-Line Supervisors of Farming, Fishing, and Forestry Workers coordinate labor crews and increasingly oversee robotic and autonomous equipment deployments. Experienced farmworkers with bilingual skills, pest-scouting knowledge, and equipment familiarity are the primary pipeline for these supervisory roles on mid-sized operations.
- · Crew scheduling and labor-compliance recordkeeping (OSHA, FLSA, H-2A standards)
- · Pesticide applicator license
- · Basic farm management software (Granular, FarmLogs)
- · Conversational English and Spanish for bilingual crew coordination
How has the work of farmworkers changed since 1700?
The tools that defined the work, one line per era. Select an era to see how it reshaped the work.
Hand tools + enslaved and indentured labor (hoe, sickle, cotton gin 1793)
For more than a century before the Civil War, the hand tools of American crop agriculture were essentially unchanged from the tools of antiquity: the hoe, the rake, the sickle, the dibble stick, and the cotton hook. Eli Whitney's cotton gin (1793) mechanized cotton-fiber separation from seeds, which increased the profitability of cotton growing so dramatically that it roughly tripled the demand for field labor to plant, cultivate, and pick the cotton itself. The gin is the clearest example in American agricultural history of a labor-saving machine in one stage of production creating more labor demand in upstream stages. Enslaved workers (concentrated in cotton, tobacco, rice, and sugar production) performed the overwhelming share of American crop labor. Their work was extracted by force, not compensated as wages, and represented an estimated one-third of the entire wealth of the United States at the eve of the Civil War. The Emancipation Proclamation (1863) and the 13th Amendment (1865) formally ended chattel slavery and forced a reorganization of Southern crop-labor markets into sharecropping and tenant farming: structurally different from wage labor but still dependent on the same hand tools and the same physical intensity.
Effect on the workThe cotton gin roughly tripled cotton production and dramatically increased the demand for hand-picked cotton labor, enslaved workers in the South grew between 1790 and 1860 as cotton spread across new states. Emancipation ended the forced-labor system without immediately changing the tools or the crop-labor structure.
Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) → Japanese → Filipino → Mexican labor migration waves
On May 6, 1882, President Chester Arthur signed the Chinese Exclusion Act: the only US law to bar immigration on the basis of race and national origin. In California, where Chinese workers had built the transcontinental railroad, drained the Sacramento Delta, and formed the backbone of Central Valley fruit and vegetable agriculture, the Act's immediate effect was to strand existing workers while eliminating future recruitment. California growers pivoted to Japanese workers in the 1880s-1910s (until the 1907 'Gentleman's Agreement' informally restricted Japanese immigration), then to Filipino workers (Manongs) in the 1920s-1930s (until the 1934 Tydings-McDuffie Act limited Filipino immigration), and finally and durably to Mexican workers whose proximity and economic pressure drove a continuous migration stream that no single law could fully stop. The Mexican Revolution (1910-1920) accelerated northward migration; the Immigration Act of 1917 included an exemption for temporary agricultural laborers at growers' insistence; and by the 1920s, Mexican workers had replaced all earlier waves as the dominant hired crop-labor force in the West and Midwest. The Great Migration also brought Southern Black workers to Northern agriculture and industry, but crop farmwork in the South remained dominated by sharecropping and tenant farming through the 1930s: a form of debt bondage that had replaced slavery without liberating its workers.
Effect on the workEach legislative restriction on one national-origin group created demand for the next wave of immigrant workers, without changing the hand-labor technology or the wage structure. The result was a crop-labor market permanently organized around the most economically vulnerable available workforce, willing to work for wages that US-born workers would not accept.
Bracero Program (Emergency Farm Labor Agreement, 1942): institutionalized temporary migration
On August 4, 1942, the United States and Mexico signed the Mexican Farm Labor Agreement: the Bracero Program. The immediate justification was wartime labor shortage: young American men were being drafted into military service, and California and Texas farms faced the real possibility of crops rotting in the fields for lack of hands. The program provided Mexican men with short-term contracts (weeks to several months) for specific agricultural work, with provisions for a minimum wage, transportation, housing, and medical care. In practice, the housing provisions were often unfulfilled, the minimum wage was often below what had been promised, and workers who complained could be deported without recourse. Nevertheless, the program grew from thousands of contracts in 1942 to a peak of approximately 445,000 in 1956. Over its life, approximately 4.6 million contracts were issued to Mexican men, though a single worker could receive multiple contracts, so the number of individuals involved was smaller. The program was simultaneously a labor-supply mechanism and a template for the permanent structure of American farm labor: temporary, immigrant, legally vulnerable, and priced below domestic wage floors.
Effect on the workThe Bracero Program suppressed agricultural wages in receiving regions. The program also created social networks, remittance patterns, and migration corridors that persisted as undocumented migration after the program ended.
Mechanical harvesting (cotton picker, tomato harvester, lettuce thinner): selective displacement
The mechanical cotton picker, commercially viable by the early 1950s, was essentially complete in its penetration of US cotton production by 1970. The conversion from hand-picking to mechanical harvesting displaced an estimated 400,000 workers over decades: the largest single technology-driven displacement of agricultural laborers in US history. The second major mechanization was the UC Davis tomato harvester, developed by agricultural engineers Jack Hanna and Coby Lorenzen in the early 1960s and commercially adopted after the Bracero Program ended in 1964. Within several years, California's processing tomato harvest (which had employed tens of thousands of hand pickers per season) was almost entirely mechanized. The 1961 adoption of a mechanical grape harvester in some wine-grape regions further reduced per-acre labor intensity in that niche. These mechanization waves shared a pattern: they worked for uniform, tough crops harvested all at once (cotton bolls, processing tomatoes, wine grapes) and failed for delicate, variable crops harvested over weeks or months (strawberries, lettuce, asparagus, cherries). The soft-fruit and vegetable harvest remained, and remains, resistant to mechanization because of the precision, timing, and gentleness that machine grippers cannot yet reliably replicate.
Effect on the workCotton and processing-tomato mechanization together displaced hundreds of thousands of hired crop workers between 1950 and 1975, compressing the hired crop-labor workforce by a third or more from its mid-century peak. The survivors concentrated in fruit, vegetable, and nursery work that resisted mechanization.
IRCA (1986) + H-2A expansion: documented immigrant workforce institutionalized
The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 created two distinct mechanisms for the crop-labor market. The Special Agricultural Workers (SAW) program legalized approximately 1.2 million agricultural workers who had been working in perishable-crop agriculture: the largest single legalization of agricultural workers in US history. Simultaneously, IRCA split the old H-2 temporary worker visa into H-2A (agricultural) and H-2B (non-agricultural) categories, creating the modern framework for documented temporary agricultural labor. The SAW legalizations initially shifted a large share of the workforce from undocumented to documented status, temporarily reducing grower dependence on unauthorized labor. But the long-run dynamics moved in the opposite direction: legalized SAW workers aged, moved out of agriculture, and were replaced by a new wave of undocumented workers from Mexico and Central America. By the 2000s, the National Agricultural Workers Survey estimated that approximately half of hired crop workers were unauthorized: a higher share than before IRCA. The H-2A program grew slowly through the 1990s and began accelerating in the 2000s as enforcement pressure on unauthorized workers increased, reaching 48,000 certified positions in FY 2005 and growing rapidly thereafter.
Effect on the workIRCA reshaped the documented/undocumented balance temporarily without changing the underlying economics: crop production that required more hand labor than the domestic workforce would supply at prevailing wages. The H-2A program began its long growth curve that would reach 385,000 certified positions by FY 2024.
Precision ag-robotics: LaserWeeder, autonomous tractors, vision-guided pickers
By 2018, the economics of farm labor had shifted enough that robotics companies could find a business case in agricultural applications that the cotton-picker era could not touch. Carbon Robotics (founded 2018, Seattle) launched the LaserWeeder: a GPS-guided tractor-attachment that uses computer vision to identify weed plants in a crop row and fire precision carbon dioxide lasers to kill them without herbicide. The system eliminates the hand-weeding labor that represents a significant seasonal labor demand in organic vegetable and specialty crop production. By 2024, Carbon Robotics had deployed about a hundred units commercially, with customers in California, Oregon, Washington, and the Pacific Northwest. FarmWise (founded 2017, San Jose) deployed its Titan FT35 weeding robot: a large autonomous machine that cultivates between rows and uses AI vision to remove weeds by mechanical action, without chemicals. Naio Technologies (founded 2011, France) markets the Oz robot weeder and Ted vineyard robot in US markets. The most symbolically significant deployment was John Deere's 8R Autonomous Tractor, unveiled at CES 2022 and available to commercial customers in 2022: a fully autonomous 410-horsepower tractor that operates without a driver in the cab, using cameras and GPS to plow, cultivate, and plant fields. Deere sold its first units to US farmers in late 2022. Tortuga AgTech (founded 2017, Houston) has demonstrated strawberry-picking robots capable of identifying and harvesting ripe strawberries: the most challenging hand-harvest task because strawberries are fragile, ripen unevenly, and grow in geometrically irregular positions. As of 2026, Tortuga systems remain in advanced trials rather than broad commercial deployment.
Effect on the workBLS projects an employment decline for SOC 45-2092 from 2024-2034: modest shrinkage rather than collapse. The robotics platforms are real but narrow: Carbon Robotics LaserWeeder about a hundred units deployed, John Deere 8R Autonomous Tractor in initial commercial sales, strawberry-pickers not yet at scale. The H-2A program continues growing (385,000 certified positions in FY 2024), indicating that growers in most crop categories still rely on human labor and have not found a cost-effective robotic substitute.
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Browse all rolesFarmworkers and Laborers, Crop, Nursery, and Greenhouse employment and pay by year
In other countries
The latest figure each country's statistics agency publishes for this job. Each uses its own occupation definition, survey basis and currency, so the numbers are not directly comparable with each other or with the US figures.
Canada (NOC 85101)
- Employment, 2020
- 28,795, Statistics Canada Census 2021 Official statistic Report an errorStatistics Canada Census of Population 2021: number of persons with employment income, the EXACT SUM of the cited cells for NOC 85101 + 85103 (this US occupation has no single NOC unit-group equivalent), combined as Harvesting, nursery and greenhouse labourers, Canada, reference year 2020. A recipients basis (anyone with employment income during the year), slightly broader than a point-in-time employed count. A sum of cited cells, not an estimate. Statistics Canada Open Licence.
- Median pay, 2020
- C$32,800, Statistics Canada Census 2021 Official statistic Report an errorStatistics Canada Census of Population 2021 (Table 98-10-0586): median employment income for NOC 85101 Harvesting labourers, the dominant constituent of the combined Harvesting, nursery and greenhouse labourers (NOC 85101 + 85103), Canada, reference year 2020, full-year full-time workers (the basis comparable to the US OEWS full-time median). This is the cited median of the dominant group, not a blend of the constituent medians. Statistics Canada Open Licence.
View all 28 years of cited US data, each linked to its source
| Year | US employment | Annual pay (median unless marked) | Source | Report |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1900 | 1,800,000 | n/a | Est., IPUMS USA Researched context | Report |
| 1942 | 1,500,000 | $480 | Est., Wikipedia Researched context | Report |
| 1956 | 1,700,000 | n/a | Est., Wikipedia Researched context | Report |
| 1970 | 900,000 | n/a | Est., USDA Economic Research Service Researched context | Report |
| 1990 | 700,000 | $8,500 | Est., Wikipedia (employment) Researched contextEst., USDA Economic Research Service (pay) Researched context | Report |
| 2003 | 233,450 | $15,450 | BLS OEWS May 2003 Official statistic | Report |
| 2004 | 240,000 | $16,030 | BLS OEWS May 2004 Official statistic | Report |
| 2005 | 227,750 | $16,450 | BLS OEWS May 2005 Official statistic | Report |
| 2006 | 230,780 | $16,540 | BLS OEWS May 2006 Official statistic | Report |
| 2007 | 239,380 | $17,020 | BLS OEWS May 2007 Official statistic | Report |
| 2008 | 242,390 | $17,960 | BLS OEWS May 2008 Official statistic | Report |
| 2009 | 233,650 | $18,540 | BLS OEWS May 2009 Official statistic | Report |
| 2010 | 228,600 | $18,690 | BLS OEWS May 2010 Official statistic | Report |
| 2011 | 233,280 | $18,690 | BLS OEWS May 2011 Official statistic | Report |
| 2012 | 253,670 | $18,670 | BLS OEWS May 2012 Official statistic | Report |
| 2013 | 261,720 | $18,710 | BLS OEWS May 2013 Official statistic | Report |
| 2014 | 269,650 | $19,060 | BLS OEWS May 2014 Official statistic | Report |
| 2015 | 272,170 | $19,770 | BLS OEWS May 2015 Official statistic | Report |
| 2016 | 273,450 | $22,000 | BLS OEWS May 2016 Official statistic | Report |
| 2017 | 282,300 | $23,380 | BLS OEWS May 2017 Official statistic | Report |
| 2018 | 287,420 | $24,320 | BLS OEWS May 2018 Official statistic | Report |
| 2019 | 295,520 | $25,440 | BLS OEWS May 2019 Official statistic | Report |
| 2020 | 293,910 | $28,660 | BLS OEWS May 2020 Official statistic | Report |
| 2021 | 277,200 | $29,630 | BLS OEWS May 2021 Official statistic | Report |
| 2022 | 284,000 | $33,000 | BLS OEWS May 2022 Official statistic | Report |
| 2023 | 258,730 | $34,470 | BLS OEWS May 2023 Official statistic | Report |
| 2024 | 261,690 | $35,690 | BLS OEWS May 2024 Official statistic | Report |
| 2025 | 265,500 | $35,660 | BLS OEWS May 2025 Official statistic | Report |