Job Check
Agricultural Equipment Operators
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.
10 main tasks · most important first
Your main tasks and AI
Importance- 01Load and unload crops or containers of materials, manually or using conveyors, handtrucks, forklifts, or transfer augers.Mostly human for now
- 02Mix specified materials or chemicals, and dump solutions, powders, or seeds into planter or sprayer machinery.Mostly human for now
- 03Spray fertilizer or pesticide solutions to control insects, fungus and weed growth, and diseases, using hand sprayers.Mostly human for now
- 04Observe and listen to machinery operation to detect equipment malfunctions.Mostly human for now
- 05Manipulate controls to set, activate, and adjust mechanisms on machinery.Mostly human for now
- 06Operate or tend equipment used in agricultural production, such as tractors, combines, and irrigation equipment.Mostly human for now
- 07Adjust, repair, and service farm machinery and notify supervisors when machinery malfunctions.Mostly human for now
- 08Attach farm implements such as plows, discs, sprayers, or harvesters to tractors, using bolts and hand tools.Mostly human for now
- 09Load hoppers, containers, or conveyors to feed machines with products, using forklifts, transfer augers, suction gates, shovels, or pitchforks.Mostly human for now
- 10Direct and monitor the activities of work crews engaged in planting, weeding, or harvesting activities.Mostly human for now
Tasks from O*NET® 31.0 (US Department of Labor, CC BY 4.0, changed by us), most important first. “Already use” comes from Anthropic’s data on real work chats with Claude; “could speed up” from task ratings made with GPT-4 in 2023.
Four studies, side by side
None is a forecast of job lossToo little dataNot enough work use was seen to measure. This does not mean the job is safe from AI.Anthropic, 2026
0%of this job’s tasks an AI model could do in half the time, counting tasks that need extra tools as half (rated in 2023).Eloundou, Manning, Mishkin and Rock, 2023
Above 23% of jobsin how often and how well AI helped with this job’s work in Microsoft Copilot chats (2024 data).Microsoft Research (Tomlinson et al.), 2025
Above 100% of jobsin how much of this job’s physical work robots have been shown to do, from factories to homes (2026).Anthropic, 2026
Your human edge
The main tasks with no real AI use seen and no big speed-up expected. This is where your skill counts most today.
- Load and unload crops or containers of materials, manually or using conveyors, handtrucks, forklifts, or transfer augers.
- Mix specified materials or chemicals, and dump solutions, powders, or seeds into planter or sprayer machinery.
- Spray fertilizer or pesticide solutions to control insects, fungus and weed growth, and diseases, using hand sprayers.