Job Check
Farmworkers and Laborers, Crop, Nursery, and Greenhouse
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.
10 main tasks · most important first
Your main tasks and AI
Importance- 01Record information about crops, such as pesticide use, yields, or costs.AI could speed this up a lot
- 02Direct and monitor the work of casual and seasonal help during planting and harvesting.Mostly human for now
- 03Participate in the inspection, grading, sorting, storage, and post-harvest treatment of crops.Mostly human for now
- 04Harvest plants, and transplant or pot and label them.Mostly human for now
- 05Repair and maintain farm vehicles, implements, and mechanical equipment.Mostly human for now
- 06Harvest fruits and vegetables by hand.Mostly human for now
- 07Set up and operate irrigation equipment.Mostly human for now
- 08Inform farmers or farm managers of crop progress.Mostly human for now
- 09Identify plants, pests, and weeds to determine the selection and application of pesticides and fertilizers.AI could speed this up, with extra tools
- 10Operate tractors, tractor-drawn machinery, and self-propelled machinery to plow, harrow and fertilize soil, or to plant, cultivate, spray and harvest crops.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 loss2%of this job’s work time goes to tasks that people already do with Claude at work, counting tasks where AI only helps as half (2026).Anthropic, 2026
14%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 10% 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 93% 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.
- Direct and monitor the work of casual and seasonal help during planting and harvesting.
- Participate in the inspection, grading, sorting, storage, and post-harvest treatment of crops.
- Harvest plants, and transplant or pot and label them.