The advances in robotics makes it look like a humanoid robot that could harvest lettuce is only a decade or two away. Making the robot is the easy part. The code to drive it has been the hard part. Until now, that is.
California has about 800,000 agricultural laborers and about 400,000 FTE’s.
That’s a lot of robots…and they probably won’t be able to drive themselves from field to field.
Self driving cars are here today, driving in city traffic. Self driving a truck from one field to another seems like it would be eminently doable as far as the technology goes. However, I doubt a bunch of humanoid robots is the optimal robot configuration for harvesting lettuce. Tesla made 1.6 million cars in 2025. Toyota made 11 million. If we handwave that a humanoid robot is roughly as hard to manufacture as a car at scale, there's gonna be a lot of robots.