The People Behind the Machines: Precision Agriculture and Farm Service Technician Demand

By Parthu Kalva and Joe Janzen

Precision agriculture is a technological solution to rising labor costs in farming. Once installed, digital systems and automated machinery can operate with lower, more predictable marginal costs than human labor, improving both profitability and planning certainty. Yet the notion that technology simply replaces workers overlooks an important reality: rather than simply eliminating labor, precision agriculture modifies the demand for agricultural labor. As automation and digital systems associated with precision agriculture spread, labor demand shifts from manual to technical and analytical work managing and maintaining sensors, robots, and data platforms. This includes both on-farm operators and off-farm specialists who maintain and service the systems. Among these, farm service technicians have emerged as a critical new occupation, installing, calibrating, and maintaining the digital systems embedded within modern farm machinery (GAO 2024).

The US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) estimates that approximately 36,830 ‘Farm Equipment Mechanics and Service Technicians’ were employed in the US in 2023 (BLS, 2024), but industry sources report a shortage of qualified technicians (e.g. Castillo, 2025). Possible consequences of a shortage are longer wait times for maintenance, which, during planting or harvest, can translate into significant losses for farmers. Scarcity may also drive up technician wages, increasing the cost of dealership service contracts and raising the overall expense of adopting and maintaining advanced technology.

To assess the potential skilled labor shortage related to new technologies in production agriculture, this article examines precision agriculture adoption across US states and how the use of these technologies correlates with employment and wages for farm service technicians.  Positive correlation between technology use and both employment and wages suggest precision agriculture is indeed changing the nature of agricultural labor. Higher employment and wages in places where precision agriculture use is high is consistent with some degree of supply response. Workers are acting in response to the need for more service technicians, though perhaps not as quickly as the industry needs or wants.

What Is Precision Agriculture – and Where Is It Happening?

Precision agriculture uses digital technologies to manage variability within fields and improve production efficiency. It combines GPS guidance, sensors, yield monitors, and variable-rate applicators to collect and act on spatial data about soils and crops. These systems allow farmers to apply inputs such as seed, fertilizer, and pesticides more precisely, boosting efficiency while reducing waste and environmental impact. Precision agriculture also addresses broader challenges in agriculture, including rising costs, labor shortages, and climate variability, by increasing control and information at every stage of production.

Using data from the USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) Technology Use report, Figure 1 maps the share of farms using precision agriculture in 2023. Adoption varies sharply across the country, but the leaders cluster in the Midwest. States with large-scale row-crop systems, especially corn and soybean, tend to report the highest use. Many precision tools (auto-guidance, variable-rate application, yield monitors) are fixed-cost add-ons that become relatively cheap per acre as acreage grows. Thus, they plug well into a machinery-intensive production systems where small efficiency gains compound across thousands of acres.

California is an important exception. It produces many labor-intensive specialty crops that may create strong incentives to adopt precision agriculture technologies. High land and labor costs, water scarcity and regulation, and the potential for large payoffs from better irrigation and input targeting can make precision investments attractive even when operations are not dominated by commodity row crops. Many southern and western states show lower adoption intensity, indicating that per-acre gains from precision tools are not large enough to justify upfront costs in these locations.