{
  "source": "Cooked Index — occupational AI risk register",
  "page": "https://cookedindex.com/jobs/farmworkers-farm-ranch-and-aquacultural-animals/",
  "methodology": "https://cookedindex.com/methodology",
  "notice": "Verdicts are re-examined as evidence accumulates. Re-fetch before relying on this; the page above always carries the current score.",
  "scored_at": "2026-08-11",
  "model": "claude-opus-5",
  "occupation": {
    "title": "Farmworkers, Farm, Ranch, and Aquacultural Animals",
    "soc_code": "45-2093",
    "category": "Agriculture",
    "us_employment": 32810,
    "median_annual_wage": 36670
  },
  "verdict": "EXPOSED",
  "risk_resistance": 54,
  "contested": false,
  "near_boundary": false,
  "dimensions": {
    "task_resistance": 17,
    "embodiment": 19,
    "liability_shield": 2,
    "trust_premium": 6,
    "judgment_accountability": 10
  },
  "reasoning": {
    "task_resistance": "Pulling a malpresented calf, catching and treating a lame heifer in a muddy alley, or diving to patch a torn net pen require force, grip, and improvised positioning that no software performs — the 17 rather than 20 reflects that milking, feed delivery, and mortality/illness flagging, which are genuinely large slices of the day, are already being done by robotic parlors, feed pushers, rumination collars, and automated aquaculture feeders.",
    "embodiment": "This is an outdoor job with no controlled version of itself: ice, manure, 100°F barns, crowding gates, boat decks and cages, and animals that kick and crush — 19 rather than 20 only because a share of hours goes to records, ration mixing, and parlor monitoring under a roof.",
    "liability_shield": "No license, no board, no exam stands between anyone and this job; the herd owner or farm operator carries the FDA/VFD authority over drug use and the veterinarian signs off on protocols, so a worker who administers the injection bears no personal legal exposure and can be replaced by anyone hired that morning.",
    "trust_premium": "Nobody buys the milk or the fish because of who fed them, but the 6 is not a 0 — livestock recognize and settle for the handler who moves them daily, and an owner who has watched someone read a cow going off feed will keep that person over a new hire, which is relationship value inside the farm rather than with a customer.",
    "judgment_accountability": "Deciding at 2 a.m. whether a calving needs the vet, whether a downer cow is worth lifting, or whether a mortality spike in a pen means water quality or disease are real unsupervised calls with money and animal lives attached, but most of the shift runs on written feeding rates, milking routines, and withdrawal periods set by someone else, which keeps this at 10 rather than in the ownership band."
  },
  "rationale": "Feeding, herding, calving assistance, hoof and udder care, pen cleaning, and net-pen work happen in mud, weather, and around 1,400-pound animals that behave unpredictably — language models do none of it and general-purpose robots are nowhere close. The real pressure is not chatbots but purpose-built farm capital: robotic milking parlors, automated feed pushers, sensor-based heat and illness detection, and automated aquaculture feeders that cut headcount per animal without needing to replicate a human body. There is no license protecting the role and no client paying for a relationship, so when a dairy installs robots the job count falls even though the remaining work stays stubbornly hands-on.",
  "outlook": "The work itself stays physical and unautomatable, but robotic milking and automated feed and monitoring systems will keep shrinking workers-per-animal, pushing the surviving jobs toward animal-health specialists and equipment technicians.",
  "what_would_raise_it": {
    "levers": [
      {
        "dimension": "liability_shield",
        "change": "Animal-welfare or biosecurity rules that require a named, trained stockperson on site — e.g. the EU-style 'attendant/competent person' requirement, or FDA/state Veterinary Feed Directive and antibiotic-administration rules requiring a documented human handler; a USDA rule making a certified livestock caretaker personally responsible for euthanasia and downer-animal decisions in audited programs (FARM Program, GAP) would push this from 2 toward 6-8",
        "plausibility": "plausible",
        "would_add": 5
      },
      {
        "dimension": "judgment_accountability",
        "change": "As feeding, milking and monitoring get automated, the residual role becomes exception handling: dystocia calls, deciding to cull or treat, responding to sensor alerts before a vet arrives, disease-outbreak triage in avian flu / ASF events. Herdsperson-type roles that own those calls under a signed welfare protocol carry real accountability; if the job title consolidates into that tier, 10 rises toward 14",
        "plausibility": "already happening",
        "would_add": 4
      },
      {
        "dimension": "task_resistance",
        "change": "Two-tier shift: the routine tier (feed delivery, milking, pen scraping, aquaculture feeding) is exactly what capital automates, leaving calving, hoof care, sick-animal handling, fence and net-pen repair in weather — work no robot line addresses. Task_resistance for those who remain edges up even as headcount falls",
        "plausibility": "already happening",
        "would_add": 2
      },
      {
        "dimension": "trust_premium",
        "change": "Certified pasture-raised / Animal Welfare Approved / Certified Humane labels that specify human stockmanship and prohibit fully automated confinement handling let buyers pay for a human caretaker; expansion of these audited premium channels moves 6 toward 9",
        "plausibility": "plausible",
        "would_add": 3
      }
    ],
    "ceiling_note": "Embodiment is already 19 and cannot meaningfully rise. The core threat is headcount-per-animal, not task substitution: every lever here protects the residual judgment tier without protecting the number of jobs. A dairy going robotic still cuts the crew even if the remaining herdsperson scores higher on all three institutional dimensions."
  },
  "adjudication": null,
  "employment_history": {
    "points": [
      {
        "y": 2017,
        "emp": 35460,
        "wage": 25470
      },
      {
        "y": 2018,
        "emp": 37780,
        "wage": 26560
      },
      {
        "y": 2019,
        "emp": 36630,
        "wage": 27830
      },
      {
        "y": 2020,
        "emp": 36820,
        "wage": 29130
      },
      {
        "y": 2021,
        "emp": 34140,
        "wage": 29630
      },
      {
        "y": 2022,
        "emp": 33020,
        "wage": 34150
      },
      {
        "y": 2023,
        "emp": 32590,
        "wage": 35120
      },
      {
        "y": 2024,
        "emp": 35420,
        "wage": 36150
      },
      {
        "y": 2025,
        "emp": 32810,
        "wage": 36670
      }
    ],
    "from": 2017,
    "to": 2025,
    "change_pct": -7.5,
    "comparable_from": 2019,
    "spans_soc_revision": true
  },
  "pivots": [],
  "license": "https://cookedindex.com/terms"
}