EXPOSED
This is a boots-in-the-field job: walking crop rows and orchards, judging when a block is ready to pick, assigning crews to tasks, fixing what breaks, and enforcing safety on moving equipment — none of which a language model can do. The automatable slice is the paperwork layer: crew scheduling, payroll and piece-rate tallies, harvest yield logs, H-2A and OSHA compliance records, and pesticide application reports, all of which farm management software plus AI is absorbing quickly. Licensure is thin (pesticide applicator certification in some states), so the moat is physical presence and on-the-spot judgment, not regulation.
Headcount grew steadily across the period.
Median pay $48,280 → $59,320 -1.7% in real terms
This line is counted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics — the one figure on this page that isn't a judgement of ours. Headcount moves on demand, offshoring, demographics and the business cycle, and automation is one term among several, often not the loudest.
So a falling line is not evidence that AI did it, and a rising one is not evidence that it won't. Both happen in this register: some occupations resist automation and shrink anyway, others are highly automatable and keep growing. The marked year is 2020.
BLS projection, 2024–2034
+2.5%
Percentage only. The projection counts a different population from the 27,960 above — it includes self-employed workers, which for this occupation is most of them, so the two headcounts are not comparable.
Growing, and only partly exposed
The BLS expects +2.5% more of these jobs by 2034, and at 60/100 the work is only partly exposed — some tasks are automatable, the core of the job is not. Nothing here is in tension.
Different clocks. The score is what current AI could do to this work today. The projection is how many of these jobs will exist in 2034. Everything between the two — how fast employers actually adopt, whether demand grows in the meantime — is why they can point opposite ways without either being wrong.
~8,500 openings a year on average, including replacing people who leave.
Saw BossBarn BossBoom BossCamp BossFarm BossCrew ChiefGamekeeperWoods BossBoom MasterCorral BossSow ManagerYarder BossBarn ManagerCrew ForemanFeed ManagerCattle ManagerKennel ManagerArea SupervisorCrew SupervisorFarm SupervisorHarvest ManagerLogistics AgentOrchard ManagerShelter Monitor
Holding it up: embodiment . Weakest point: liability shield .
Tasks largely resist digitisation Deciding that this block of strawberries is at picking maturity while the next row needs two more days, then redeploying a 30-person crew mid-morning when a picker goes down or a conveyor jams, is judgment made by walking and touching the crop — it sits at 14 rather than 18 because the recordkeeping half of the day (piece-rate tallies, yield logs, H-2A hour reports) is already being pulled into farm-management platforms.
Hands-on in uncontrolled environments You are outdoors in heat, dust, mud and cold for most of the shift, climbing on tractors and harvesters, checking irrigation lines and pruning cuts, standing on a fishing deck or a felling site where footing and weather change hourly — the 18 reflects genuinely uncontrolled terrain, short of 20 only because part of the week goes to an office or truck cab for scheduling and compliance paperwork.
Certification preferred, not legally required There is no supervisor licence in agriculture: a state pesticide applicator certification (and sometimes a commercial driver's licence or first-aid card) is the whole credential stack, and when a worker is injured the citation lands on the employer under the OSHA general duty clause and the Worker Protection Standard, not on you personally — hence 5 rather than 0, since that applicator card is a real legal requirement someone must hold.
Meaningful discretion Calling a work stoppage before a thunderstorm, deciding whether a bruised load still meets the buyer's grade, or pulling a crew off a field within a pesticide re-entry interval are consequential calls made without waiting for a phone call up the chain; it lands at 13 rather than higher because harvest windows, contract grades, and labor budgets are set above you and constrain the range of choices.
The verdict above describes this occupation as a whole. Almost nobody does the typical version of a job — tick what's actually in your week and see how your own mix sits.
Your task mix speaks to task resistance (14/20 here) — how much of the day's work current AI already does. That is the dimension the boxes above are about.
It cannot move the other three. Liability shield (5/20) is whether the law requires a licensed human to sign. Trust premium (10/20) is whether buyers specifically pay for a person. Judgment and accountability (13/20) is whether the role exists to own consequential calls. Those are facts about the occupation's standing, not about which tasks are in your week — a paralegal who does only trial exhibits still holds no licence. Together they are 28 of this occupation's 60 points (47%).
Embodiment (18/20) is also a property of the work rather than the worker, but we don't tag individual tasks as physical or not, so the picker can't tell you anything about it. That's a limit of this tool, not a claim.
Did we get the list right? Tell us what's missing — the tasks are written from the outside, and you're reading this from the inside.
No occupation passed every test: close enough to first-line supervisors of farming, fishing, and forestry workers on skills and subject matter, at least 10 points more resistant, no big jump in training, no new licence, no pay cut, and not shrinking on its own. That happens for 223 of the 654 occupations here that aren't SAFE, and it is worth stating plainly rather than leaving the section off.
The usual reason is that exposure travels with the skill profile. The jobs most similar to yours tend to be exposed for the same reasons yours is, so the near neighbours don't clear the gap — and the ones that do are a different kind of work, not a transfer of what you already know. Read that as a limit of this method, not a verdict that you're stuck: it only compares whole occupations, and it cannot see specialisation, industry, or anything you'd bring that isn't in a federal skill survey.
Here is that claim on your own job rather than in the abstract. These are the three occupations closest to this one by skill and subject matter — the places the work would most naturally transfer — with what the register scores them:
That is the whole problem in three lines. The nearest work is not meaningfully safer, so there is no move here that trades a similar skill set for a better verdict. This is not us running out of ideas — it is what the neighbourhood looks like.
The moves above are yours to make. This is the other half: what would have to change in the world for the occupation itself to score higher. None of it is in any one person's gift, but it is where the floor actually comes from. Scores here are not a one-way ratchet. Only two of the five dimensions — task resistance and embodiment — track what machines can do. The other three track law, what buyers will pay for, and who is answerable, and those move in both directions, often in response to the same pressure AI creates. If every lever below landed, this occupation would score around 77/100 — SAFE.
State pesticide-applicator rules tightening so that a certified applicator-in-charge must be physically present and personally sign each application record, including for drone/UAS and autonomous sprayer applications — EPA's Part 171 certification-of-applicators rule and FAA Part 137 exemptions for agricultural UAS already push toward a named certified human responsible for each pass. If states add a supervisor-signature requirement for autonomous equipment passes, this rises sharply.
Task-mix shift: as scheduling, payroll tallies, yield logs and compliance filing get absorbed by farm management software, what remains is the irreducible judgment tier — harvest-timing calls on a block worth six figures, heat-illness stand-down decisions under Cal/OSHA §3395 and the proposed federal heat rule, and crew reassignment when weather turns. Fewer clerical hours per consequential call raises this dimension without any legal change.
H-2A compliance enforcement (DOL Wage and Hour, the 2024 Farmworker Protection Rule and its litigation) attaching individual supervisor liability for housing, transport, and wage-record accuracy, so a named on-site supervisor must attest to daily hours and piece-rate records rather than software generating them unattested.
OSHA heat-injury and illness prevention standard (proposed 2024) finalizing with named-supervisor duties for acclimatization, rest-break enforcement, and emergency response — making the stand-down call an owned, documented, auditable decision rather than informal practice.
Autonomous orchard/row-crop equipment scaling to the point the supervisor's day becomes exception-handling for machine failure in mud, canopy, and slope — diagnosing why a robotic harvester is bruising fruit, which is field-diagnostic work no remote system does. Raises task resistance only if fleets grow while remote-operations centers stay thin.
The limit. Trust premium has no realistic route: the buyer is a farm owner or packing shed buying labor coordination at commodity margins, not a client who would pay extra for a human crew boss. Licensure will stay thin outside pesticide handling — no state is likely to license farm supervision generally. Realistic ceiling is roughly the low 70s, and it rests on embodiment plus pesticide/heat-safety signature duties, not on any market preference for human supervisors.
| Bakersfield-Delano, CA | 1,430 | $46,910 -21% |
| Fresno, CA | 1,340 | $48,850 -18% |
| Salinas, CA | 1,240 | $62,030 +5% |
| Visalia, CA | 990 | $47,800 -19% |
| Santa Maria-Santa Barbara, CA | 710 | $48,520 -18% |
| Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA | 520 | $73,480 +24% |
| New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ | 380 | $70,120 +18% |
| Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario, CA | 370 | $56,720 -4% |
| Minneapolis-St. Paul-Bloomington, MN-WI | 110 | $92,560 +56% |
| Indianapolis-Carmel-Greenwood, IN | 50 | $91,820 +55% |
| Coeur d'Alene, ID | 40 | $82,040 +38% |
We have no reported case of a named organisation automating this occupation. Not one deployment, not one announcement.
That is worth saying out loud next to a score of 60. The verdict above is about what the work exposes — what current AI could do to these tasks. It is not a claim that anyone has done it. For this occupation those two things have come apart completely: the capability argument is on this page, and the evidence column is empty.
Has AI actually changed your work? One tap, anonymous, and the running tally is public. Nothing else is asked of you.
Rather than check back: get the digest and we'll tell you what changed — or watch a single occupation from its own page.