Technological innovation pushes agriculture toward a brave new world.

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David “Coon” Offerdahl doesn’t mince words in describing the goal of his company, Ramsay Harvesting. “We’re in the midst of changing our machine designs to eliminate as many bodies as possible,” says Offerdahl, the tattooed and pierced vice president of engineering for the ag machine company. “We want to help growers get to a point where workers will be able to work in the fields in better conditions, rather than being hunched over all the time. Plus for the growers, the less labor they have to pay for, their costs go way down.”

The way Offerdahl sees it, their automated harvesters that cost about $250,000 each are simply meeting a demand. On a recent morning near Salinas, Chris Garnett, Ramsay’s VP for marketing and sales, does the math as he watches one of his company’s automated harvesters finish off a long row of baby leaf spinach in about 10 minutes.

“By hiring five workers instead of 45 to harvest this field, a grower can save about $22,500 in labor costs each week,” says Garnett. “So in about 10 weeks, they’d have just about paid for the harvester.”

Garnett says Ramsay Harvesting has been producing baby leaf spinach automated harvesters for six years and has sold more than 50 in the US, Canada, England and Spain. “Every year we’re tweaking the harvesters to make them better,” says Garnett, a soft-spoken and clean-cut man who grew up in the Salinas Valley in a strawberry-growing family.

While lowering labor costs is a driving force behind today’s growing demand for automated harvesters, it’s not the only one.

With estimates showing that about half of all American farmworkers are here illegally, coupled with fierce anti-immigrant sentiments in Congress, many growers feel it’s time to start investing in a technology that diminishes their reliance on undocumented immigrant workers.

Besides, Garnett says, today’s farmworkers don’t really want to be farmworkers. Most abandon the backbreaking work of the fields—even in middle of harvesting season—as soon as they land a job in construction or in a restaurant.

“No one risks their life to come to this country to be a lettuce-cutter all their life,” says Garnett, who spent years amongst Mexican farmworkers in his father’s fields.

Ramsay Harvesting machines are already a common sight in the Salinas Valley, especially the harvesting aids for strawberry and lettuce crews. “We calculated that 30 percent of a strawberry pickers’ time on the field is spent walking boxes to the trucks and then walking back to where they left off picking,” Garnett says.

With that data in hand, Ramsay engineers produced a machine the size of a small airplane that follows strawberry and lettuce pickers on the field so they only have to pick the crop and place them in boxes on the contraption’s “wings.” That results in big labor cost savings for the growers.

Another piece of equipment allows farmworkers to pack romaine hearts into salad bags right out on the field, which fulfills an idea that Bud Antle formulated in Salinas in the 1970s, but later abandoned.

Bob Roach, assistant agricultural commissioner for Monterey County, says a big trend on local farms is to have as much work done out in the fields as possible, such as cleaning produce and even bagging it. While these innovations do cut costs and add extra value to a company’s produce, there is no doubt about what the real holy grail of harvesting innovations will be: an automated harvester for lettuce and romaine hearts, two of the Salinas Valley’s top crops.

The idea has been around for decades, but harvesting lettuce and romaine hearts is hard to do with a machine. “You need that human touch,” says Roach. “Because every head of lettuce is not ready to be cut at the same time. It’s a tough problem, and someday someone will solve it.”

Ramsay Harvesting and Tanimura and Antle are in a race to do just that. Both companies are testing out pilot romaine lettuce automated harvesters that, if successful, will replace thousands of farmworkers in the Salinas Valley.

Neither company will allow their pilot harvesters to be photographed. But representatives from both say the goal is to have the harvesters cut romaine lettuce out of the fields, poke the lettuce’s core out, and have it put in boxes so it’s ready to be packed in ready mix salad bags.

“The goal is to have it all done automatically, including the packing,” says Jaime Michel, who works in Tanimura and Antle’s research and development department. “We’re testing the machine out right now here in Monterey County and also in Yuma, Arizona…we’ll probably see these mass-produced in five to 10 years.”

While Michel has heard arguments that the development of this kind of automated harvesting technology will eliminate human jobs, that’s not a necessarily a negative outcome to him. “The field is the last place immigrants want to work nowadays,” says Michel, a Mexican from Guadalajara who started in the industry by working in packing factories in the Salinas Valley. “Plus, you’re never going to eliminate all of the jobs in the field, just the most mundane and the most difficult.”

If automated lettuce harvesters replace most of the Valley’s farmworkers, the social repercussions will be massive in Monterey County, where tens of thousands of seasonal farmworkers now live and work several months out of the year. No one seems to be quite sure what will happen to these people or where they’ll go if they’re no longer needed out in the fields. But that question doesn’t trouble the driver of the automated baby leaf spinach harvester near Old River Road. “Nah, I don’t worry,” says the farmworker in Spanish. “I’d just find another job.”