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Rural Policy

Epistemological Friction: Embodied Expertise and the “Last Mile” of Agricultural Automation in the U.S. Tree-Fruit Industry Alex Hernandez*, Alex Hernandez, Anne Visser,

Agricultural technology (AgTech), ranging from autonomous robotics to AI-driven sensors, is frequently positioned as a panacea for labor dependency and rising production costs in U.S. specialty crops. Yet despite significant investment in these innovations, the actual implementation of these technologies often stalls at the “last mile” of on-farm integration. Research tends to view technology adoption of farms as a binary choice based on external factors like economics and technological capacity. However, this perspective overlooks the complex socio-technical negotiations and networks required to make these advanced technologies operational on-farms. This paper investigates how agricultural knowledge systems and on-farm socio-technical networks mediate the integration of AgTech technologies. Drawing on an extensive mixed-method study comprising 25 weeks of ethnographic fieldwork and 165 in-depth interviews with farm owners, managers, and workers across California and Washington, we identify a critical epistemological friction between two competing frameworks: technical expertise, which prioritizes digital control and abstract logic, and embodied expertise, which relies on sensory, site-specific knowledge to navigate biological variability. Through in-depth case studies of automated fruit counting, orchard platforms, and robotic harvesters, we find that agricultural workers act as a type of “human middleware” by providing the skills and knowledge necessary to bridge the gap between technological design and orchard reality. Our findings demonstrate that sociotechnical networks underpinning AgTech adoption are also geographically contingent and shaped by the contrasting institutional ecologies. We conclude by proposing a move towards a Relational Theory of Agricultural Automation, arguing that the success of the “farm of the future” depends less on engineering milestones and technological specifications and more on better understanding of how on-farm networks reconcile technical systems with the situated expertise of the workforce.