The Transition Every Agricultural Community Eventually Faces
A few months ago, I had a conversation with an economic developer in Washington State who was worried about something people in his community are starting to ruminate on. . Agricultural technology — automated harvesting, precision equipment, robotics for tasks that have always required human hands — is advancing fast enough that a meaningful share of the region's agricultural workforce could be displaced soon. Our conversation wasn't whether this would happen. It was how do you get a community ready for a shift like that?
A few years ago, I was working on a financial forecast for Center, Texas, where there is a large Tyson poultry processing plant. Before I got there in 2010, there was a failed experiment with using automation to cut the chickens. Instead, the company chose to expand and hire more people, leaning into the labor-intensity of their operation.
But what’s going to happen when the technology progresses to a point of competing with humans? And what happens to the community that is built around this employment base?
I’ve been fascinated by the concept of economic evolution – the process an economy goes through moving from one state to another. There is some literature that gives us some clues on how an economy can transition from agriculture-based to manufacturing/industrial. What’s less understood, from a practitioner standpoint, is how that actually happens.
The pattern, and where it breaks down
The foundational framework comes from the economist Arthur Lewis, who in 1954 described how economies with a large agricultural workforce transition as industrial sectors develop and absorb labor that agriculture no longer needs (Lewis, 1954). In Lewis's model, this transition is fundamentally a good thing — labor moves from lower-productivity agricultural work to higher-productivity industrial work, and the overall economy grows as a result.
But Lewis's model rests on an assumption that doesn't always hold at the community level: that there's an expanding industrial (or other) sector nearby, ready to absorb the labor that agriculture sheds. For a national economy, that absorption can happen across regions. For a single rural community, it's a much narrower bet. If the local economy doesn't have — or doesn't build — that second sector, displaced agricultural labor doesn't transition. It just leaves, or it stays and the community's economic base shrinks, placing a great burden on the tax base.
This is where a different line of research becomes useful. Bruce Johnston and John Mellor, writing in 1961, argued that agriculture's role in economic development isn't just as a labor source to be drained — agriculture also contributes capital, market demand, and trade earnings that can fuel growth in other sectors, if those contributions are channeled deliberately (Johnston & Mellor, 1961). In other words, an agricultural economy isn't just a waiting room for industrialization. It has assets — financial, relational, infrastructural — that can actively shape what comes next, but only if a community recognizes and uses them.
There's a third piece worth introducing here, from Theodore Schultz's 1964 work on traditional agriculture. Schultz pushed back on the idea that agricultural communities are simply "behind" and need to catch up. His argument was that traditional agricultural practices are often quite rational given the resources available — and that transformation doesn't happen just because new technology exists. It happens when new inputs arrive: education, infrastructure, capital access, and the institutions that let people use new technology productively (Schultz, 1964). Technology alone doesn't transform an economy. Readiness does.
Where this series is headed
Put these three ideas together, and a different question emerges than the one most communities ask. The question isn't "will agricultural technology displace workers?" — that's largely a function of economics and engineering, and it's coming whether a community plans for it or not. The real question is whether a community has built the conditions — the second sector, the channeled assets, the readiness inputs — before that displacement happens, or whether it's starting from zero when it does.
Over the next few articles, I want to explore two distinct paths a community can take in response: one toward manufacturing, building on the linkages agriculture already provides, and one toward entrepreneurship, building a more distributed and resilient base of local business activity. Neither is automatically "the answer" — they involve different timelines, different capital requirements, and different ideas about what success looks like.
But both start from the same premise: the transition is coming. The only real choice is whether a community is ready for it.
References: Lewis, W.A. (1954). Economic Development with Unlimited Supplies of Labour. The Manchester School. Johnston, B.F. & Mellor, J.W. (1961). The Role of Agriculture in Economic Development. American Economic Review. Schultz, T.W. (1964). Transforming Traditional Agriculture. Yale University Press.
