AI Farmbots Could Boost Florida Agriculture 35% by 2030, UF Says

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Florida is turning its farms into testbeds for the next wave of automation. With a new AI agriculture center, a supercomputer named HiPerGator, and a looming labor crunch, the state is quietly building something that looks a lot like the future of food: robots in the fields, models in the cloud, and yields tuned by algorithms instead of gut instinct.

At the heart of that push is the University of Florida’s new Center for Applied Artificial Intelligence in Agriculture, under construction at the Gulf Coast Research and Education Center in Hillsborough County. According to UF weed science professor and associate center director Nathan Boyd, AI and robotics could boost agricultural production by roughly 35% by 2030 — including in Florida’s high-value fruit and vegetable crops.

Why Florida Is Betting Big on Farmbots

Florida’s agriculture runs on a paradox: huge demand, shrinking workforce. As of mid-2024, the state employed about 9,640 crop, nursery, and greenhouse workers — the second-highest total in the U.S., but tiny compared with California’s workforce.

On top of that, farm operators are aging, domestic interest in agricultural labor is low, and around two-thirds of U.S. crop workers are immigrants. As Boyd put it to lawmakers: “How do we keep feeding the country in winter with fewer people? Here come the robots.”

From Labor Crisis to Code and Steel

AI-driven agriculture promises to do more with less. Cameras and computer vision identify weeds and pests in real time, models decide what to spray or harvest, and robots execute tasks with millimeter precision.

Robotic harvesting, a $236M industry in 2022, is projected to hit $6.8B by 2030, while agricultural drones are expected to form an $18B market within five years.

Inside UF’s AI Farm Lab: Robots, Drones and a Supercomputer

UF’s new center aims to employ 100 staff and give students hands-on robotics and AI experience. Its compute backbone: HiPerGator, the most powerful university-owned supercomputer in the U.S.

Why This Matters Far Beyond Florida

Florida’s experiment is part of a global shift toward AI-native agriculture—from California orchards to Dutch greenhouses. If UF’s blueprint succeeds, it could scale far beyond strawberries and tomatoes.

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