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The estate is enumerated, and the work is not. The 2022 Census counts 1,900,487 farms on 880,100,848 acres, with the largest 2% of farms holding 42% of the farmland, and it counts a machine fleet of 3,784,743 tractors and 298,301 self-propelled combines. It records no engine hours, and farm tractors are not registered or licensed anywhere in the United States, so this review located no utilisation measure for the installed base. At 2024 new-machine retail rates the 100-horsepower-plus tractor fleet would take about 46 years to replace and the combine fleet about 54, which puts retrofit and supervised operation of iron already in the field on the near-term delivery path and makes engineering implementation the constraint that binds it.

The labour bill is concentrated. Hired and contract labour is 12.24% of a $424.14bn census expense base, 23.0% of farms report any hired-labour expense at all, and 67,320 farms carry 83.2% of the national hired-farm-labour bill. That is the addressable population, and it is small enough to name. The wage floor those farms face then moved by a third: the Department of Labor's 2025 interim final rule cuts the California entry-level H-2A rate from an operative $19.97 to $13.52. USDA discontinued the Agricultural Labor Survey on 28 August 2025, so the series that would have measured the effect ended in the same season the rule changed it.

The deployed record sorts by how prepared the environment is. The largest verified embodied deployment in US agriculture is robotic milking at 6% of milk in 2021, and it is furthest along because the cow presents herself indoors on a prepared surface with a task geometry that repeats. Open-field specialty crops sit earlier on the same trajectory and the record there is a first generation replacing itself: Monarch Tractor ceased operations on 3 April 2026, FarmWise wound down after raising about $95.7 million, and advanced.farm and Tortuga AgTech exited within four weeks of each other in March 2025. Closures are better evidenced than installations, because a closure is recorded in an accounting or court filing while an installation is recorded in a company announcement, so the ledger is read here as a record of iteration rather than as a survival rate. Regulation binds separately and by a wide margin: California still requires an operator at the controls of self-propelled equipment under a rule written in 1977.

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Every deployment, withdrawal and independent measurement the review tracks, with the grade of the evidence behind each. A record graded self-published comes from a party selling the thing being measured; the independent measurements are the small minority graded verified or reported.

Every automation savings claim in specialty crops is denominated in the cost of a hand-weeding pass, and this review did not locate a published count of how many passes an acre actually receives, on which crops, in which regions. NASS publishes acres by crop and by organic status, and a search of its series did not return one broken out by weed-control practice, so the addressable acreage for automated weeding cannot be derived from the public series located here. One grower, one season and a pass log would produce the denominator the sector prices itself against. The same operator could publish machine utilisation and downtime alongside it, which this review did not locate published by any vendor: the fullest public unit economics located here come from two farms in one valley, and they disagree with each other by a factor of 1.7 on the same machine in the same season.

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