The Mushroom Robots Are Coming

In Salmon Arm, British Columbia — a small lakeside city tucked between Vancouver and Calgary — robots are quietly working the night shift. They don’t ask for overtime, they don’t need coffee breaks, and they never call in sick. These particular robots are in the mushroom business, plucking, trimming and packing button mushrooms 24 hours a day using AI-guided cameras and suction cups.

As the CBC reported, the company behind them, 4AG Robotics, just secured $40 million to ramp up production from 16 robots to 100 by next year. Their machines are already working in Canada, the United States, Ireland, the Netherlands and Australia. What sounds like a quirky Canadian tech story is, in fact, a preview of a much bigger reality.

Buckle up, America. This isn’t just the friendly “technology makes everything faster, cheaper, and more efficient” kind of story. This is the other kind — the one where technology steps in not because it’s better than humans, but because the humans simply aren’t there anymore.

In Canada, as in the United States, agriculture depends heavily on seasonal and migrant labor. The Canadian Agricultural Human Resource Council says thousands of farm jobs go unfilled every year, and the shortage is only getting worse. Farmers are desperate for workers, and when they can’t find them, they start looking at automation not as a nice-to-have, but as the only option.

In the U.S., the equation is even more acute. President Trump’s aggressive immigration crackdowns, combined with the expanded enforcement powers of ICE and Homeland Security, have dramatically reduced the number of foreign workers able to take the low-wage, physically demanding jobs Americans have historically avoided.

You can debate whether that’s good politics, but it’s bad farm economics. When you remove the labor supply without replacing it, something has to fill the gap.

And in agriculture, that “something” is increasingly robots.

The migration from human hands to machine arms isn’t limited to mushrooms. AI-guided strawberry pickers, robotic lettuce thinners and self-driving orchard sprayers are already in the field. Automation is moving into agriculture faster than most people realize, largely because labor shortages are forcing the pace. Ten years ago, these technologies were experiments. Today, they’re line items in farm budgets.

One-way street

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: The debate over immigrant labor in agriculture is no longer about whether Americans “should” do these jobs. It’s about whether those jobs will exist for people at all. The more we constrict the labor pipeline, the more we incentivize capital investment in automation — and once a robot is doing the work, that job isn’t coming back, no matter what immigration policy looks like down the road.

This is not to say automation is the villain. In some cases, robots can make farm work safer, less physically punishing and more precise. But when technology is adopted out of necessity rather than design, the transition can be abrupt, messy and economically disruptive. Small farms may struggle to afford the investment. Rural communities that rely on seasonal labor could see their local economies hollowed out.

The mushroom robots in Salmon Arm are just one case study, but they illustrate the future we’re hurtling toward. In the short term, they’ll fill labor gaps. In the long term, they’ll reshape how we think about the agricultural workforce — and by extension, the immigration policies that have sustained it for decades.

So, America, take a good look north. The robots are coming. Not with malice, not with malfunctions straight out of a sci-fi thriller — just with a steady, unblinking AI gaze and a suction cup hand, ready to harvest your dinner. If we want to decide how, when and where they’re deployed, now is the time to have that conversation.

Because if we wait until the mushrooms are picked, packed and shipped without a single human hand involved, the debate won’t be about immigration or labor shortages anymore. It will be about what happened to the jobs we thought we could get back.

Aron Solomon is the chief strategy officer for Amplify. He holds a law degree and has taught entrepreneurship at McGill University and the University of Pennsylvania, and was elected to Fastcase 50, recognizing the top 50 legal innovators in the world. His writing has been featured in Newsweek, The Hill, Fast Company, Fortune, Forbes, CBS News, CNBC, USA Today and many other publications. He was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for his op-ed in The Independent exposing the NFL’s “race-norming” policies.

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Illustration: Dom Guzman