Talk about uninformed. Yep. Potato plants itself, waters itself, harvests itself, walks to fresh pack shed at Wadas to be washed and packaged and then hitches a ride to the grocery store. But hey school districts in Idaho (including those surrounding Wada Farms) still let out for potato harvest because gramps had it off too back in the day & we Idahoans all wanna go to Lagoon for 2 weeks.

Farming--including potato farming--is extremely still very labor intensive. Yeah technology has changed it a bunch. Yeah GPS steers the tractor, but the operator still turns the thing, still maneuvers the implement that the tractor pulls, still trouble shoots hydraulic problems, mechanical issues, etc. GPS is for fuel efficiency and time savings--it does not make a tractor operatorless.

Yeah a farmer can manage his irrigation pivot from his phone or his work office, but there's still plenty of hand pipe and wheel line pipe all through Idaho. Drive from Pocatello to Idaho Falls down I-15 with your eyes open sometime and you'll see plenty of pipe still. In fact in SE Idaho, large farms in certain areas have removed many center pivots and have gone back to traditional wheel line pipe. Some summer laborers move these wheel lines 3x a day, full time for 3-4 months straight. And that hired man does nothing for those 3-4 months but move these pipe. That means in the fields all day everyday.

Visit a farm sometime. You'd learn a lot. Which appears to be greatly needed.