farmworkers/sullivan-farmworker-focus-group-romaine

Quote / Position

“When they tried a machine that cut the lettuce, the lettuce was cut upwards and they tore it apart, the one with hearts [romaine]… Then I had to fix it. So, people are always going to be needed.”

Context

This farmworker focus-group quote is from Sullivan SSRC Just Tech September 2025 essay — one of the rare verbatim farmworker voices in the agrifood AI corpus. The quote captures the technology-readiness limit of automated romaine lettuce harvest (the machine tears the lettuce rather than cutting it cleanly) and the farmworker’s structural insight that people are always going to be needed — the labour-displacement-doesn’t-happen-yet framing for harvest automation specifically.

Worth knowing because:

• The quote is a farmworker voice on agrifood AI deployment, not a vendor or analyst voice. The Sullivan unit names the substantive US critical-voice contribution as centred on farmworker experience; this quote is the verbatim anchor.
• The quote is from a focus group, not an interview — meaning it is a collective farmworker perspective on automation, not an individual voice.
• The quote is dated December 2025 (focus group conducted) — current as of mid-2026.

This is the first verbatim farmworker quote in the field guide. It builds the quotes/farmworkers/ category that the Sullivan unit names but the corpus previously did not have.

Source

Sullivan, Summer. A Tale of Two Valleys: The Salad Bowl of the World Goes Digital. Just Tech (Social Science Research Council), September 10, 2025. DOI 10.35650/JT.3087.d.2025. https://just-tech.ssrc.org/articles/a-tale-of-two-valleys-the-salad-bowl-of-the-world-goes-digital/

(Per Sullivan unit: “A farmworker quoted in Sullivan’s focus group (December 2025): ‘When they tried a machine that cut the lettuce, the lettuce was cut upwards and they tore it apart, the one with hearts [romaine]… Then I had to fix it. So, people are always going to be needed.’”)