The future of farming in California’s Central Valley is rapidly automating. While there are still men and women working in fields with their hands, today it’s not uncommon to see robots harvest strawberries, drones monitoring crop health, and GPS-guided tractors operating without human drivers. The workforce isn’t keeping up: the average farmworker has less than an eighth-grade education, language barriers, and limited computer knowledge.
To bridge the gap, seven of the region’s community colleges launched an ambitious experiment last year: a $42 million program designed to retrain farmworkers for high-tech agricultural jobs, through a combination of self-paced online courses and in-person tests taking between six months and two years to complete.
But when the first cohort arrived at Merced College in August, instructors discovered the challenges they faced were even more fundamental than expected.
“We had our IT guy in there, we had four other people that were going to help,” recalls Karl Montague, an instructor in the program. “We thought we were overprepared.”
They weren’t. The free certificate program teaches workers how to handle basic equipment operations, troubleshoot agricultural systems, read technical documents and write effective reports — but many participants who enrolled didn’t know how to use a computer.
“Probably 10 or 12 of them had never even touched a computer before,” Montague says. “We were having to tell them how to turn the computer on. We were having to tell them, ‘This is what we call a mouse.'”
The disconnect forced program leaders to quickly rethink everything, from curriculum and recruitment to fundamental assumptions about what employers needed.
“A lot of our faculty thought that industry wanted workers to fill specific needs. That they needed a student who could diagnose the ins and outs of a specific type of electric controller,” explains Cody Jacobson, Merced’s director of agricultural innovation.
But when his team reached out, employers said they had different priorities, Jacobson says: “We just need to make sure that if something is broken, the employees can turn the equipment off safely. That they know how to communicate with a foreman, how to formulate an email, and operate basic technology.”
Digital literacy quickly became the first competency, a point of emphasis before students moved on to learning tractor operations or more technical skills. Group orientations gave way to individual onboarding sessions, as instructors struggled to find better ways to reach their students.
“It was like herding cats,” Jacobson admits. “So that’s when we said time out, our onboarding process is going to change tremendously, and be much more 1-on-1 based.”
A different student than expected
Perhaps even more surprising than the technology gap was who actually enrolled. In the program’s first year, only about 10-15 of 60 students at Merced were active farmworkers, with maybe half having any ties to the industry.
“When we first thought about this program, it was designed traditionally for the more traditional farm laborer, and upscaling them for the workforce,” Jacobson said.
“Instead, the cohort ended up being a mix of ag workers trying to add a credential for their employers, university students trying to get some hands-on experience, and formerly incarcerated folks hoping to rebuild their resumes.”
Students who complete the self-paced courses earn “The Ag Systems Certificate,” a credential that can show employers their readiness for supervisory roles or higher-paying positions that require specific technical skills.
Take Frida Brahms, a truck driver who hauls cargo between farms and processing facilities. She often waits hours or days for others to unload her trailer with forklifts—unpaid time that cuts into her earnings.
While working to earn the Ag Systems certificate at Lemoore College, she also was able to get her forklift operator license. By allowing her to unload cargo herself, that license “is going to save me significant time and money,” Brahms says.
Cecilia Hernandez Soriano, who earned a law degree and previously practiced law in Mexico, enrolled in the agricultural program as a stepping stone toward practicing agricultural law in the United States.
“She really wants to get her degree equivalency here in the U.S. so that she can hopefully continue with law,” Fernando Garcia, a pathway navigator at Lemoore College, says while translating for her.
Despite the program’s unexpected student mix, it can still help address a broader regional challenge: Merced County’s unemployment rate was the second-highest in California as of April 2025, at 10.4 percent, underscoring the need to get people into better work opportunities.
For Adamaris Alvarez, who completed the program while finishing her senior year at UC Merced, the hands-on experience complemented her academic studies to make her not just more employable, but also more confident.
“I learn better with my hands than online,” she says. “For me, it was about learning the skills. Since it was a free program, I knew I couldn’t lose anything.”
Alvarez is now doing soil sampling and water testing as a summer intern for Nitricity, a Fremont-based startup that produces organic nitrogen fertilizer from renewable energy sources. She hopes to eventually become a farm manager near her hometown of Watsonville, and maybe use her skills to better manage her family’s 23-acre strawberry farm, too.
Working to better reach farm workers
While administrators see the program’s broad appeal as a positive, they also are trying to find ways to reach more of the farm worker population they originally set out to help.
In 2023, Merced College conducted a study that brought in more than 10,000 responses from farm workers in Merced and Kings counties. It found that the average farmworker had an eighth grade education or less, and that a third of them were at risk for being replaced by automation.
Those responses underscored the need to help farmworkers upskill for future jobs. Nang Thao, the program’s student support coordinator, thinks that part of the challenge is convincing farmworkers they’ll have time to complete the program while still working.
“For them, it’s about explaining that they can put in early hours on, say, a Saturday morning, before they go out to their work day,” Thao says.
She reminds them of the self-paced nature of the online program. Plus, open office hours and assessments with the instructor are available between 2 to 6 p.m. Monday through Thursday, which allows active farm workers to come after their morning shifts.
The program’s self-directed structure allows students to balance their course load with full-time work. Still, it’s often hard to reach farm workers, given the linguistic and economic barriers they have traditionally faced in accessing education.
“We can post flyers, send emails, put info on social media — but a lot of these students don’t see any of that,” Thao says.
Before Thao arrived at Merced in December, the program’s initial marketing efforts focused on just a few in-person events. She has sought to expand those with a “be everywhere” approach, while also starting to narrow in more on where farm workers tend to be.
Rather than try to reach out to students individually, Thao is plugging into local nonprofits and community-based organizations that already serve the farmworker population, hoping that getting information about the program to them will spread the word far wider.
“We’re still pivoting,” she says. “We’re learning as we go.”
One student, Nadia Olivos, a longtime farmworker, has even been scouting out locations where Merced instructors could find other students like her — recently telling Thao about a local bridge near a work site where many of them take their lunch break.
After 20 years in the fields, Olivos wants to be like her higher-paid coworkers, who spend less time doing hard labor and more time logging data about strawberries and raspberries into iPads.
In doing so, she hopes for a better life for her children, too.
‘Something to be proud of’
John Pressell has been incarcerated for half his life, with intermittent stints that began when he dropped out of high school in 11th grade.
“I used to always look at education like, “Oh, I don’t need it,” the 44-year-old says. As a teen, Pressell felt like he was making plenty of money on the streets while living what he describes as “a criminal life.”
Two years ago, everything changed. After being released following a decade in state prison, Pressell connected with Reform Merced, a California nonprofit that helps formerly incarcerated individuals rebuild their lives.
They placed him at their recently opened organic farm, Restore Farms, where he now tends bell peppers, tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, and seasonal crops.
He was one of those students with very little computer savvy at first. At the end of long, busy days out in the fields, he sometimes dreads dealing with it.
“Sometimes when I get off of work, I’m tired, where I don’t even want to, like, open up the computer. But I have to,” Pressell says. “Some days are harder than others, but I’m going to keep with it.”
Pressell knows that if he procrastinates for too long, he’ll get a reminder from Thao, the support coordinator. “She is always texting me, and it helps,” he says.
Through the agricultural program, Pressell is learning how to operate advanced machinery, including tractors, as well as digital literacy and technical writing skills that could help him advance further at Restore Farms.
The certificate could position Pressell for supervisory roles at Restore Farms — and for California, the program be another tool for reducing recidivism while filling critical agricultural workforce needs.
“I enjoy driving the tractor and I enjoy planting food. It’s something that can actually stay with me in the future,” Pressell says. “Something to be proud of, where I can see people go to a grocery store, and think, ‘Look, I grew that.'”