Critical agri-food scholars have argued that previous mechanization efforts in specialty crop industries have led to labor intensification, deskilling, and displacement, while developers of automated strawberry harvesters assert that these machines can relieve farmworkers from physically demanding labor by enabling the reskilling of workers and by improving their working conditions. In order to investigate this tension, this paper draws from labor process theory and critical agri-food studies to better understand how automated harvesters’ envisioned futures will affect workers’ skills and employment if these futures were to materialize. Using critical (multimodal) discourse analysis, I examine interviews with technology developers, agricultural scientists, and experts in strawberry production, and online promotional material published by manufacturers of automated strawberry harvesters. I find that automated strawberry harvesters are envisioned to reduce labor needs and automated harvesting aids have uneven implications for the labor process. This paper also finds that the natural and biological factors of strawberry production complicate the effective automation of harvesting, and therefore, has uneven implications for the labor process. Therefore, I argue that labor process theory, when applied to the study of labor automation in agriculture, needs to account for the natural and biological factors that characterize agriculture.