Vox media kit7/26/2023 ![]() Case has an autonomous tractor concept that doesn’t even have a cab for a human driver, and AGCO, which owns farm equipment brands like Fendt and Massey Ferguson, is testing smaller autonomous machines, including a seed-planting robot that’s the size of a washing machine. John Deere isn’t the only one working on autonomous farming equipment, and it’s not even clear that big self-driving tractors are the best use of the technology. “But they’re trying to be the Facebook of farming.” John Deere says it will sell self-driving kits separately so that older models can be retrofitted to be autonomous. “I’m all for innovation, and I think John Deere is a helluva company,” Kevin Kenney, an agricultural engineer and right-to-repair advocate, told Wired after John Deere announced its autonomous tractor. Meanwhile, John Deere’s privacy and data policy says it can share the data about farmers’ activities that its software collects with “outside parties” in certain circumstances. ![]() This means they’re forced to pay John Deere or its authorized repair shops for their maintenance needs. Many farmers say they can’t even repair the tractors themselves, lest they trip a switch that disables the machine entirely. Almost anything the machine does gets logged and beamed to the cloud from an onboard cellular transmitter, and John Deere has the capability to remotely shut down many of its tractors if it determines that someone has modified their equipment or has missed a lease payment. The newest John Deere tractors are sensor-filled and internet-connected. The company also says it’s looking into offering a subscription plan, but didn’t specify how much it would cost.īut even if a farmer buys the tractor outright, it’s not clear who actually owns the equipment or the valuable farming data it collects. John Deere says it will sell the automation system as a kit that can be installed on its other tractor models. ![]() And while the company hasn’t said how much its new autonomous tractor will cost, existing, non-autonomous models in the 8R line can cost over $600,000. With models ranging from 230 to 410 horsepower, the John Deere 8R tractors are big machines designed for big farms. There’s reason to believe that farmers who own thousands of acres will be first in line to buy John Deere’s new self-driving tractors. ![]() But exactly who’s in charge of that future and who benefits from it is still to be determined. Autonomous farming equipment like soil sensors, specialized drones, and self-driving tractors are key to a future where we can produce more crops with less effort and less environmental impact. Simply put, precision agriculture is a concept that utilizes computers, data gathering, and satellite imagery to build a strategy for maximizing the output of a farm. This is clearly a big deal for John Deere, but it also represents a huge step forward for the precision agriculture movement as a whole. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.įor more newsletters, check out our newsletters page. “That’s big news,” Pitla said, “and it’s good news.”īy submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice. John Deere’s equipment accounts for more than half of all farm machinery sold in the United States, and even the simple fact that it’s putting an autonomous tractor on the market will change the way farming works. “In my view, it’s a big deal,” Santosh Pitla, associate professor of advanced machinery systems at the University of Nebraska, told Recode. The tractor goes on sale later this year, just in time for an extra special robotic harvest season. The farmer doesn’t need to be anywhere near the machine to operate it, either, as there’s a smartphone app that controls everything. It looks a lot like any other John Deere tractor - it’s green and yellow - but there are six pairs of stereo cameras that use artificial intelligence to scan the surroundings and maneuver accordingly. More specifically, it’s the self-driving John Deere 8R tractor that can plow fields, avoid obstacles, and plant crops with minimal human intervention. The most exciting gadget of the year isn’t a TV that displays NFTs or a foldable tablet computer or anything related to the metaverse.
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