Photo credit: Joe Miller
“When will farmers be able to hit a button and deploy a fleet of autonomous tractors?”
My question took a John Deere engineer by surprise a little. As usual, I was jumping ahead a few years. I was about to climb into a massive full-size John Deere tractor, situated on a course far behind the Las Vegas Convention Center at CES 2019. In my head, I was picturing a farmer sipping a lemonade at watching cable news while the tractors in his field planted seeds or harvested corn, all without any intervention and all on their own.
Automated agriculture
We’re not quite there, but it was easy to see how it might work. I sat down on a jump seat next to the main driver in the big green machine. The operator showed me how manually driving a tractor is somewhat laborious. On the course, bright yellow lines created a curved pattern that ran for about 100 feet or so. I’ve never operated a tractor, but to stay within the lines, the operator had to look all around the tractor constantly. With one button press, he enabled autonomous mode.