A farm in Sonoma County had 27 tractor driver positions open and posted the positions on various job boards. The farm didn’t get a single applicant for weeks.
A few weeks later, the owners onboarded an autonomous tractor system for the farm and updated the job listing to say they were looking for an agtech operator position. In the preferred qualifications they listed “video game experience.” The applications came rolling in.
“You’ve opened up a whole new workforce for agriculture,” Tim Bucher, CEO of the ag startup Agtonomy, said. “One that’s never driven a tractor before.”
Tesla, Waymo and Zoox are usually the names that come up when talking about self-driving. But far away from the hallowed halls of Silicon Valley, autonomous vehicle solutions from Agtonomy and Deere & Co. are making huge impacts in the agricultural sector.
As farms struggle to address a significant labor shortage, self-driving tractors and other autonomous technologies are not only positioned to fill the gaps, but could also reinvigorate interest in an industry that has struggled to recruit the next generation of workers.
Tired: self-driving cars, Wired: self-driving tractors
Tractor giant Deere and software startup Agtonomy have emerged as some of the major players driving the autonomous revolution. While the two companies are focused on different sectors in agriculture, their end goals are the same: Helping farmers make more money by making smarter decisions about their operations.
“There’s obviously struggles with labor shortages around the country, and so people are always looking at ways to how they can get more done in the shortest amount of time,” said Micheal Porter, the go-to-market manager for large tractors at Deere.
Deere has used automatic steering on its tractors since the 1990s. This year, Deere announced its 2025 tractors will have autonomy abilities, with the goal to have a fully autonomous corn and soy production system by the end of the decade.
Deere’s autonomous solutions focus on row crops, like soy and wheat that have to be replanted each year. Farmers can use Deere’s AI-enabled equipment to help with tillage, one of the most time-consuming that usually has to be done during a very small window.
“[Having] machines being able to run 24 hours a day with the autonomous tillage solution is obviously a big advantage for those growers when crunch time is on,” Porter said.
However, the appeal of round-the-clock tillage could undermine the growing momentum of the no-tillage movement, which has gained traction as a more sustainable agricultural practice in recent years.
While Deere’s equipment is meant for traditional row crops, Agtonomy is focused more on vineyards, orchards and other specialty crop operations that are more dependent on labor for production.
Agtonomy only makes the precision agriculture software behind the self-driving vehicles, and the startup partners with vehicle manufacturers to scale the technology for growers. The company partnered with Bobcat on autonomous tractors currently used by Barefoot wine maker Gallo and Australia-based Treasury Wine Estates, one of the world’s largest wine companies.
Autonomous technology in specialty crops requires more precision than in traditional row crop farming because the stakes to get it right are high. Damaging even a single citrus tree, for example, would mean years of work and thousands of dollars worth of production gone in a single moment.
Right now the technology on the market is mostly focused on weeding and mowing — Agtonomy included. Automating these labor-intensive tasks not only frees up workers for other jobs but also allows growers to rely less on pesticides.
“There is no farmer in the world that wants to use chemicals,” said Bucher, who founded Agtonomy in 2021 after decades of experience both in farming and tech. “They are forced to, just for economic reasons at times. But if they had automation solutions that could do things like mechanical weeding versus using herbicides, they would take that any day.”
Filling labor gaps or replacing farmworkers?
From traditional row crops in Iowa to wine vineyards in California, autonomous vehicles hold incredible promise for farmers to replace the need for manual labor. But like many others in the quickly developing artificial intelligence space, some are concerned about possible labor replacement in the future.
Both Deere and Agtonomy emphasized that autonomous engineering wasn’t going to replace jobs, but fill in existing gaps. The labor shortage in agriculture is so severe, executives say, that farms need solutions in order to make it to the end of harvest.
“Talk to any farming operation, big or small, [they] can’t make the numbers work,” Bucher said.
An aging population of farmers and declining interest in the industry are among the myriad of reasons behind a lack of workers in agriculture. While there’s a lack of national data quantifying the extent of the shortage, some states have attempted their own estimates: A survey of California producers in 2019 found 56% of participating farmers were unable to hire all employees needed in the previous five years, while researchers in Kansas estimate labor constraints cost the state as much as $11.7 billion.
For agtech executives, automating just one aspect of the farm frees up workers to take on other tasks.
“They’re not losing labor,” Porter said. “They’re reprioritizing the work.”
Beyond filling in labor gaps, adoption of new technology could also create new job pathways in agriculture that fit a new generation’s interests and skills. Autonomous technology still needs to be controlled by a human, even if they’re not sitting in the tractor seat.
Over the next decade, employment of agricultural equipment operators is projected to grow faster than the average for all occupations in farming, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics.
With more of these types of jobs expected, early technology adopters are already capitalizing on opportunities to expand their workers’ skillset. With Agtonomy’s technology, workers can operate machines remotely after just a few hours of training, said Bucher, and control equipment from their smartphones.
“So they can push a button, and a whole fleet can go out from the shop to where the apples or the grapes or the citrus are, do their mowing job all day, and then come back,” said Bucher. “And they can stay in their air conditioned truck and monitor the fleet and get the work done in a much safer environment, and with [a] return on investment that’s huge.”
Still, some experts warn that more resources are needed to fully understand the impact of agricultural technology on people currently working in the industry. Aaron Smith, a professor of agricultural economics at University of California, Davis, and a leader of ethics and socioeconomics at the AI Institute for Next Generation Food Systems, wrote in a blog post that “not everyone will win” in the transition to autonomous technology.
“The losses will depend in part on how quickly the technological transition happens,” he wrote. “Robots are filling a gap left by missing labor, so a slow transition would mean few job losses. However, a fast transition could mean significant job losses.”