The Consumer Electronics Show, held last week in Las Vegas, was all about autonomy and AI — including farm equipment. Leaning in on the farm labor crisis, equipment companies like John Deere and Kubota showcased autonomous machines that can mow your yard, till your field, spray your orchard — even bring refreshments out to the field, with no help from a human.
To sum up CES 2025: automation, robots, and AI were on practically every booth and product.
“There is a lot of opportunity in what AI will bring to agriculture,” says Sarah Schinckel, Director of Emerging Technologies and Architecture at John Deere. “It’s not just software; it’s also physical AI related to automation and machine learning.”
While it may surprise some to see ag companies at CES, John Deere has exhibited the past six years, in part to showcase modern food production to consumers.
Will an AI ‘agent’ run your farm in five years?
“I predict that in the next five years farms will be operated by AI agents, with the farmer still in control,” says Tim Bucher, a California farmer and entrepreneur who has created several companies over the last three decades. “It will be a command center that farmers can run their operation from.”
Bucher, CEO and founder of Agtonomy, an agtech company working with OEMs to integrate AI and automation into their machines, believes this could start with a work order; say, ‘plant 10,000 acres of soybeans.’ That gets broken down into jobs; ‘plant blocks using this seed;’ next the AI would break that job into tasks; say, ‘take this tractor and plant that field.’
“Today the farmer makes decisions based on weather, soil or other factors,” says Bucher. “That can all be done now with an agent, but the farmer is still in control.”
Some equipment leaders see a gradual adoption, based on specific farm tasks.
“With certain tasks we’re very close, but we’re a long way from automating the entire farm,” says Brett McMickell, Chief Technology Officer with Kubota North America. “You’re going to see augmented automation where the robots are helping out, but not doing the full task.
“In specialty crops, weeding is becoming a bigger problem especially with herbicide resistance,” he adds. “We need to use AI to tackle weeding as well. Spraying and pruning is an example of where automation is being used.”
Schinckel and Bucher spoke on a panel titled, ‘AI or die? Why farms must embrace the AI revolution or die.’ Bucher believes the session title is not an exaggeration.
“We are facing an existential threat,” he says. “We must feed a global society. If you don’t have skilled labor, which becomes more and more rare, no one will drive your vehicles. Embracing technology is a necessity, not a convenience. It’s a necessity for farmers, equipment makers, and the whole food chain.”
Agtech adoption is rarely a slam dunk
Even with the promise of solving labor shortages and improving yields and sustainability, agtech adoption is rarely a slam dunk. Many startups have bitten the dust when their elevator pitch could not pass muster at the farm gate.
Will farmers embrace AI?
“If the tool provides value to their business they will adopt,” says Schinckel. “If we can build tools with technology that helps them make better decisions, to solve a labor challenge, be more precise or more productive, it will be adopted.”
Gaurav Bansal, Deere’s vice president of engineering, agrees.
“We want to build tools that enable farmers to do more with less,” he says. “We have to do it by taking customer needs into account. We see the future as highly automated and autonomous.”
While it may not always be clear what that adoption curve will look like, the potential for big gains from technology remain clear, says Todd Stucke, president, Kubota Tractor Corporation.
“A big wow factor we’ll see in the future is how do we go from managing the field by the acre, managing by 20 square feet, down to plant management,” he says. “With the imagers and technology Kubota has today, we can get down to plant level; we can minimize inputs and maximize outputs. That data gets served up to you in a usable format. It’s coming, and it’s coming faster than what we think.”
Meanwhile reasons to resist change — such as slow recharge time on a battery-driven vehicle — are beginning to fade. Kubota’s Agri Concept vehicle is fully electric and capable of automated operation. The vehicle will have a quick charging feature capable of recharging the battery from 10% to 80% within 6 minutes.Kubota is awaiting regulatory clarity before it begins selling the vehicle in the United States.
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