John Deere wants self-driving tractors to help with America’s farmhand shortage

Sherwood ^ | 01/10/2025 | Tom Jones

[9YearLurker]

For some reason, the US has long been fine with ag workers getting paid less than others. A number of states still exempt them from their minimum wage laws.

[Gaffer]

That’s the big elephant in the tent in my opinion. Try to get anything fixed or fix it yourself and you run up against proprietary software and parts issues that force you to go to JD - hugely expensive.

[9YearLurker]

It’s because they could get illegals who don’t speak English to work for less than Americans.

[GreenHornet]

Oliver Wendell Douglas has weighed in on this (with fife music playing in the background): “Gentlemen, the American farmer will never allow some pre-programmed piece of equipment do his farming for him! No! He takes pride in rising at dawn, tilling the rich fertile soil himself, planting the tiny seedlings which rise up to sunlit sky, providing the crops that feed this nation! We will never step aside and cede this proud heritage to some machine!”

[EinNYC]

Jeremy Clarkson, in “Clarkson’s Farm” on Youtube, gives us non-farmers a real bird’s eye view on the often ridiculous government regulations and how they micromanage every aspect of farming. I’m sure that the self-driving tractors would be subject to dozens of new laws and quite possibly forbidden to be used.

[Rockingham]

“Clarkson’s Farm” is set in Britain, which has embraced an extraordinary level of Leftist administrative state power and regulatory excess. You have a point though, and one can hope that John Deere and other US manufacturers would have the political clout to prevent over-regulation from killing off the emerging market in self-driving farm equipment.