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

Sherwood ^ | 01/10/2025 | Tom Jones

[SeekAndFind]

Oh, Deere

The largest farming-equipment manufacturer in the world, John Deere, unveiled a new crop of autonomous tractors and trucks at CES 2025 earlier this week, as the heavy-machinery giant looks to capitalize on the buzz around all things self-driving.

If your immediate thought is that this sounds like a job killer... it is. John Deere has talked up its machines’ capabilities for precisely that purpose: to help alleviate some of the labor-shortage issues that farming faces, with the company’s chief technology officer, Jahmy Hindman, saying that “there is not enough available and skilled labor” to do the kind of agricultural and construction work that its customers do.

Though John Deere introduced its first fully autonomous tractor three years ago, the latest suite — which includes a couple of tractors, a lawnmower for commercial landscaping, and a driverless dump truck — comes plowing into a world where attitudes toward self-driving vehicles have softened.

Whether John Deere’s goal for fully autonomous farming by 2030 — outlined in a September blog post from Nvidia (we know: AI royalty Nvidia proudly touting its collaboration with a lowly multibillion-dollar minnow like JD rather than the other way around? Who’d have thought it?) — comes to fruition or not, the company will hope the new fleet reinvigorates sales after a slightly fallow year.

In 2023, John Deere’s total revenues rose to a record $61.3 billion , but sales slumped some 16% in the last fiscal year as farmers tightened their purse strings and invested less into Deere-branded machinery and equipment, which accounts for as much as ~87% of the company’s revenue. Clearly, fewer farmers up and down the country fancied dropping thousands, or indeed millions, of dollars on new machines last year, with the company’s most expensive tractor, the 9RX 830, listing for $1.228 million.

Interestingly, the company aims to make 10% of its annual revenue from software subscriptions by 2030 — quite the shift for a business that’s still almost exclusively known for making things that chop, plow, mow, move, and spray.

[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.