Beyond Prototypes: Why 2025 Is the Year Ag Autonomy Moves from Research to Reality
In some form, agriculture has been experimenting with autonomous vehicles since at least the early 2000s when John Deere displayed its first version of an autonomous tractor, writes Editor Eric Sfiligoj at CropLife. However, according to market watchers, 2025 represents an extraordinary moment for this category — partially driven by a number of outside influences.
“We are entering a new era of agriculture defined by technology,” says Kendal Quandahl, Precision Segment Lead, North America for Case IH. “We’ve had amazing gains in iron technology over the years, but now we get the opportunity to take this precision technology and build it into all of the products we use.”
Dinen Subramaniam, Product Launch Manager for Autonomy at PTx Trimble, agrees, giving credit to the technological advances being made in another “iron-oriented” industry for helping autonomy development to expand in agriculture.
“We are on the cusp of innovation because of the automotive industry,” says Subramaniam, citing the advanced vision/machine learning systems now being incorporated into automotive designs. “There have been several attempts to get autonomous vehicles adoption going over the past 10 years, but most of them were not viable products. The new advances have driven the technology to such a point that it is in a much more viable place to become a useful solution for agriculture.”
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Up until now, say market watchers, the development and innovation of autonomous vehicles in agriculture have been what could be called “exploratory” or “research” efforts. “These tended to be one-off products that targeted very niche segments of agriculture or were concept vehicles,” says Subramaniam. An example of this would be the Autonomous Concept Vehicle (ACV) showcased by Case IH back in 2016.
However, according to Case IH’s Quandahl, the ACV did serve an important role in the evolution of today’s autonomous vehicle movement for agriculture. “When we introduced the ACV in 2016, we as a company were planting our flag in the ground when it came to autonomous vehicle development,” she says. “That product told the world where we thought agriculture was headed in terms of technological development.”
Read more at CropLife.
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