The future is here - autonomous tractor operating in Perkins County

Perkins County may be what some would consider small or rural, but residents here shouldn’t be excluded from carving the path for the future, and who would have thought that one of the first autonomous tractors in the country would be put to use right here in PC where so many farmers have given their blood sweat and tears to their fields without a second thought of the hard work that involved in any given generation?

“Top Producer” is the slogan at Bruce Young Farms in Madrid, and to Bruce Young this means so many things.

A third generation farmer for almost all of his years, Young prides himself on doing any job well, keeping a small but dedicated crew, and progressing with the times.

After last week, Young can add running the latest farming technology available to the list of things to be proud of.

A partnership several years in the making between John Deere, 21st Century Equipment and Young came to fruition on Friday when Bruce Young Farms operated one of the first autonomous tractors in the United States.

“We have been working on this for three or four years.” Young’s wife Bo explained. We’ve already been pushing all of the information into our computers and into our equipment to get to this point,  and that’s why they asked us to do this,” 

“Everything is pushed to the computer and we maintain it within the John Deere Ops Center app,” she said.

One of the preparations for the day was the field being pre-mapped and programmed into the tractor’s GPS, which is a task that requires a person to be in the tractor.  

Before the tractor is ready to be “let loose” in the field, an operator must run through and set up “autonomous boundaries,” which use John Deere’s SFRTK satellite system to navigate and map each field.

On Friday, March 28, all systems were in place and the long awaited day had finally arrived. Bruce Young Farms’ and their 8R-410 John Deere tractor and 2660VT John Deere tiller were tilling the field, manless.

The tractor is a newer 410 model John Deere tractor, however, what makes it autonomous is the “kit” that is put on to make it autonomy ready, explained Anne Duetch, a representative with 21st Century.

Duetch was in the field Friday with the mobile app pulled up on her phone and explained that with the app, remotely, the tractor can be started, turned off, or paused and the equipment adjusted as needed.

In addition, the mobile app shows the user where the tractor is located in the field, the path it’s on, the speed it’s traveling, as well as a 360 camera view which allows the user to “see” from inside the tractor via the screen.

Users can remotely access and adjust the display screens inside the cab as well.

“When I got out here this morning and got out of the cab and told it I want to start this from my phone, all I had to do was swipe a button that says ‘swipe to begin,’ and there it went,”  Deutch said, adding “I mean, we could go to town right now and this thing would keep running!”

While there are still kinks to be worked out, as is to be expected with any new technology, the excitement over the benefits of this system was palpable in the field.

One of the issues in the field on Friday can be attributed to the extremely dry conditions and the dust.

Safety features included with the autonomous system include 360 view cameras on all four corners of the cab of the tractor. While tilling and creating so much dust, the cameras were getting dirty, causing the tractor to “pause.” Once the dust settled and no threat was  detected, the system would kick into gear again, giving a warning siren that the tractor was about to begin, and onward it went.

21st Century representative Troy Randall said, as a safety feature, the machine will shut off and alert the user on the app if the machine detects motion or anything in its path.

“Tilling is just the first step,” Young said. “Once that is perfected, in the next few years, they’re trying to get the planters, and the strip tillers and so on.”

With technology ever-changing, John Deere is hoping to have the capabilities to go completely autonomous by 2030, Randall said.

While the technology is exciting, Randall explained that one of the down sides is the machine is not designed for job quality. 

“It’s not looking back at the tool to see how it’s doing, or making sure it’s not plugged up, he said.  

“It’s designed right now to just make sure it doesn’t run into anything. So that will be stuff that we will continue to work on.”

Watching his tractor till the field without a driver, Young said, “It takes us 6.5 to 7 hours to till this 130-acre field, so if this one is going 9 mph, I bet it could get it done in 5 hours, and without losing a man to do it.”

The tractor and tiller cruised the field at about 9.2 mph on average. Which according to Young is another advantage because a man in the cab would be bouncing around too much at those speeds. Young added he believes at those speeds, the tiller actually works better, another benefit he is excited about.

“You can just program these tractors and everything in them and then you don’t have to worry about having somebody to run it, we’ll just do it from our phones” Young said.

While it may be a ways off that the tractor runs fully autonomously, “it’s really starting to get exciting, it’s just beautiful,” Young said. 

According to 21st Century Equipment representatives, there are currently less than 50 autonomous tractors in operation in the United States, and less than eight in the state of Nebraska. The autonomous tractor at Bruce Young Farms was the first in operation in their Western Nebraska region.