Continuing with the autonomy theme, the topic came up during a technology panel at the Farm Equipment Manufacturers Association Fall Convention in Dallas.

Colin Hurd, founder of SmartAg, the first retro-fit driverly tractor automation system, says we’re a ways away from what he calls “set-it-and-forget autonomy,” He ventures we’re 5-plus years out for a lot of autonomous applications.

“I think we're a lot closer to one person being able to run four or five machines at the same time, or the combine operator managing the grain cart."

“I think you'll create really meaningful value very quickly and not have all of the liability concerns that sometimes surround autonomy. So that's what I think is near-term. I think you'll see a lot of that coordinated fleets, multi-machine, in-field coordination with people on-site still."

Chris Hunsaker, co-founder and CEO of Acuitus Ag, agrees and predicts we'll see a mixture of things happen.

“Personally, coming from the implement space in the past I look at the autonomy as... Depending on what your implement is and how complicated it is, it might be really difficult to fully automate everything that happens on that machine."

“But you can look for high-value add automation you can introduce that makes it easier for the operator or gets you a better outcome. And so if you're capturing the data from your machine and it's used, that can inform and de-risk some of the creation of that automation for you."

“And then yeah, the future of a mixed fleet where you have... Depending on what your farm is and what you're doing, you may have certain things that are fairly autonomous and you have other things that aren't. There's got to be some kind of a management layer on top of that that allows that stuff to coexist in the same space."    

Dan Rauchholz of Farmada looks at autonomy as “evolution instead of revolution.” He says we’ll see autonomy come in a step-by-step progression rather than a big rapid change. Before you know it, he says, everything’s running by itself robotically or autonomously.

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