by Melinda Zimmerman-Boehler
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations estimates that by 2050, the world will need 70% more food to feed a population of almost 10 billion people. A diverse group of experts, including environmentalists, agricultural scientists, economists and policy analysts, say reaching that goal may only be feasible through the use of advanced agricultural technology.
“Autonomy is an evolution of the path that we're already on,” says Ryan Abel, principal software architect at CNH Industrial. “It’s going to allow us to get more efficient in our processes while improving agronomic output to better feed the world, hopefully with a higher-quality product that doesn't rely on the conventional pesticides and herbicides that we use today. I believe autonomy will lead us to a more sustainable world.”
When it comes to autonomous ag equipment, there’s clearly a lot of potential. But transitioning that vision into reality requires collaboration among the sprawling and fiercely competitive global ag industry.
A safe space for development
Compared with the variable and unpredictable public on-road environment, the agricultural world is a relatively safe space for autonomy to grow and evolve. Add to this the opportunity for farmers to retrofit their current machines — not as viable an option for on-road vehicle owners — and this means the market opportunity in the ag world is significant.
The World Economic Forum forecasts that by 2027, autonomous agriculture will be a $95 billion market. Several factors are driving the expansion. There is an increasing need to feed a growing population, but there also is a need to reduce emissions, pesticides and water use.
Robots and automated machinery will allow farmers to finish tasks faster while saving on labor costs. The technology promises to improve crop quality, deliver accurate data to help farmers make better-informed decisions and make traditional work more efficient. Autonomous farming also will prevent losses from pests and diseases; conserve water, fertilizer and pesticides; increase yields; and promote sustainable agriculture — all of which will help global food security.
“Removing the operator by way of autonomy ultimately allows us to think in a much broader scale and ask, ‘How can we do agriculture better?'” Abel says.
No humans allowed
Etymologically speaking, the term “driver" can be traced back to the Middle English word “drivere” from the 1400s, referring to driving working animals, such as a team of horses or oxen. In the late 1800s, drivers came to be known as “behind-the-wheel" operators of motorcars.
Driving takes intelligence and a physical presence to operate a vehicle safely and properly. Having a driver has not only shaped vehicle designs for over a hundred years, but also automotive safety, training, marketing, etc. Going “driverless” is an entrance into a brave new world.
“This does free up the agricultural equipment manufacturers to shift from thinking ‘How do I make things better for the operator?’ — which has always been our primary focus — to ‘How do I make things easier and more efficient without the operator?’” Abel says.
The advent of autonomy is allowing the ag industry to rethink those processes in total, as most agricultural processes are purely logistical tasks.
“And it’s not just ‘the operator’ that we're trying to solve,” Abel says. “We've ultimately eliminated ‘the need’ for that operator. So, how could we make our agronomic practices better — higher yield, higher-quality food and more sustainable?”
Evolving implements
“Machines and implements look like they do now because there is a human operator in the loop, and removing them gives us the opportunity to really rethink the process and design differently as a whole,” says Alexander Grever, team lead of software development at KRONE. “I think implements, for example, will look completely different 10 years from now. Implements are already being fitted with sensors to carry out reasoning about the quality of work and improve it accordingly.”
Cultivating crops laid the groundwork for civilization thousands of years ago, and continuing to effectively manage that process changed the world by altering economics, social structure and the landscape. Likewise, autonomous equipment will create a different vision, one that humanity is marching toward.
“We are trying to build it as a gradual progression,” Grever says. “The first step is autonomous retrofit kits and autonomous traction units, which are very similar to traditional tractors in terms of dimensions and design. This step makes sense in order to be able to use the existing implements. However, as humans no longer necessarily have to be on board, agricultural processes can be rethought. Whether small or large, agricultural robots should not be discussed in black-or-white.”
While changes may not be an eventual tractor-to-tractor exchange, there will be an entirely different way of doing agriculture than has been traditionally executed by farmers.
“Changes can sound negative,” Grever says. “But basically, it is primarily about supporting farmers and making their daily work easier, and ultimately helping to ensure that we are prepared for the growth of our global population.”
A better system
With a focus on identifying and removing technical barriers, the Agricultural Industry Electronics Foundation (AEF) is a global nonprofit founded in 2008 by a collection of companies with the desire to provide a testing and validation framework for existing international standards like ISOBUS based on ISO 11783 to improve cross-manufacturer compatibility in agricultural equipment.
In 2024, the AEF announced the Autonomy in Ag (AUT) project team. The team is defining an interoperability roadmap for autonomous agricultural products and will create and document the necessary architecture.
Consisting of 60 people from AEF member companies and growing, the team is being co-led by Abel and Grever. Both are experienced autonomy experts within their companies.
The working group is moving quickly, initially providing the definition of key use cases and functional requirements that will lead to the high-level architectural definition for autonomy.
Considering the rapid development of autonomous technology, the AUT project is becoming a central force within the AEF to address the standardization challenges associated with autonomy in the agricultural domain.
Brand interoperability
With such a wide scope of ag products on the market today, a lack of brand interoperability is a fairly common problem. However, when products all share the same ISOBUS “control system,” they communicate seamlessly.
In order to take advantage of specialized, highly precise and technically advanced equipment, interoperability is necessary.
“Interoperability is extremely important,” says Norbert Schlingmann, general manager at AEF. “It gives the farmer the freedom to choose farming equipment from different brands — essentially to mix and match — to get the most suitable setup for their specific farming operations. Interoperability creates a competitive flexibility that is also a brand differentiator.”
“Everybody wants more choice, and the more choice you have to use with your equipment, the more you can tailor the equipment that you have to your unique needs,” Abel says. “And the more choice you get, the more competitive that market becomes, which generally means that you’re going to get better technology or you’re going to get a better price, or both.”
“It would definitely be nice if interoperability played a more important role for Americans,” Grever says, “because there are quite a lot of good implement manufacturers who provide really, really good solutions.”
“The work on autonomous solutions also generates a quick win for driver-assistance systems because we will improve them,” Grever continues. “So, we will generate implements and tools that will provide a better quality of work. But to be honest, the main point is actually interoperability and the replication of the cognitive capabilities of the human operator because that's what autonomy stands for. It’s actually the highest level of automation.”
Plant-to-plant, weed-to-weed
While the Great Depression in the 1930s brought swarms of locusts that devastated crops, particularly in the Midwest and Great Plains regions, it appears as though the age of autonomy will bring about a swarm of its own.
“Swarm farming," the vision of several to hundreds of smaller robotic platforms autonomously conducting farming operations as a system in place of singular, manned, heavy agricultural machinery, just might be the next evolution we are headed toward.
Key drivers for farming by swarm include decreasing labor, enhancing environmental sustainability, reducing potential negative effects from soil compaction when using larger ag equipment and increasing the size of farming operations, among others.
With one of the main limiting factors being a growing scarcity of workers, autonomy will allow us to spend more time in the field doing these types of things.
“In many circumstances, mechanical weeding could eliminate the need to spray,” Abel says. “Humans will no longer supervise each individual task; instead, an ‘autonomy stack’ will evaluate the plants to customize an agronomic approach in a plant-by-plant or weed-by-weed basis.”
“We might be able to look at true organic farming on a much larger scale, and be able to do it much more successfully while reducing our chemical footprint,” Abel adds. “Maybe even reducing it to nothing, as well as from an emissions standpoint. Maybe these systems will even be small electric vehicles.”
“I could imagine having solar panels next to the field providing energy for smaller robots performing work in a swarm,” Grever says. “Autonomy allows us to generate more sustainable processes in the future. Swarm farming will actually allow us to build more sustainable systems in total.”
Autonomy upgrade
The work, largely unprecedented in terms of complexity in the overall agriculture space, aligns necessary content adaptations to existing AEF guidelines. The specifics and next steps for the successful execution of a high-level autonomy roadmap will be accomplished in collaboration with the existing expert/project teams.
“We want to make it such that any manufacturer could build a fully autonomous tractor, or a fully autonomous implement, and use another manufacturer’s software to plan all of these autonomy missions. And when they do that work, it all comes together and works properly,” Abel says.
The agriculture sector is actively applying technology where necessary, and many farming tasks stand to be upgraded, where human and machine will unite, and then with autonomy, where machines will do the work with almost zero human involvement.
“Companies in the ag industry will generate implements and tools that will provide a better quality of work due to our work here through the AEF,” Grever says.
Although it may seem outside of most farmers’ budgets to be able to afford technologically sophisticated autonomous systems, Abel says that if manufacturers do their jobs right, those systems could pay for themselves.
“Ultimately, it could become a question not of how can they afford this, but how could they not afford this,” Abel says. “If we do our jobs well, we're going to improve the efficiency of their operation, which can lead to higher yields, higher quality, etc. So, it really might be one of these things where the benefits far outweigh the monetary costs and, ultimately, it pays for itself.
“There's a long ways to go, and there's a lot of definition to be done. Right now, companies are working in isolation with their own equipment, and that's really not what the farmer needs.”
“Our ultimate goal is to create a roadmap for the agriculture industry to begin a transition to autonomous machines for work occurring in fields,” Schlingmann says. “The initial work provides the definition of key use cases and functional requirements that will lead to the high-level architectural definition for autonomy.”
“I would say that the work that we're doing right now is largely unprecedented in terms of complexity, at least in the agriculture space,” Abel continues. “Our goal is to make meaningful definition and decisions on this as fast as possible so that the companies that are working in this space can continue their work, and that we can make them more successful.”
According to the AEF, the first artifacts of this group could come within the next year or two, and perhaps even sooner.
“As we get new regulations … like trying to make farming practices much more sustainable, or we attempt to get more yield out of our fields, we're constantly going to be having new problems to solve, and we're going to be constantly integrating them into our autonomy packages,” Abel says. “I don't know if that work necessarily really ever ends. We may, at some point in time, call success we built something and it's working, and it's in the field. We're always improving and making things better for our customers. Ultimately, they have one of the most important jobs in the world. Without them, we don't eat.”