Not if, but when
By Diego Flammini
Assistant Editor, North American Content
Farms.com
Imagine a farmer standing in a barn while a tractor makes its passes through the field.
Now imagine the tractor doesn’t have a driver and the farmer is commanding it with the touch of a button from a laptop inside the barn. When the farmer presses stop it stops, presses left and the tractor turns left.
With all the talk surrounding driverless cars recently, could driverless tractors be far behind?
“It’s getting close,” said Bill Barker, service manager with Brant Tractor in Brantford, Ontario today. “Probably within the next 10 years or so.”
“Technology seems to move so fast, you never know what’s coming next,” said Mark Brenneman, a farmer near Tavistock and the new president of the Oxford County Federation of Agriculture. “If we get there and the technology works, then yeah, it would be interesting.”
Should driverless tractors become an option, there would be at least one benefit to using them.
“Labour,” said Brenneman. “Labour would be big.”
Brenneman said that while driverless tractors could benefit farmers in Ontario, they may be an even bigger help in western Canada.
“In the west where you have big tracks of land, it might work a little better there than in southern Ontario,” he said.
As it turns out, a farmer from western Canada is beginning to use a driverless tractor.
Matt Reimer, a farmer from Killarney, Manitoba, recently won the Best New Invention Award at Manitoba Ag Days. He estimates he’ll save about $5,000 in labour on his 2,500 acre farm.
Reimer said the emergence of drones has made it a little easier to create driverless tractor operations.
“In the past only (a) huge mining corporation could justify costs,” he explained today via Twitter. “It’s really the drone industry that is creating a mass market for sensors that is driving the cost down.”