Precision Ag Trends

Jenner Precision Location Manager, Brian Fehr talks about the latest trends in farming technology with a focus on the rise of autonomous tractors.

“The biggest thing, I would say, going the future is the autonomy side of it. You're going to see more and more autonomy in the market. So Raven, at one time, had a autonomous auger cart, where we put a system on a tractor, and the tractor drove by itself. That kind of got kaput a little bit. And so they're redone it because when you started up, it wasn't 99% of the time fired up correctly. But now I know is that Precision Planting working with Trimble, they have a system that you can put on a tractor, and it's an autonomous auger cart. So that's where it's starting. I know Deere is pushing it. That's what I see the future.”

Fehr states that although you will not see tractors driving themselves down the road, you could see them driving themselves in the fields. And when it comes to producers choosing to use new technology. It's all about ROI.

“What can we put on their equipment that's going to give them return on investment? So when you go from a chain drive planter and you go to an electric planter, where you can variable rate the population, and you can very broad population, put the population where your good ground is up that or lower it, that's a huge thing, right?”

Which leads to seed savings for producers.