Autonomous Tractor - John Deere 8R

When you start out in the spring, you work the soil and it just smells so fresh when you till it up. And it's just the greatest smell. When I started farming, there basically was no technology. Every tractor was driven manually. Everything was done manually. You'd be planting, you had to follow a line. If the sun was wrong, you would lose the line. Darkness, you couldn't see your marks. Moisture, couldn't see your mark. Then you'd get squiggly rows. My name is Doug Nims. I'm a farmer from Blue Earth, Minnesota. I'm a fourth generation farmer and I raise approximately 2,000 acres of corn and soybeans. I really never thought I would see an autonomous tractor in my farming career. For me, it was really exciting the first time I got to take the autonomous tractor to the field, swipe my phone, watch the tractor, start with no one in the cab, start doing tillage, come to the end of the field, turn on, and do the tillage just as well as I can do myself. With no one in the cab, I can pull up the app. I can monitor the tractor, see how much of the field it's gotten tilled. I can check the fuel level. I can check the app to see how much of the field is left. If there was something in the field that it wasn't sure about, the tractor will stop and alert me. Is this something I can go around? Do I need to go out and remove an object from the field? The app gives me all this information so I can monitor everything very closely. On farms, labor is always a challenge. We need labor for lots and lots of hours for short periods of time. The autosteer and technology has helped reduce our labor load, which makes my life a lot easier. Autonomy will help because we will be able to put a tractor out in the field and and let it run for 24 hours a day because it's not manned. But it also helps us with the weather because we can run so hard when soil conditions are fit. The thing that excites me the most about autonomy is not be locked in a tractor cab all day. It will just allow me to run my business better because I can just pay closer attention to other tasks. Now we'll be doing the jobs that we always wanted to get done but never had time to. We were in the cab all the time. Farmers are fairly traditional, but I have a feeling that once they try it, they will become very accepting of it. I think the tractor can do a better job than I can do Autonomy. It's going to be a life changer for me, Sam.