John Deere wants self-driving tractors to help with America’s farmhand shortage

Oh, Deere

The largest farming-equipment manufacturer in the world, John Deere, unveiled a new crop of autonomous tractors and trucks at CES 2025 earlier this week, as the heavy-machinery giant looks to capitalize on the buzz around all things self-driving.

If your immediate thought is that this sounds like a job killer... it is. John Deere has talked up its machines’ capabilities for precisely that purpose: to help alleviate some of the labor-shortage issues that farming faces, with the company’s chief technology officer, Jahmy Hindman, saying that “there is not enough available and skilled labor” to do the kind of agricultural and construction work that its customers do.

Though John Deere introduced its first fully autonomous tractor three years ago, the latest suite — which includes a couple of tractors, a lawnmower for commercial landscaping, and a driverless dump truck — comes plowing into a world where attitudes toward self-driving vehicles have softened.

Whether John Deere’s goal for fully autonomous farming by 2030 — outlined in a September blog post from Nvidia (we know: AI royalty Nvidia proudly touting its collaboration with a lowly multibillion-dollar minnow like JD rather than the other way around? Who’d have thought it?) — comes to fruition or not, the company will hope the new fleet reinvigorates sales after a slightly fallow year.

In 2023, John Deere’s total revenues rose to a record $61.3 billion, but sales slumped some 16% in the last fiscal year as farmers tightened their purse strings and invested less into Deere-branded machinery and equipment, which accounts for as much as ~87% of the company’s revenue. Clearly, fewer farmers up and down the country fancied dropping thousands, or indeed millions, of dollars on new machines last year, with the company’s most expensive tractor, the 9RX 830, listing for $1.228 million.

Interestingly, the company aims to make 10% of its annual revenue from software subscriptions by 2030 — quite the shift for a business that’s still almost exclusively known for making things that chop, plow, mow, move, and spray.