It’s been the case for many years now — John Deere consistently has one of the most interesting showings at CES. At this year’s show, they’re showcasing four examples of their automated technology, and this time, they’re not just staying on the farm. John Deere has solutions for orchard farmers, landscapers, and contractors, helping to make the background business of food and housing more efficient.
Big farms need big tractors
We’ve been following John Deere’s tractor tech for years now — their 8R tractor was built to patrol the fields using mapping and obstacle detection powered by machine learning. It was a game changer for farmers, who had enough time and labor to harvest crops in the fall, but not enough of either to till their fields for the next planting season. Sending an autonomous tractor out and letting it work demands less time and attention from farmers. Since then, John Deere has developed technology to help with planting, as well.
That’s good progress, but John Deere wants to automate everything. The company is aiming to establish a fully autonomous farming system for corn and soybeans (the two largest crops by volume in the U.S.) by 2030.
At this year’s CES, John Deere is showing off the 2025 9RX autonomous tractor they introduced in February 2024. An update to the existing 9RX, itself an upgrade over the 8R, the 2025 model is autonomy-ready, with all the requisite GPS functionality, cameras, and sensors — 16 cameras, to be exact — to give the tractor a 360-degree view at all times.
The improvements don’t stop at autonomy. The new tractors are bigger, operate with more horsepower, and have improved turning radii, all of which allows farmers to do their work with fewer passes around the field. That’s huge, because those tractors are enormous and inconceivably heavy, and every pass they take compacts the soil considerably.
The mower goes electric
John Deere’s Autonomous Battery Electric Mower isn’t exactly for the front yard — while it’s considerably smaller than their mountainous tractors, these mowers are big enough to tackle large-scale commercial landscaping jobs. Thanks to its smaller footprint, the mower can operate for up to 10 hours on electric battery power, a good-sized daily shift for grass cutting.
The mower can map its surroundings and navigate using just four pairs of cameras. It’s a solid bet that these will be big on golf courses someday, although the obstacle detection will need to be on point to spot rogue golf balls left on the course!
Keeping almonds watered is a big job
Corn and soybeans dominate in the United States, but almonds aren’t too much further down the list. There are loads of large scale almond orchards, especially in the Central Valley of California, where they’re famous for needing a whole lot of water and a whole lot of herbicide.
John Deere has brought autonomy into orchards, too, but it turns out that orchards present a unique challenge. Because of the density of trees, GPS tends to be less accurate, so for their autonomous orchard tractors, John Deere uses Lidar in addition to a 360-degree camera array to help tractors see obstacles and keep track of the trees, so they can stay on the beaten path.
These tractors pull sprayers behind them, and they’re a big time saver for farmers. Spraying almond trees is a time-consuming job, and farmers have a chronically hard time hiring people to do it. Like it is with the autonomous tractors above, this is one of the rare times where automation replacing jobs isn’t as much of a concern — these jobs have mostly gone unfilled, and fall to the farmers themselves.
Building houses faster starts at the source
Granted, there are a lot of limiting factors when it comes to building housing, something many places in the country are badly short on. A lot of those roadblocks are government problems! Here’s one contractor problem, though — hauling stone and other building materials around quarries.
Before we even get into the autonomous features, John Deere’s autonomous articulated dump trucks help just by being massive — they are 34 feet long, 12 feet high, and hold a difficult-to-imagine 92,000 pounds of material. That’s big enough to move a house’s worth of stone, sand, and gravel in just three trips.
So, while the dump truck moving autonomously is certainly a time-saver, the biggest benefit might just be the size of the thing. It’s like when you resolve to take as few trips from the car to the house after grocery shopping, but on a little bit bigger of a scale.
Tackling labor shortages
While this level of autonomy usually brings with it the threat of job losses, John Deere is quick to point out this isn’t always the case in farming, landscaping, and construction. Labor shortages, especially for the most physically demanding of jobs, are common — John Deere cites surveys that indicate that upwards of 80% of firms in contracting and landscaping have a difficult time finding workers. If that’s true, John Deere is poised to fill an autonomous tractor-sized gap in labor needs for some of the most critical industries in the U.S. in the years to come.