Tractors Finally Get the Tesla Treatment

By Kyle Stock

Like most vintners, Wente sprays its grapes with fungicide in the spring. But its vines crawl around a dense patchwork of neighborhoods in Livermore, Calif., about 30 miles east of San Francisco Bay. If Wente crews dust the plants after 6 a.m. on a weekday, they run afoul of laws regulating air quality around schools and daycares. Dust before 6 a.m. and the phone starts ringing with calls from people who prefer a traditional alarm clock to the rumble of a diesel tractor.

“If harvest is the Super Bowl, fungicide season is the playoffs,” says Niki Wente, viticulture manager at the five-generation wine producer.

Next season, however, Wente hopes to be more simpatico with its neighbors thanks to two new electric machines from Monarch Tractor. The 12-foot long vehicles would start crawling the property at four a.m., with their battery-driven motors making about as much noise as a toaster. What’s more, the rigs would drive themselves, so Wente’s field hands can chaperone far from the cloud of fungicide, which tends to irritate skin and eyes.

“It’s really fitting the bill on a number of fronts in terms of making everybody’s lives better,” Wente says.

With their battery-driven motors, Monarch’s electric tractors make about as much noise as a toaster. Photographer: Cayce Clifford for Bloomberg Green

Electric vehicle technology has finally arrived in heavy machinery, thanks to battery breakthroughs, a small crop of startups like Monarch and investors hungry for the next new thing on wheels. The future of transportation is about to hit the Heartland.

The tractor market lives and dies on huge machines. Corn, wheat and soybeans comprise roughly half of U.S. farm revenue and those crops are best planted and picked by something called a combine harvester, which looks like a utility shed on wheels and carries a massive rake-like implement that can swallow up to 32 rows of corn at a time. A fully kitted combine fetches low seven figures these days and commercial farming operations seldom hang onto them for more than five seasons, lest they risk a breakdown in the 20 or so days a year that they are running almost nonstop. Climate change is forcing farmers to upgrade more frequently as volatile weather threatens already precious planting and harvesting windows.

The business model at a contemporary tractor company is essentially elephant-hunting. These 25-ton machines are to an outfit like Deere & Co. what jumbo jets are to Boeing or pickups are to Detroit; they largely carry the company. At CNH Industrial, a global conglomerate that makes big machines including tractors, last year roughly one in 10 revenue dollars — some $2.3 billion — came from combines.

“They’re all trying to expand their product offerings and introduce larger, higher horsepower equipment, because that’s where the money is being made,” says Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Chris Ciolino.

But while honking combines is where the big money is, the market is quickly moving downscale. Of the 305,000 tractorsbought in North America last year, some 68% were models with less than 40 horsepower, according to Deere. The big rigs, meanwhile, are fallow. The market for tractors over 100 horsepower peaked in 2013. Last year, Americans bought just 6,605 combines.

Tractors and other vehicles in the $292 billion global market for machinery equipment are playing an outsized part in climate change. In the U.S. alone, tractors burn 5.3 billion gallons of fuel a year, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, and agriculture accounts for 10% of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions — about one-third as much as the country’s planes, trains and automobiles. That, increasingly, is creating more incentive to throw R&D money at a small machine with fresh, perhaps fussy technology.

In a V-neck sweater and jeans, with a face mask pulled over his bicep, and Apple AirPods perched in his ears, Schwager hops on Facetime from the Monarch nerve center. Behind him a massive American flag hangs from the rafters and a crowd of workers carrying laptops swarm one of the company’s first complete machines. It looks, well, like a tractor. The controls are similar to those found on any similar-sized rig and it’s tooled to hook up to most farm implements, from trailers to plows.

“That’s very intentional,” Schwager says. “Farmers are familiar with tractors. We have to fit in the existing farm ecosystem.” The seat, however, is designed to be less than cushy, a subtle nudge to encourage the human to hop off and let the robots do the work.

The rig’s battery — packed into a block rather than a flat, Tesla-style skateboard — is carried up front, counter-balancing the weight of anything hitched to the rear. Monarch declined to disclose the size of its battery, but said it can power about 10 hours of average work, like spraying, or 5 hours of heavier tasks, such as plowing.

Monarch has a simple solution to the range-anxiety rife on roads; its machine is engineered to easily swap batteries. With two batteries and a relatively fast charger, Monarch says its rig can run 24/7. The vehicle also doubles as a giant rolling generator, a feature that Ford Motor Co. also is using as a major selling point for its all-new electric pickup.

Cameras on the sides feed a continuous stream of images that inform decisions on where and when to plant. Farmers call this ground truthing. Right now, it requires a hands-on approach and hours of bumpy pickup rides to far-flung corners of an ag empire.

The machine’s brains are wired into the roof, where algorithms process sensor data. When Wente sprays its grapes, for example, the roof of the tractor is steering the rig, aiming the nozzles and adjusting in real-time based on wind and weather.

The only visible hint of the rig’s high-tech guts is an iPad-sized screen bolted to the pillar of the cockpit. While a farmer can fiddle with the old-fashioned levers, a few taps on the touch-screen accomplishes the same tasks and more. Bumping through an orchard, the operator can order spare parts, tweak a charging schedule or decide which recent field photos to upload to shoppers cruising the produce section of a grocery store. “It’s eventually going to be a tool that allows farmers to tell their story,” Monarch cofounder and CEO Praveen Penmetsa explains, “and get more value for their crop.”

None of the tractor giants, including CNH and Deere & Company, has rolled out anything like the Monarch. The closest proxy was an electric concept unveiled by Deere on Youtube two years ago that was designed to run while plugged in — a giant spool was attached to the front of the machine to hold 1 kilometer of cable. “It physically had a cord on it,” Ciolino chuckles, “which just goes to show you how far away we still are.”

There is much more to farming than picking corn and wheat. Here are just some of the things people do with a tractor: mowing, discing, tilling, spraying, seeding, pruning, and bush hogging (it’s like clearing, but it sounds cooler). There’s a lot of hauling, of fence-posts or field-hands, you name it. Nearly all of these jobs are best done with a smaller, cheaper machine. “You find a bunch of these in every farm,” Penmetsa said. “It’s the Swiss Army knife of agriculture.”