HANOVER, Germany (DTN) -- A wider release of John Deere's autonomous tillage system is coming, but don't expect in the near future for it to expand quickly beyond its current limited release.

That was one of the messages Deere Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer Jahmy Hindman passed along this week when he spoke at the Agritechnica machinery show in Hanover, Germany.

"This is a crawl-walk-run, for us, is the way I think about it," Hindman said. "We're in the middle of walking, I would say, in the North American market. We'll continue to increase the number of users. We've done that this fall, and we'll continue to do that this spring and this fall, as well."

The numbers of farms currently operating Deere's autonomous tillage system are so far small -- "it would round up to 100," Hindman said. But he said those farmers and Deere engineers are learning plenty of lessons as the tractors roll and as farmers adapt the technology to their operations.

For instance, farmers using the machines tend to set their field boundaries differently to get the tractor to attack its job working straight on to the wind, with it or against it, as opposed to going sideways through it as debris blowing in front of the tractor's camera system can be a problem when the machine is programmed to stop rather than drive over potential obstacles.

"If you look at farmers who have run it through multiple seasons, they're setting up boundaries differently because it works better going a certain direction. If the wind is a prevailing wind out of the west, sometimes guidance lines going some angle to the wind are helpful because you see stuff blow across the field, and you get stopped as a consequence," Hindman said. "Now that they've experienced it over multiple seasons, they're figuring out how to adapt their farms to autonomy, and it's changing how they farm to take full advantage."

So, when will the rollout become standard rather than limited? Think single-digit years, Hindman said. And less than nine.

"When is it going to be ready? That's a hard question to answer. We're in corn and soy. When's it going to be available for anyone? I'd say single-digit years ... low single-digit years," he said.

He said he's seeing farmers realize advantages both in the field and out of it.

"We went into this, and there was obviously a clear benefit from a labor cost prospective, but their quality-of-life component, especially for owner-operators in the upper Midwest with 3,000- to 5,000-acre farms, you're often the owner and the operator, and you look at the opportunity cost. The quality-of-life component is hard to put a number on, but it's definitely a factor."

Deere's been testing its autonomous solutions in the field for at least five years. The company first showed its driverless tractors off to the public at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January 2022.

It rolled out a revamped and upgraded version at that same trade show in January 2025. Agritechnica marked the largest European trade show in which the company showed off its newest autonomy set in Europe.

But it's not clear when that tech will cross the Atlantic. It could be longer for European farmers, especially Western European farmers who work in fields that stand to benefit less from the technology.

Hindman said autonomous tillage will be most at home in large, contiguous fields where farmers can leave the technology to run. As it still needs to be driven by a human between fields, frequent hops between smaller fields eat into the labor savings that are a driving force behind Deere's launch reasoning.

"That's one reason we started in North America. The value calculation for a grower in North America with large fields is a better value calculation than it would be for a European farmer right now," Hindman said. "The question of demand and difference between regions is nuanced. It's a function of how large are the farms? How easy is it for them to attract labor? It tends to not be a U.S.-Europe thing. It tends to be about regions, about how available is labor? It's different in the U.S. from state to state and different in Europe from country to country. The general trend, though, of more labor scarcity is a trend that is ubiquitous and is happening everywhere."

Joel Reichenberger can be reached at Joel.Reichenberger@dtn.com

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