All Farm Equipment Including Tractors And Combines Will Be Electric

As we electrify everything all at once to address global warming, a big question that arises is about vehicles that don’t run on roads near cities. What will we do with them?

In this series on the big subset of everything that is transportation, we’ve already looked at cars, buses, trucking and railroads. The reasons why they will all be battery electric or tied directly to overhead wires, fully powered by decarbonized electricity, are laid out there. There’s no room for hydrogen, synthetic fuels or biofuels for anything that runs on pavement or rails. But what about off of the paved road?

Let’s first categorize farm equipment a bit. It’s more sophisticated than you’d think. For this purpose it’s worth thinking about stationary equipment, light utility vehicles, airborne vehicles or services and heavy farming equipment.

For stationary equipment, whether it milks cows or smokes peppers, that’s all trivial to plug into electricity, and increasingly it already is. Just like the big cranes in ports, if it doesn’t move around, it gets plugged in. Anything that’s currently burning propane will burn electrons in the future, and be more efficient, quieter and less polluting in the process.

Light utility vehicles include pickups — although the top end of that category is anything but light —, vans, powered carts and all terrain vehicles of various types. These are already electrifying rapidly, with adequate battery powered options for every type of vehicle and more arriving from manufacturers daily. The same economics that are driving cars and pickups that spend their time on the roads apply. Battery electric vehicles are simpler, a lot cheaper to operate, quiet and have amazing torque.

This article is led by an image of a farm worker operating a spray drone for a reason. The entire world of using crop dusters and tractors to apply fertilizer, fungicides, pesticides and herbicides is being disrupted, as is the use of helicopters or airplanes for crop surveys and information gathering.

Right now, approaching 100% of American farms already use drones to gather information on crop health during the season. It used to be a that a subset of farms could afford aerial overflights by fixed wind or helicopter crop survey services. Now all farms can afford cheap aerial drones, either fixed wing or quadcopters, from major manufacturers like DJI, AgriExpo, and eBee AG.

That information flows into services like Pix4D which stitch it together to create analytics for farmers which tell them which bits of their fields need which products in order to thrive.

In turn, the crop analytics are increasingly used to provide massive spray drones from firms like Hylio, John Deere and DJI again with the information that they require to fly over the fields and apply exactly the amount of product required at specific spots. These drones are 14 feet across and can carry and apply a couple of hundred pounds of products at a time.

A couple of Hylio’s biggest drones, the AG-272, can apply as much product in a day as a $700,000 top end John Deere tractor, but cost only $200,000 with trailer and support gear and run on dirt cheap electricity. And they can be fixed at the side of the field. They are incredibly simple devices with few moving parts, and servicing them is trivial for farmers. That’s no longer true for tractors and combines.

The spray drones aren’t replacing ploughing, harvesting or the big fertilizer spreading at the end of harvest, but they are increasingly replacing everything else. And that includes the fixed wing aircraft and helicopters that were providing crop dusting services. Many of those firms now operate spray drone services instead and don’t have pilots risking their lives trying to dodge wires and poles around fields.

Spray drones, due to their precision and the physics of their prop wash pushing product down into the plants, reduce product application amounts by 30% to 50% for the same crop yields. Further, like crop dusters, they aren’t driving heavy vehicles across farm fields, so soil compaction isn’t nearly as big a problem. One study found soil compaction costs 9% to 55% yield losses, so avoiding it is a big deal and a key justification for the expense of crop dusters.

What about seeding? Well, as with product application, seeding is increasingly done with seeding drones that put seeds precisely where they should be with equal spacing and no soil compaction.

These aerial surveillance, spraying and seeding drones sip at electricity instead of gulping diesel. They launch from the roads that run through and around farms, fly out over the fields and return for reloading and battery swapping. Most of the weight flying around is of the product, not the equipment, while the reverse is true for tractors and the like.

Farmers are buying spraying drones because they save them money coming and going. The rest of us like them because they are decarbonizing farming and reducing agricultural products ending up in our water ways. Win, win, win.

But you can’t harvest crops with a quadcopter. And you can’t spread tons of fertilizer across massive fields before planting. However, fields are flat, speeds are low and torque is king. Those are the conditions battery electric vehicles shine. The flat torque curve for electricity flowing into electric motors from zero RPM is what allows a Tesla Model S Plaid to hit 60 miles per hour in just under two seconds, and allows a Tesla Semi to accelerate up hills with it’s fully loaded 80,000 pound gross vehicle weight.

On roads, heavy farm equipment has a standard top speed of 25 miles per hour. When being used in fields they are moving a lot more slowly. Smaller electric tractors are already available from multiple vendors. John Deere is committed to offering electric options for all of its smaller tractors by 2026.

That’s with today’s battery energy densities. As the series has made clear, battery energy densities that are double what Teslas currently use are commercially available from Chinese EV battery giant CATL today. Further, silicon battery chemistries with a potential energy capacity five times that of CATL’s new battery are commercializing in 2023. There are multiple vendors and groups which have demonstrated the technical breakthroughs for them. As a reminder, silicon is cheap and ubiquitous.

A Tesla Semi in 2035 could have a range of 5,000 miles on a single charge, well over double the longest range semi diesel truck operating today. When those battery energy densities are considered against farm equipment that travels a few dozen miles in a day, it’s clear that there will be sufficient battery power for big tractors and combines by 2040 as well.

And anything which can electrify, will electrify. The value propositions for battery electric vehicles are just too great. Electric drive trains are radically simpler than modern tractors making maintenance cheaper and easier. Electricity flowing through batteries and electric motors is radically more efficient than diesel being delivered to farms, put into tanks and burned in diesel engines with well-to-wheel efficiencies of around 20%.

Tractors will be used a lot less on the farm of the future as more of their roles are taken over by spray and seed drones. Combines will run as often. But both will have big batteries that can be charged over night and run all day. And they’ll be a lot quieter too, something the neighbors will appreciate.