Just an opinion...
On a recent episode of the Prairie Farm Podcast, Val Van Kooten, administrator at the State of Iowa Historical Society, was asked a question she probably doesn't get in most of her interviews. Nicolas wanted to know what she thought autonomous tractors would do to Midwest culture. Not the economics. Not the yield data. The culture. The thing people keep saying is slipping away.
Her answer was the opposite of the doom and gloom you usually hear.
"People thought when we got rid of horses that culture was going to disintegrate. And then when we went to bigger, great big tractors, culture was going to disintegrate. And then when farms got bigger and bigger, culture was going to disintegrate."
To a certain extent, she said, it probably has. But culture is not as fragile as people think, and the farmers she has read about through a century and a half of journals have a way of adapting that most of us underestimate.
Where the Technology Actually Is
Autonomous tractors are not science fiction anymore. John Deere introduced its first fully autonomous 8R tractor at the Consumer Electronics Show in 2022, and at CES 2025 the company revealed a new autonomy kit with 16 cameras arranged for 360 degree field vision. The new system can drive 40 percent faster than the first one, handle implements twice as wide, and retrofit onto 2020 and newer 8R and 8RX tractors as well as 2022 and newer 9R and 9RX models.
The company's stated goal is a fully autonomous corn and soybean farming system by 2030. And it is not just Deere. Case IH, AGCO, and a wave of startups are racing to put driverless machines in the field, most of them pitching the same core message: there are not enough people left to do the work.
The American Farm Bureau Federation estimates roughly 2.4 million farm jobs need to be filled across U.S. agriculture every year. According to the 2022 USDA Census of Agriculture, the average age of a U.S. farm producer is now 58.1 years, up from 57.5 in 2017 and continuing a longer aging trend. Farmers 65 and older increased 12 percent between the two censuses. When you line those numbers up, a tractor that runs itself through the night starts to look less like a gadget and more like a necessity.
The Historian's Take
Val's optimism was not naive. She has read more Iowa pioneer journals than almost anyone, and what she keeps seeing is that technology does not flatten culture, it redirects it. When tractors replaced horses in the 1920s and 30s, a lot of farmers hated it. The Wessels Living History Farm archive notes that in 1915, roughly 93 million acres of U.S. cropland were used just to grow feed for horses and mules. By 1960, that number had dropped to 4 million acres. A third of the harvest, gone from horse feed to cash crops. That shift reshaped small towns, diet, land use, and rural identity. And rural culture, somehow, is still here.
"If it works and it works well, it's going to free people up to invent and do a lot more things in agriculture," Val said. "They're gonna have the time to put into solving other agricultural problems, which is what I hope happens."
That is the part most ag tech coverage skips. The question is not whether the tractor can drive itself. The question is what the farmer does with the hours it gives back.
What Happens to the Time
Nicolas pushed back on the optimism a little. He told a story about a high school classmate who used to do his homework in the tractor because the tractor would drive for him. If the tractor can already drive itself, what is the human for?
Val's answer was that the culture that is worth preserving was never really about the machine. It was about what people did with the downtime the machine created. Farm kids in the 4-H and FFA tradition, neighbors getting together to boil maple syrup in March, families gathering around somebody's piano in the evening. The work is going to keep getting easier. Whether that creates a richer rural life or a lonelier one depends entirely on what people choose to fill the hours with.
"We can romanticize that and say I wish it was," she said, about the small farm neighborhoods of her 1970s childhood. "But it's not. And we have to be pragmatic and think, okay, then what are the positives of it? And how can we make that culture?"
Acres That Can Do More Than Grow Corn
Here is where autonomous equipment intersects with something farmers have been telling us for years at Hoksey Native Seeds. When a machine can handle the easy acres on its own, the marginal ones, the wet spots, the erodible hillsides, the awkward corners, suddenly have room to become something else. Prairie strips, pollinator plantings, and native grass pasture all become more realistic when the farmer is not trying to force a combine through ground that has fought back every year since 1975.
If autonomous tractors actually deliver on the promise of freed up time and attention, a lot of that attention could go toward the parts of the farm that have been neglected because nobody had the bandwidth to think about them. That is not a bad future. That might be the best version of what Val was describing.
If you have got some of those awkward acres on your operation and you are ready to think about them differently, reach out to Hoksey Native Seeds. Thirty years of Midwest native seed experience, and we can help you figure out what to put there.
