New tractors from Canada and the United States are looking to help the planet and the bottom line with eco-friendly and cost saving electric, automated farm equipment. Monarch is a company from California that is making electric compact tractors with driverless capabilities, DOT is a Canadian alternative running on diesel fuel that has been extensively field tested.
Both innovations are looking to lower overall farm costs and save time with their automation. DOT has been used from 2019-2020 by a select group of farms for testing, the automated tractor was able to successfully plant and spray whole field without farmer intervention with their full-sized equipment. Monarch has just begun its launch on December 8th, 2020 the specifications it has been given are impressive, with real time soil, crop and weather data collection their compact tractor solution will improve small farming.
The costs for both projects are well within the costs of other high-performance compact tractors and will be commercially available. With new electric and automated machines slowly saturating the equipment market prices should stabilize and small farmers will be able to cut down emissions and costs as they switch to electric over the next 10-20 years.