What's Your Problem? Building a Self-Driving Tractor to Change the Future of Food
Dec 18, 2025
Tim Bucher, a farmer-turned-entrepreneur and the visionary behind Agtonomy, shares his journey in creating autonomous electric tractors for specialty crops. He highlights the challenges of automating farming tasks, particularly with permanent crops like grapes and olives. The discussion covers innovative technologies like 'trunk vision' to enhance automation capabilities. Tim also reveals his strategic pivot to focus on autonomy software for established manufacturers and shares insights on how automation could revolutionize the farming landscape.
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Permanent Crops Need Trunk-Level Precision
- Permanent crops require much higher positional precision because trunks are expensive and must not be struck.
- GPS alone is insufficient; autonomy must perceive and align to the plant structure within inches.
Exploit Crop Structure For Perception
- Agtonomy exploited a common feature across permanent crops: trunks, and trained 'trunk vision' detectors.
- Trunk detection generalized well across crops like grapes and olives, accelerating deployment.
Mowing Taught Crucial Feedback Lessons
- Agtonomy's first real task was mowing cover crops, which revealed the need for implement feedback and adaptive speed control.
- Engineers learned to replicate human operator feedback loops to avoid bogging and ensure proper cut quality.