COLUMBUS - John Deere revealed its autonomous tractor at the Consumer Electronics Show earlier this month.

Spectrum News 1 agriculture expert Andy Vance said farmers have used computer technology for decades. but this takes things to another level.

"It's really a huge step in an evolution that's been underway for 20, 30 years now," he said. 

"The idea here is that we've taken the technologies that have been underlying [agriculture] innovation for really 20 plus years now," Vance said. "Farmers have been able to use self-guided tractors where the GPS technology was maybe using what we call ‘autosteer’ to pilot the tractor in a straight line through the field as it's planting or harvesting a given crop, but the operator is still been in the cab of the tractor. There's still a farmer in the tractor, making turns at the end of the rows or otherwise supervising the operation.

"This next iteration is having truly autonomous tractors where the farmer is, you know, maybe out doing some other chore. They're in their pickup truck. They're back home at the homestead and the tractor is piloting itself through the field using not only GPS, but artificial intelligence, machine learning, an army of cameras, and other sensors to guide the machine through the field and do the entire task really start to finish planting other applications like fertilizer and herbicide applications."

Vance said it's likely that these pieces of equipment will be some of the most expensive on the market.

“You know, the cost of this is going to be astronomical and what that means is you're going to have the largest farmers at the top, the farmers who have large volumes of acres to cover, they're already doing a huge amount of production. Maybe they have, you know, they're in land that would lend itself really well to this," Vance said. "Some of the flatter pieces the countryside, you know, out in the high plains, but you're going to see that start at those levels, the larger, more well-established operations. I think there's definitely interest in this because, you know, you hear all the time how hard it is to find good help these days, right?

"The labor stories you and I have talked about in agriculture and inflation and so this will be a huge labor-saving opportunity for farmers. But there's definitely a cost there. And so my curiosity is to see what the trade-off is between the much higher cost of these machines and the rate of farmers who are willing to be early adopters to bear that cost of development."

John Deere said its autonomous tractor will be available later this year.