Russell Maichel has worked orchards for 34 years in Northern California, tending to olive, prune and almond trees on 3,500 acres in the Woodland vicinity. He knows the 24x7 life of a farmer, full of12 hour days and the constant struggle to find capable labor help.
The work never ends. Trees 30 feet high need more attention that grain crops, with up to 12 sprayings throughout the growing season. That work is done with air blast sprayers on 500- gallon chemical tank pulled behind a special tractor equipped to lift low-lying branches.
Maichel has driven those orchard tractors through the years and knows the work. He can’t nearly do it all himself and has faced the problem of finding help, and then making sure the help can handle the work. With air blast sprayings, the tractor driver is often exposed to spray chemicals and needs to wear protective clothing similar to a hazmat suit. The work is often done at night to take advantage of cooler temperatures that work better with chemicals being sprayed.
Enter the self-driving tractor. Maichel started working with John Deere engineers two years ago to evaluate the design of the autonomous orchard tractor, which is equipped with sensors and Nvidia GPUs to find their way around rows and avoid obstacles.
At CES 2025, John Deere introduced that orchard tractor model that is partly the result of Maichel’s input, alongside other autonomous machines for mining and commercial grass mowing, including an electric version of the orchard version. The company took advantage of learnings from its first autonomous tractor, introduced at CES in 2022, a larger model that is designed to pull enormous implements for tending and harvesting grain crops. The autonomous 5ML orchard tractor for spraying operations has an added lidar sensor to work effectively in a dense orchard canopy.
The orchard model appears to have more agility for sharp turns and other maneuvers, but Maichel is mostly impressed by the driverless feature. “I’ve run all night long,” he said in an interview on the expo floor at CES. “As we progress with this tractor, it will help me with labor. And with the safety part, we don’t have to deal with it. With the labor force as it is, there’s no shift change. I struggle with finding qualified employees.”
In addition to farming 3,500 acres, he also serves as a consultant to other farms totaling 14,000 acres. His interactions with other farmers have given him plenty of time to gauge their interest in autonomous tractors. From his experience, the autonomous tractor is a home run and he said other farmers seem “curious” to try it out.
Maichel, however, has not tested the electric model of the authomous orchard tractor and wonders how long its battery will last and how often it will need to be recharged. The electric vehicle could be a “good push for farmers” but he wonders “If it can last an entire shift” on a single charge to cover 200 acres of spraying. Also, he would want to know how it performs around the terrain of an orchard and if it can be adapted for different jobs, including mowing.
Autonomous tractors will be expensive, hundreds of thousands of dollars apiece, although Deere has worked up a design for a kit that can be used to adapt existing tractors. Maichel said the issue of cost hasn’t been the biggest concern voiced by farmers he knows. “It’s not cost [they care about] it’s efficacy,”
In other words, will an autonomous tractor work reliably and consistently long term, a concern he shares with others in the world of autonomous industrial machines.