Show me a farmer, said Mike Burdick, vice president of Sabanto, an autonomous tractor startup in Itasca, Illinois, and I’ll show you someone who has a million things he or she just doesn’t have time to do in the course of their workday. He’ll also show you a farmer who wouldn’t mind having their tractor ghost-ride across their fields as they take care of the endless work of being a modern farmer.
That’s one of the central observations that has driven the growth of Sabanto’s autonomous tech. It’s a rig that can be attached to just about any existing tractor to help it mow, seed, weed, and perform any number of time-intensive tasks, all on its own, for a sector desperate for more labor.
The startup launched in 2018, with Craig Rupp, the founder and a serial entrepreneur who grew up on a farm in northwest Iowa, seeking to find a solution to the labor shortage impacting American farmers. Challenges with recruiting workers, rural population loss, and immigration and guest visa snafus have left the agricultural sector desperate for help. The president of the nation’s Farm Bureau said in April that the labor shortage is “holding agriculture back, and threatening the future of our American-grown food supply.”
Rupp, who had spent time at Motorola and Monsanto, started by building his own model. He spent a winter writing the hardware and software to automate a heavy-duty tractor—a multiton model that’s more than 15 feet tall—then earned his own commercial trucking license so he could load and haul that prototype around the country, do demos, and ask farmers for feedback. After touring and learning what his customer base wanted, he eventually developed a model that helped him raise a $2 million seed round in 2019, allowing him to hire engineers.
Rupp and that engineering team began working on going beyond his original prototype, and in 2021, Sabanto arrived at a working model of agricultural tech that could upgrade standard tractors into autonomous ones. The company then began selling retrofit kits to individual farmers. Sabanto currently employs about 50 people and has 300 units in operation in the United States and Australia.
The tech is similar to the LiDAR remote-sensing systems in Waymo and other autonomous cars. There isn’t much traffic in a wheat field or rows of corn, so the tractor rig isn’t designed with the kind of 360-degree awareness of pedestrians needed by cars cruising down urban roadways. Unlike Waymos, however, which don’t even open their own doors, Sabanto systems can perform choreographed manipulation of all kinds of levers and gears that make farm equipment till, aerate, mow, spray, and seed.
“This takes a bare-bones tractor and elevates it to the most technical tractor in the industry today,” said Burdick. “It probably quadruples output and capability.”
Each rig consists of a main control unit that hooks into the drive system and controls existing steering wheel and pedals, and a crown-like vision and navigation system consisting of cameras and LiDAR sensors placed on the top of the tractor. The current iteration can fit a variety of makes and models, including John Deere, and takes a day or two to set up and calibrate. The system costs about $75,000 up front, with a $10,000 yearly fee, regardless of the tractor or how many miles it covers.
That may seem pricey, but new tractor prices can approach $1 million apiece. Since Sabanto can help give older machines a second life, Burdick argues it’s a massive savings in capital spending for small farmers. A case study done with Yirsa Farms in Montana found the Sabanto system saved roughly $12.71 an acre when seeding. And even better for time-strapped farmers, Sabanto-aided tractors can roll anytime of the day.
Sabanto has found particular pickup in the sod farming industry, which requires farmers to mow endless fields of grass, a monotonous task that turns out to be perfect for an autonomous tractor. But it’s also being used across different types of farms due to its flexibility and adaptability.
Burdick said the firm has operated on 50,000 acres of farmland in total, giving it additional data to fine-tune its operations. And it’s attracting more investor interest. Earlier this year, Sabanto raised a Series B round led by the innovation investment arm of Bayer, the biotech and pharma company, for an undisclosed sum. Burdick said it’ll be enough for Sabanto to add hundreds of new customers every year for the foreseeable future, saving countless hours for overworked ag workers.
“There are 100 things a farmer would get to if they could,” said Burdick. “And for every one, I can find a farmer’s husband or wife who says they just got a massive improvement in quality of life because their spouse can spend more time at home.”