Tim Bucher, CEO and co-founder of agricultural technology company Agtonomy, says he created the prototype that would become the company’s first autonomous tractor to save his farm, but in doing so, he says he’s developed something that has a much broader appeal.
From Farmer to Engineer
Bucher’s background is unique. Raised a dairy farmer, he says he has always had a love of tractors, and he designed, fixed and repaired his family’s tractors. He says he always knew he wanted to be a farmer.
“I fell in love with the growing of grapes, because all of my friends were growing grapes in Sonoma County, Calif., and were mostly Italian immigrants,” he says. “I learned how to prune grapes probably by the age of 8. I learned how to make wine by the age of 10, and I bought my first vineyard at 16.”
He named his vineyard Trattore Farms, which means tractor in Italian and is a nod to his love of tractors. He also grows olives for olive oil processing. He studied agriculture at the University of California, Davis, and he says one computer course changed the trajectory of his future.
“I went in a farmer, and I came out a farmer and an engineer,” he says.
Bucher then went on to study computer science at Stanford University while still farming. He says he deployed various high-tech implements on his vineyard, from systems for automatic water recycling, computer-controlled fermentation tanks and more.
Bucher also has had a long career in the tech space, including executive roles at Apple, Microsoft and Dell.
“My engineering background and my farming background allowed me to do agtech for decades before the word agtech existed,” he says. “I can do anything from anywhere in the world, and it’s allowed me to be in Silicon Valley at the same time as well. There was one thing I hadn’t automated, though, and that was the field work.”
Bucher says things on Trattore Farms were good — until about seven to 10 years ago when he realized his farming expenses outpaced the growth of his farm’s revenue, which he called “farmageddon.”
“As I started to dig into it, I realized that the amount of money that I’m paying on labor is just going up and up and up,” he says. “Eighty percent of your labor force is needed preharvest and postharvest — whether it’s in the pruning activities, the mowing activities, the fertilizing, the plant cultivation or spraying. If labor is the biggest part of my expense and I’m going underwater here, and of that, if 80% is preharvest and postharvest work, why can’t I automate some of this?”
Idea to Prototype
Bucher says that with the massive amount of money put into researching self-driving cars, he saw potential for some of that knowledge to be deployed in agriculture. He named his first prototype Spirit after the NASA Mars rover.
“On the one hand, the technology for self-driving cars is much harder from a navigation standpoint, but on the other hand, the work that you’re doing in agriculture is much more difficult, because you’re not just navigating the vehicle from Point A to Point B,” he says. “You’re doing work along the way, and that work has to be correct.”
And it was after showing the prototype to a friend, who became a co-founder, that he realized he had created something with potential.
“I built this prototype with some friends and then showed it to my other colleagues from Silicon Valley, and said, ‘Look at what we built to save Trattore Farms. And one of my co-founders, Valerie, said, ‘This is not about saving Trattore. It’s about saving the world,’ and we started a company.”
Prototype to Fields
Bucher says one thing he realized early on is that, despite his love of tractors, he knew the solution he created would need to work with OEMs instead of creating a whole new tractor company.
“There is nobody in the world who would want to build a tractor company more than me, but the farmer hat in me said that would be the stupidest thing in the world to do,” he says. “Why? Because growers need those trusted brands. They need the dealer network. They need the parts and the service, right? This equipment is for the livelihood of the business. Trusting it to some fly-by-night startup, you’re not even going to get the traction.”
He says he also knew that equipment manufacturers need solutions that looked to the future. Instead of creating a retrofit kit, he saw the importance of embedding the autonomous technology in the vehicle itself for better performance and lower costs.
Agtonomy currently works with both Kubota and Bobcat to integrate the Agtonomy solution into its product line.
“That’s what we built Agtonomy for is, first and foremost, to help with the challenges that growers are having just getting the work done, not being able to get labor, or having labor that just costs too much, where they go out of business, but do it in a way that is not a paradigm shift,” he says. “It basically just falls in line with how they work today. They love the OEMs.”
Bucher says he also felt it was important the solution he created be something a grower could buy, instead of a farming service. He says he wanted to develop something that a grower could operate from a tablet or a smartphone.
“We want to enable somebody, anyone who doesn’t have any experience in tractor driving or equipment operation, to be able to manage an entire fleet of these super smart machines from the palm of their hand,” he says.
He adds that he also knew the autonomous tractors need to work in various environments, often in locations with little to no cellular service. All Agtonomy-enabled equipment comes with integrated cellular and Starlink connectivity. Bucher says the Agtonomy-enabled tractors’ software platform features advanced vision-based navigation.
“They can actually change their behavior based upon the situation that they find themselves in,” he says. “Software that has a great understanding of this great situational awareness to know, you know what needs to be cut, what needs to be sprayed, how much to apply, how to navigate, you know, very precisely through these high value crops, how to check on the work and how to do it all in the way that the growers are used to doing it, by keeping them in control.”
He says after several years of customer data, he says he’s seen some pretty significant fuel savings for customers operating Agtonomy-enabled tractors.
“What happens is, a human operating doesn’t always set the RPM exactly the same,” he says. “Every time the person doesn’t lift the implement at exactly the right time, every time drop it at exactly the right time, every time doesn’t actually optimize the routing, either. Well, computers can do that perfectly every single time. We have customers that are citing 20% to 30% in fuel savings, which is massive.”
The other thing he says he’s noticed is the change in how Agtonomy customers see the role of tractor driver evolving into a new type of operator.
“Ninety percent of our customers use existing operators and upskill them to manage the fleets, and they love it,” he says. “But then there are customers that can’t even get anyone, and what they’re doing now is, instead of advertising for tractor drivers, they’re advertising for agtech operators. And in the job description, one of the requirements is video game experience. Now, what automation is doing is bringing a new labor force into the picture and the technology now excites them. It’s Farmville for real, and that’s something that I’m really excited about.”
