Now a growing field of companies is offering autonomous retrofit kits – with hardware and software that can convert an existing tractor into a self-driving one, without the cost of buying an entirely new autonomous machine.
According to several industry figures, the market for autonomous retrofit kits is shifting from a niche into a genuine commercial category. Craig Rupp, CEO and founder of Sabanto, describes a market in transition. “The market for agricultural autonomy is transitioning from an emerging technology category to a practical productivity solution driven by labour shortages, rising equipment costs, and increasing pressure on farm profitability”, he says.
He points to specialty crops as the early proving ground, where repetitive operations and labour constraints made the return on investment obvious well before broad-acre agriculture caught up. That’s changing, in Rupp’s view. “Over the next decade, I expect autonomy to expand into broad-acre agriculture, particularly in seeding, planting and spraying applications, as farmers become more comfortable with the technology and proven business cases accumulate.”
Rupp emphasises the most significant shift will be from purchasing ever-larger equipment to deploying smaller, more efficient autonomous machines that can operate for longer hours without being constrained by operator availability. Framed that way, autonomy stops being a one-off technology purchase and becomes something closer to a new operating model – one Rupp argues improves productivity, reduces capital expenditure requirements, and helps address chronic labour shortages.
Smaller equipment
That thesis recently found financial backing. On July 14, Sabanto announced an oversubscribed Series B funding round led by Leaps by Bayer, with participation from Sustainable Forward Capital, InnoVenture Iowa, Fulcrum Global Capital, DCVC and Yara. The funding is earmarked for expanding Sabanto’s dealer network, ramping up retrofit kit production, continuing software development, and accelerating adoption in the row crop market.
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“We believe the workhorse of the future is smaller equipment”, says Rupp. “Our retrofit approach allows farmers to shift labour toward higher-value tasks, increase operating hours, and ultimately focus on growing their business and their bottom line. We’re seeing too many farms fold under economic pressure and our solution levels the playing field.”
For Leaps by Bayer, the case is as much about capital efficiency as about the underlying technology. “Farmers today need solutions that improve efficiency without requiring massive capital expenditures”, says Paimun Amini, the firm’s VP of Agriculture Venture Investments. The funding round lands as Sabanto extends its platform into new territory – the company recently added planting capability, and has integrated with Precision Planting and DICKEY-john monitoring systems, aiming for compatibility with the precision agriculture tools growers already use.
A gap the big manufacturers have left open
In Europe, a similar dynamic is playing out. Arjan Mulder, Chief Commercial Officer at Dutch company AgXeed, believes the demand for autonomous solutions is rising sharply, but factory-built autonomous machines remain rare. ‘In Western Europe there is hardly anything available for the market that is factory-fitted’, says Mulder. “But farmers can of course use their existing tractors and simply get to work autonomously with a retrofit system.”
AgXeed developed the VCU (Vehicle Control Unit), a retrofit kit that converts tractors equipped with TIM (Tractor Implement Management) into level-2 autonomous vehicles. Mulder says the kit appeals particularly to larger operations that rely on external labour. “These businesses often employ a lot of Romanian workers”, he explains. “And they simply want to be certain that the vehicle in the field does exactly what the business owner or farm manager wants.”
Mulder identifies two forces driving demand for retrofit autonomy in Europe right now: a growing shortage of labour, and the increasing use of mechanical weed control. “We see, broadly speaking, that available labour is simply becoming a problem worldwide. Also for the quality of available labour for various tasks.”
AgXeed currently has a machine running in Germany that averages 160 hours a week. “If you want to do that with drivers, that becomes difficult.” Farmers, Mulder adds, increasingly report that they can no longer retain staff.
AgXeed works closely with Claas, currently the only major tractor manufacturer offering a factory-fitted VCU solution: the Claas Axion 900 and Xerion 12 come equipped with the VCU from the factory, visible in the Claas terminal. Mulder expects other manufacturers to follow. He envisions farms eventually running a mix of vehicles: conventional tractors for transport and similar tasks, tractors that drive autonomously, and dedicated agbots.
A shrinking labour force, a large existing fleet
Niels van Vilsteren, founder of Dutch company Nivavi, sees the autonomous tractor as now within reach for many farmers, since it no longer requires buying an entirely new machine. He points to the scale of the opportunity: roughly 140,000 tractors are sold annually in Europe for agriculture alone, while Eurostat figures suggest Europe will have 80 percent fewer farmers within twenty years. That combination – a large existing fleet of machines and a shrinking workforce – creates, in his view, a structural need for labour-saving technology.
Van Vilsteren also notes that the major tractor manufacturers have largely left this specific market open. “The tractor manufacturers themselves are not coming up with these solutions. That’s why we want to add autonomy to the existing, already optimised technology.” Nivavi is bringing its own system, Bart, to market first in the Netherlands, where regulation for autonomous agricultural vehicles is further along – though the company’s ambitions extend beyond Dutch borders.
Support and skills remain a hurdle
Jay Katupitiya of ThornTek expects retrofit units to find a lasting market simply on cost grounds. “I am certain that retrofit units will have a market as time goes on, for the simple reason that it is much cheaper to retrofit an existing machine”, he says. “Therefore, the retrofittable market will obviously be targeting the existing machine owners.”
But he cautions that affordability alone won’t determine how well the category succeeds. “These retrofitted machines may be autonomous, but to get them operational and attending to the configuration, and programming and maintenance work associated with them is not a farmer’s job”, he says. “Such products will need a lot of support from the manufacturers of the retrofittable units, and the development of the market remains to be seen by way of how acceptable this sort of arrangement is for farmers who may not have the required level of skills, knowledge and experience to deal with the retrofittable units.”
Not one market, but several layers
Mark Chen, Director of Digital Media at Tersus GNSS, argues the retrofit category shouldn’t be viewed as a single market at all, but as several distinct layers developing at different speeds. The first, and currently the largest, is automatic steering and precision guidance retrofit – centimetre-level guidance, field boundaries and basic operation-data workflows.
The second layer, supervised autonomy or driverless retrofit for specific tasks, is already moving from concept to early commercialisation in Europe and North America, Chen says, covering vehicle control, task planning, perception sensors, safety monitoring, and remote supervision for tasks such as tillage, spraying, orchard and vineyard work, and grain cart support.
The third layer, Chen argues, is less about the vehicle itself and more about how it fits into a farm’s existing operations. “Users will not only ask whether the vehicle can drive automatically. They will also ask whether the system can fit into their existing operational workflow”, he says, pointing to ISOBUS compatibility, Task Controllers, FMIS/FMS platforms and cross-brand data exchange as increasingly decisive factors – particularly in Europe, where farms and contractors often run mixed fleets and multiple software platforms.
Taken together, the picture that emerges is of a market being pulled forward from several directions at once: labour shortages and rising equipment costs on one side, a large installed base of existing machinery on the other, and investors now willing to back the retrofit approach at scale.
