Good morning, growers!

A Gippsland potato and onion farm has ordered what coverage is calling the southern hemisphere’s first AgXeed T2 7-Series autonomous tractor. The tech takeover is starting to make its way into Aussie paddocks. However, if autonomy is going to stick in our own backyard, try-before-you-buy feels like the way to go.

Cummaudo Farms at Mirboo North are behind that AgXeed T2 7-Series order. Delivery later in 2026. Coles Nurture Fund put in A$500,000. Not the full cost, the family says, but that seems like quite a chunk. They already ran a smaller T2 5-Series in Nov 2025 on rip, hoe and bedform: about 300 hours, roughly 200 hectares, gradients up to 1:3. Aim is less fatigue on the boring prep work, not wiping out jobs. Fair enough. We’ve all watched good operators get chewed up by the same paddock runs.

Bayer and Polybee are bringing Polybee’s Farm Intelligence Platform to Aussie veg growers. Autonomous drones and AI for harvest forecasts, cutting schedules, planting plans, and NIR disease scanning. Starts with spinach and broccoli with the timing still TBA. Companies say no new machinery or major workflow changes. That’s their claim, not ours.

Up north, SkyKelpie has moved its livestock mustering algorithms out of the simulator and into Queensland paddocks, working with MLA and QLD DPI. Founder Luke Chaplain frames it as grazier-in-the-loop help, not a full replacement. The company says customers already manage more than 600,000 head nationally. Not too shabby! Still, mustering kit that has to work on cattle out in the paddock is the right kind of hard.

U.S. Sugar’s autonomous John Deere fleet is the big overseas watch. Four 8Rs and one 9R with ASI kits. One operator can oversee multiple machines on cane land prep and cultivation, up to 24/7. They call it the biggest commercial autonomous tractor setup in American sugar. An 18-month pilot came first. The ~255,000-acre talk is a decade plan, not done-and-dusted. No Aussie availability as yet.

Denmark’s FarmDroid FD60 launched 1 Sep 2026. Wider autonomous robot that seeds, then mechanically weeds using RTK seed coordinates. No cameras for the weeding step. Up to about 6.75 m wide and up to 20 rows. Company figures talk ~60 ha a season and up to ~18 ha a day. Orders open, deliveries from Jan 2027. Vendor numbers, so likely optimistic, but less spray means less coin spent, which we are all about.

John Deere’s next-gen perception kit puts 16 roof cameras on select 8R/9R tractors for autonomous tillage, managed through Operations Center Mobile. Retrofit path for newer machines, some MY2025 units autonomy-ready from the factory. This is tillage autonomy. Keep an eye on it if you’re already in the Deere stack.

Self driving tractors are here! Think rip, hoe, bedform and other straight-line jobs, while you get on with the day.

The Up Side: Those jobs eat hours and burn good operators out. Autonomy keeps the machine on the line so labour goes to work that actually needs a human.

The Down Side: Mud, slopes and a bad path still win, autonomy does not invent traction. Until farms start publishing hard numbers, it’s not proven beyond good in theory.

Can spray drones earn their place on Australian farms?

When the boom cannot get in and the plane is booked, spray drones start looking sensible. Worth a look at what they are, where they fit, what AI mapping is changing, and the CASA, label and weather caveats that still matter.

Read it here: https://sprayflyr.substack.com/p/can-spray-drones-earn-their-place

Out the Back / Sprayflyr