Picture this: You’re driving through farmland in Chouteau County on a beautiful day. You pass a sign that says “Yirsa Farms” and glance past the fence where you see something that makes you do a double take.
There’s a tractor there, seeding the land. But no one is driving the tractor. No, your eyes are not deceiving you. But miles away from the comfort of his garage, Justin Yirsa knows exactly what you’re thinking.
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"I think most people think I'm crazy,” he said. “It's not something you see every day for sure.”
Once the initial shock passes, your next thought is undoubtedly, why? That’s when it starts to sound less crazy.
“It's a business decision, not just a fun project,” Yirsa explains.
Yirsa and five generations of his family have raised wheat on Yirsa Farms just outside of Big Sandy for more than 100 years. His operation was at capacity and he was looking at ways to expand. But he wanted to spend money on land, not equipment.
“The issue is we were at full capacity on our seeding equipment,” Yirsa said. "And so what's the next step? Traditionally, you have to hire another person and add another million dollar equipment set up. But then you're way over capacity. So I thought, well what can we do to incrementally increase.”
The answer was adding smaller, less expensive equipment. But who wants to sit on a small tractor all day?
"And so I thought, well what's out there for autonomous tractors?” he said.
After some research Y,irsa discovered Sabanto, a company that operates out of Illinois and Iowa that specializes in autonomous agriculture. Their initial conversation came in January. They were keen to help Justin find solutons and assembled a development team that made the trip to Montana, which included Chief Operations Officer Cory Spaetti.
“Fast forward to March and April. We came out and worked on some capabilities that were special for Justin,” Spaetti said. "And we've been here ever since. And over the past couple of weeks, we've seeded close to 650 acres.”
And that’s how Yirsa Farms became home to what Yirsa and Spaetti believe is the first known privately owned autonomous tractor in Montana.
"Day one, we had people stopping on the highway,” Yirsa laughed. “Turning around and videoing. Day one.”
It’s a John Deere model, retrofitted with cutting autonomous technology from Sabanto. Its movements are programmed and controlled remotely from a cell phone or computer.
The seeder still has to be filled by hand every six hours or so, but once it starts, Yirsa can focus on other tasks, while the tractor does its job.
“We don't need to be there. No one's there right now, and it's running fine,” Yirsa said. "You can watch it on your phone or your desktop and you can go home, have dinner with the family. You don't need to sit out there till the middle of the night to get stuff done.”
Yirsa claims going autonomous has saved him nearly $2 million on labor and equipment. Time will tell if this is the future of farming, but for Yirsa, it’s already paying off.
"I don't have any regrets at this time. It's working,” Yirsa said. "And the first stuff that we seeded is already out of the ground, so that's all you can ask for at this stage.”
