I would love an electric tractor and do use an electric buggy and bikes on my farm but in the article they mention replacing hydraulics with electric drives. I’m not claiming to be an expert on electric vehicles or hydraulic systems but that seems like a bigger issue than they are allowing for in the math
Yeah, that means all new farm equipment I would think. That’s cheap, right?
There’s not as much efficiency to be gained in tractors vs cars either. There’s no regen at the end of the field when cultivating. It’s just a steady application of say power to the soil, for hours on end, often with almost zero flexibility for timing (I mean charging). This article is a demonstration of the phrase “easier said than done”.
This guy has built a conversion though and it seems practical on a small farm. https://hackaday.com/2026/01/02/adding-solar-power-to-an-electric-tractor/
I could imagine swappable batteries being a thing in the setup. Farmers tend to have the equipment and the knowledge to do things like that. I don’t mean electrical engineering, but moving heavy shit around. And it doesn’t really matter if it looks like shit like in a car.
i don’t mean electrical engineering
You would be surprised.
I know some, and they’re talented. But I do also know some electrical engineers, so my standards are high.
Absolutely, and farmers wouldn’t do much actual engineering–but farmers are notoriously ingenuous when keeping their ancient and obsolete machines alive and useful. So, i figure that when necessary, they would have no problems rigging up complex electrical systems to meet their needs.
Also definitely not all farmers are highly intelligent, but many definitely are.Hey, mine know the electrical engineers as well, they don’t need to get funky themselves.
It’s a good application for swappable batteries. Then it becomes even more expensive, unfortunately. Farmers typically do have the mechanical knowledge for something like that, it would be just like mounting another implement. 1000kg of plates on the front of the tractor.
True on the expense, but I guess that could be manageable. And swapping batteries while at home taking a dump or going for lunch seems more feasible than taking hour long breaks every few hours.
I mean, diesel’s expensive too. Batteries already look tempting and I think they’re only going to look better as time goes on. The only real hurdle for me is the initial outlay for the new hardware.
Electricity: It’s What Plants Crave!
Look an a electric tractor actually makes a ton of sense. Even now the largest, heaviest duty vehicles are already electric.
But this write up relies on far too many hypotheticals, the number one being, how do you get the power from wherever it is, to the vehicles, while running in what amounts to continuous operation. For harvest and planting, a farm might be running it’s combines or tractors continuously for weeks on end. And those equipment often service multiple farms. Swappable batteries means you then have to have more equipment to shuttle batteries, and to swap them. If they are big enough to keep a tractor pulling a drill for 12 hours, they’re going to need heavy equipment to swap them.
On a small acreage, where it’s not in continuous operation, it would make total sense. But it sounds like a logistical nightmare for a combine.
I wonder if you would be able to design farm implements in a way where battery swaps are necessary but you have like a trailer type situation where there’s like 10 batteries you can pull to the field with your tractor and then when needing to “top up” you just drive to the trailer to swap out. Then over night all ten batteries get charged. Or throughout the day you have a second trailer charging another ten batteries for continuous 24h operation.
It would be a fair bit of upfront investment but farm implements always are, and you would save on all the fuel required and having to deliver and store it.
Not immediately viable, but much better for many applications: I’m imagining an agrovoltaic setup where the tractors use a pantograph to pull energy from an overhead line mounted off the solar panels. Effectively, it would be a trackless tractor-tram. Only a small battery would be needed for row end turnarounds and driving between fields. They already mostly drive themselves, so having the rows of panels to reference off of would actually simplify the navigation system substantially, and at that point you may as well add a pantograph and overhead line.
You could either run a power cable to the Tractor from the grid, you could run it on hydrogen you made from electrolysis on the farm, or you could rethink how you farm, maybe anything from several smaller tractors to something completely different although I don’t know what I would look like for common row crops
I’d be happy with an electric chore tractor the size of a 7230 or 6R.
I can’t see electric combines any time soon. The sheer amount of power they go through would make that untenable.
I think there would have to be battery swaps. at large enough scales, it might even make sense to have a separate smaller vehicle just for running batteries out to the large machines, though fields swaps would be tough to keep clean.
For smaller jobs though, I could see running the tractor for a few hours, heading back to the barn to swap out the battery pack(s), then heading back out after maybe 15 minutes of downtime. At the rate that batteries would need to be swapped out, I think it would make sense to have batteries on a forklift pallet that can be forked off the tractor and onto a charging cradle, then fork a fresh battery pack onto the tractor and head back out. or, there could be a specialized battery swapping deck that the vehicle drives over, which would be cool because the same batteries and swapping gear could be used for cars and trucks.
With autonomous tractors, they could theoretically detect when they need a swap and orchestrate the swap automatically, making them capable of running nearly continuously, 24 hours a day. It would be very complicated and I don’t doubt that early implementations would have their share of headaches, but that looks like where we’re heading from my perspective.
I’ve never been on a farm where you could get back and forth from a field to a barn in 15 minutes. Minimum viable acreage for hard red wheat is 6k acres plus in most areas of the US. Corn and soy are higher than that.
Also, quick charging these days is very good given an appropriate design, a tender vehicle utterly loaded down with batteries could pull up along side a combine, connect, and charge, all while not stopping operations. Instead of moving the batteries and just move the power. Then one tender could service multiple machines. It wouldn’t be all that different than how garin carts move in tandem with harvesting equipment currently.
Your op sounds… much bigger than mine lol. My place is less than a tenth of that. I could see running a battery car out to the equipment, then running that back to the barn to charge / swap batteries. I would love to build one but I don’t think it’s worth it at my scale.
My rough plan right now is to throw a big old motor in an old tractor chassis, and have a bunch of lead acid batteries on a pallet that sits on top of the engine compartment, and put a solar panel roof over all of it to charge in the field + keep the batteries (and me) out of direct sun. I should be able to drive into the barn, fork the battery onto a rack with a charge cable, fork a new pallet onto the tractor, plug everything in, and get back at it in about 15 minutes, but that’s 15 minutes from the time I drive into the barn to the time I leave the barn, it doesn’t account for transit time to and from the barn, but that’s only a few more minutes on a small farm.
That was from back in my time with USDA ars. That’s just the basic maths behind wheat operation. Most farmers can’t make it work unless they are farming huge averages simply because it’s how the math works out for winter wheat.
Interesting setup. Make sure to take pictures and share it. On farm innovation is where most of the fun stuff happens anyways
The only way it’s possible is if the farmer can rely on it for a full day’s work, and then charge it reliably over night for tomorrow with never needing to worry about it running out of power during the work. I’d say battery technology is pretty close, but I do really believe we’ll need solid state batteries for it to scale.
Many farms in the US already have 3-phase 480v service for other equipment like irrigation arms (although the portable ones use generators). It’s not unreasonable to assume that they could install level 2 or 3 chargers for EVs used on the property.
Yeah but tractors combines and harvesters operate in practically continuous operation during their associated phases. At least in big acreage crops like corn, soy, wheat, and rape.
Ok? The machines still need to be refueled at some point, it’s not like they run forever without stopping.
The battery needs to be sized appropriately for the application to minimize the frequency of charging breaks, just as the fuel tanks are sized to minimize refueling breaks.
Yeah but you don’t bring a combine back to the farm to refuel during harvest, you refuel it in the field.
And during harvest and planting, they kinda do run for ever. Harvest and planting are incredibly important times and you might only have a narrow window where the crop is ready to harvest and the weather permits harvesting. You can’t run harvester in heavy rain. If the seed moisture isn’t right you can’t harvest. In farming you work on the crops schedule at the crops time.
You might only have a few weeks to get a crop in before it dries out too much or molds in the field if it rains at the wrong time, or any number if other things that can happen.
Swappable batteries have already been proposed elsewhere in this thread, why wouldn’t that work for this?
Just the scale and the logistical complexity…
Good god they’re gonna rock down to
Electric Avenue
