Scouting the Autonomous Agricultural Machinery Market

The development and introduction of machines ranging from highly automated to driverless will have a strong impact on global agriculture - there is no doubt about this. Today, fully autonomous tractors or combine harvesters are no longer prototypes, but are already in use in preliminary stages. This inevitably raises the question of how fast and to what extent the new technologies will determine the market in the future.

To examine this question, Fraunhofer IESE in cooperation with the Kleffmann Group conducted this study, which deals with the state of the art as well as the future development of the autonomous agricultural machinery market. Several parallel paths were taken in the study: (1) The first task was to identify and classify the influencing factors related to the market. This is linked to the determination of changes in agricultural work processes within the framework of autonomous agricultural machinery development. (2) These influencing factors in combination with corresponding expert assessments as well as market data on tractor sales were then used within the framework of an empirical modeling approach to develop possible future scenarios up to the year 2045.