John Deere is a grand old name in American agriculture. My grandfather farmed his 50 acres in field corn, popcorn, and soybeans with an ancient John Deere Model A. My father farmed with a bigger, newer John Deere tractor, and when he gave up farming, he went to work for John Deere at the enormous Waterloo, Iowa, tractor works.

I feel a strange loyalty to the company. In our rural Susitna Valley homestead, there are a few chores that require a mid-sized utility tractor, such as mowing, spreading gravel, moving snow, and so on. For that, we have a John Deere 1023E, parked in the machine shed even as I write this. It's a handy little thing, and its small diesel engine has all the power I need for what I ask it to do.

All of those tractors had something in common: They required a person to operate them. But now John Deere is working out the details on an autonomous agricultural tractor, and those details are interesting - and, perhaps, concerning.

John Deere is turning to artificial intelligence to help farmers address labor shortages and enable them to handle other tasks associated with their business.

"Think about every step a farmer does for corn and soybeans – whether that's tillage, planting, spraying and harvesting," Deere CFO Josh Jepsen said during an interview on "The Claman Countdown." "We will make all of those autonomous here over really probably the balance of the decade."

The U.S. is the second-leading soybean producer and exporter in the world. Meanwhile, corn accounts for more than 95% of the total feed grain production and use in the country, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Advances in technology have always resulted in a smaller proportion of the populace engaged in agriculture. When my grandfather was a young man and took over the Baty family century farm from his father, his operation was pretty typical of a Great War-era farm: 50 acres, worked with horses. That wouldn't be enough land for a hobby farm today, but back then, that was the American agricultural mainstream.

A lot has changed since then, and the latest, it seems, will be robot tractors.

The company announced in January the creation of new autonomous tractors, an autonomous dump truck and an autonomous electric mower. The machines use computer vision, cameras and AI to navigate their environments, according to a press release from John Deere.

"What we’ve found is, by bringing autonomy to tractors and tillage… it creates opportunities," Jepsen said. "[Customers] can be at home, they can be with their family, they can be at high school football games, or they can do other more value-added jobs on the farm."

Personally, I wouldn't feel comfortable being off at a high school football game while the robot tractor was tilling my acres; I'd want to stick around and keep an eye on the thing, even if I did it with binoculars from the back porch. But automation seems to be the coming thing in agriculture.

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If this works, and it might, it will continue a long trend in American agriculture. That would be the reduction of the population involved in agriculture, both as a percentage of the population and in absolute terms.

From 1920 until 1970, the workforce of the United States grew from approximately 27 million people to 79 million people. Despite this growth, the share of the workforce employed in agriculture fell, dropping from around 11 to 3.5 million people. In 1920, there were approximately three nonagricultural workers in the U.S. for every two agricultural workers; by 1970, this ratio had shifted to roughly 22 to one. Employment in nonagricultural sectors grew in most years, yet there were regular declines that coincided with recessions or war; the largest dip came during the Great Depression in the early-1930s. Agricultural employment peaked at 11.5 million in 1907, but went into decline thereafter, with the sharpest fall coming after the Second World War.                                

That trend has continued, and this latest development in automation and artificial intelligence may super-charge it.

Still, maybe it's just me, but it seems that there could be a problem with all this, that being that machines have no connection to the land. Perhaps I'm romanticizing it a bit, but I remember being very young and, in springtime, before planting, watching my grandfather kneeling in the field, running the soil through his hands, judging by his own experience and his own knowledge of his sandy patch of Linn County soil what would grow best that year. I remember my Dad grinning at me as he climbed on his horse, Goldie, to move cattle from a field he knew was growing too wet because the river was up, to move them to a drier pasture. He always insisted that the best way to move cattle was on horseback, and having seen it done, I can't argue with that.

No robot, no artificial intelligence, can replace this kind of personal knowledge of land and crops.

Still, there's a place for this kind of technology. It makes each farmer, each farm, more efficient, and efficiency makes produce cheaper and more widely available. While farming will always require farmers, with that essential human understanding of their land, their crops, and their stock, John Deere may nevertheless be on to something. It's a valuable tool - just a tool, but a valuable one.

After all: Nothing runs like a Deere.

Editor's Note: President Trump is leading America into the "Golden Age" as Democrats try desperately to stop it.

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