John Deere autonomous tractor + See & Spray vs MK-V in 2026

John Deere autonomous tractor + See & Spray

John Deere's autonomy spans the Autonomous 8R tractor (tillage, shown at CES 2022), a second generation shown at CES 2025 (Autonomous 9RX, the 5ML orchard tractor, a 460 P-Tier dump truck pilot, and a battery-electric mower), and the See & Spray targeted-herbicide system (from the Blue River acquisition), which Deere reports customers used across about five million acres in 2025. These are enterprise agricultural products sold to farms, not consumer goods, so there is no consumer price. The 8R autonomy is tillage-focused, not full-task farm autonomy, and the 9RX and 5ML are early rollout, not at-scale shipping.

MK-V

Monarch Tractor (founded 2018, Livermore, California; CEO Praveen Penmetsa) built the MK-V, a fully battery-electric, driver-optional smart tractor with a WingspanAI fleet-management and remote-supervision layer. There is no consumer price, and the company is discontinued. The MK-V did reach a genuine historical peak: it shipped to paying commercial customers starting December 2022 (the first being Constellation Brands, which took six tractors for its To Kalon vineyard), and Monarch raised more than $220 million anchored by a $133M Series C in July 2024 (recorded at commercial maturity historically).

But Monarch collapsed through 2025: its Foxconn manufacturing arrangement ended (the Ohio plant was sold to SoftBank in August 2025), with layoffs and a shutdown warning in November 2025, a pivot to roughly 70% licensing revenue, and finally an assignment for the benefit of creditors; its assets and IP (the software-defined vehicle platform and perception stack) were acquired by Caterpillar around April 14, 2026, in an asset-and-technology purchase, not a going-concern acquisition. On autonomy, marketing of a fully autonomous tractor overstated reality: full autonomy was confined to a narrow dairy feed-pushing use case, while general field work was driver-assist with an operator aboard, and an Idaho dealer sued in September 2025 alleging the tractors could not operate autonomously.

It is the wound-down anchor of the agriculture cohort.