John Deere autonomous tractor + See & Spray vs FD20 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.

FD20

FarmDroid (founded 2018 in Vejen, Denmark, by brothers Jens and Kristian Warming) makes the FD20, a solar-powered autonomous field robot that both sows and mechanically weeds row crops in a single machine. There is no consumer price: it is B2B agricultural equipment, not a product sold to consumers.

Lightweight at about 1,250 kilograms and powered by four solar panels with a roughly 1.6 kWh battery for 18-24 hours of operation, it uses 8-millimeter RTK-GPS to record the exact position of every seed at sowing, which lets it weed precisely between and within rows before the crop even emerges, herbicide-free. It has seen strong adoption in European organic farming and is at commercial maturity: by the company's own reporting it has sold more than 500 robots across 26 countries since first sales in 2019, on an independently corroborated growth curve, and it raised EUR 10.5 million in October 2024 to expand from organic into the conventional market.

Several verified-vs-claimed points: claims of being the world's best-selling robot in this niche are marketing and not asserted; the herbicide-free description applies to the base configuration (the optional +Spray module micro-doses chemicals); and the North American presence remains early-stage trials rather than commercial scale.