Friday, February 4, 2022
CapitalPress.com 7
What John Deere’s new driverless tractor means for farmers
By SIERRA DAWN McCLAIN
Capital Press
MOLINE, Ill. — Equip-
ment manufacturing giant
Deere & Co. announced
in January the upcoming
release of its fully auton-
omous diesel tractor — a
piece of equipment which,
like a self-driving Tesla car,
can operate without a driver.
The machine combines an
8R tractor, TruSet-enabled
chisel plow and GPS guid-
ance system.
“All of us here at John
Deere
are
incredibly
excited,” said Chad Passman,
a Deere spokesman. “We
brought it to market because
our customers were telling us
that they were ready and that
the value was there.”
Deere’s staff say farm-
ers have been asking for a
driverless tractor to save
on labor expenses and time
in the field.
To use the
autonomous
tractor,
a
farmer must
transport the
machine to
a field and Joe Liefer
configure it
for autonomous operation.
Then, the farmer is free to
leave.
The Capital Press talked
to John Deere’s leadership
about what this development
means for farmers in the
Western U.S.
According to Joe Liefer,
senior product manager for
John Deere, the first model of
this tractor, to be released fall
2022, has already been pre-
sold through rentals exclu-
sively to large-scale Mid-
western soybean growers
who Deere worked with in
trials last year.
Meanwhile, the company
Bill Krzyzanowski/Deere & Co.
Deere’s fully autonomous diesel tractor.
will be working with farmers
to test the equipment in other
crops, including corn, cotton
and wheat. Liefer said Deere
plans to release more tractors
and implements in 2023 and
2024. The company has not
yet released pricing.
Liefer said Deere aims to
manufacture driverless trac-
tors capable of navigating a
variety of terrains and crop
systems — potato and onion
fields, vineyards, orchards
and vegetable crops.
“We’ve got aspirations
to take this into all the pro-
duction systems and differ-
ent customer bases that John
Deere serves,” said Liefer.
Deere did not release the
names of farmers participat-
ing in trials, but Liefer said
the company will be talking
to dealers to line up farmers
to work with in the Western
U.S. in 2022.
The company is start-
ing in large production sys-
tems; Deere’s 8R tractors,
with models ranging from
230 to 410 horsepower, are
big machines designed for
big farms. But the technol-
ogy is capable of use on
small plots — for example,
a 10-acre field — and Liefer
said he expects autonomous
tractors will prove useful to
part-time operators or small-
scale farms.
Some farmers, however,
are skeptical because only
John Deere mechanics —
not farmers or third-party
mechanics — are allowed
to modify the new tractor’s
software system.
American Farm Bureau
Federation President Zippy
Duvall advocates for the
“right to repair.” In a state-
ment last year, he said that
“limiting who can work on
a piece of machinery drives
up costs and increases
down-time.”
Liefer, of Deere, said
this shouldn’t be an issue
because the imbedded
software is the only part
farmers aren’t permitted
to modify. Farmers can
repair the tractor itself,
for which Deere provides
manuals.
“(John Deere) definitely
support(s) farmers’ right to
repair,” he said.
The autonomous tractor
also collects data, includ-
ing video footage, while
moving through a field.
Growers can use this data
to make farming decisions.
Deere has access to the data
but does not sell it or share it
with third parties.
Elk feast on farmers’ haystacks across Pacific Northwest
By ANNA KING
Northwest News Network
RICHLAND, Wash. —
Anthony Leggett’s farm is
nestled in the foothills out-
side Anthony Lakes in East-
ern Oregon.
He grows pasture grass
and beardless barley and puts
up big stacks of hay to earn
extra money for his young
family. Leggett’s farm costs
include equipment, chemi-
cals, fencing and fertilizers.
But hay makes money.
“Your hay is your pay-
check,” Leggett told North-
west News Network. “That’s
how you pay your bills,
that’s how you support your
family. And they just take it.
You know, they’re animals
— that’s what they do.”
He says it’s a frustrating
situation and he does his best
to safely haze the animals.
“(But) you know, if I
chase them off my property,
they just go to the neighbor’s
property and get into their
haystack,” Leggett says.
Across the West, wide-
spread drought has left elk,
deer and even wild turkeys
hungry and in poor condi-
tion — even a bit desperate.
Wild elk are even attack-
ing farmers’ haystacks in
Washington and Oregon.
Record snow across much of
the Northwest’s mountains
has driven animals down to
the lowlands — in gangs.
And climate scientists say
things may only get worse in
S. John Collins/EO Media Group File
the future.
Joey McCanna spends Elk munch on alfalfa hay in Eastern Oregon. Farmers
a lot of his winter teaching constantly battle elk to keep them away from their hay-
hay growers and ranchers stacks.
how to build elk-proof elec-
tric fencing.
how to set up automatic pro- of Washington’s Climate
“The other big thing we pane cannons to haze them Impacts Group in Seattle.
have going on, that we have with noise. But elk are smart
“So, one of the primary
staff kind of running frantic — and sometimes it doesn’t ways that wildlife respond to
on, is we have a lot of elk always work.
changing climate is by mov-
This year, drought has ing,” Krosby says. “They
damage,” McCanna said on
a recent wildlife manage- upped the stakes — hay shift their ranges — they
ment Zoom online session. prices are up across the want to track the change in
“Elk getting into hay stacks West.
climate as it happens.”
is one of the big ones.”
She says that now, more
“This summer was very
McCanna is an expert hot and dry. And alfalfa and than ever before, animals
on resolving wildlife con- grass hay is at a premium will need to move quickly.
flicts with humans for the right now,” McCanna says.
Climate induced floods and
state Department of Fish and
Meade Krosby is a senior fires in the Northwest are
Wildlife. He teaches farmers scientist at the University
dramatically pushing ani-
mals around on the land-
scape. She says wildlife will
need safe corridors to run for
it.
“They have to move so
fast, but they have all this
stuff in the way,” Krosby
says. “They have roads and
highways in the way, they
have cities in the way, agri-
cultural areas. And all of
these form these barriers
to wildlife getting to where
they need to go to shift their
ranges to adapt to climate
change.”
Making things worse, elk
can starve on hay.
Elk have four-cham-
bered guts that change their
bacteria with the season
and what’s available to eat.
In the spring and summer,
bacteria colonies adjust
to digest green shoots and
high-protein feed. But, in
the fall and winter gut bac-
teria are essentially pro-
grammed to eat big quan-
tities of dried twigs and
grasses with a lower energy.
“The bug is clostridium
perfringens,” Colin Gillin
explains. He’s the state vet
for Oregon’s Department of
Fish and Wildlife.
“It’s a bacteria that all
ruminants carry in their
guts, it’s just you don’t want
that clostridium to get out of
control,” Gillin says. “And
it’s when you throw corn
in there, it starts to have a
party.”
In this case, the corn is
hay.
The bacteria break down
the walls of the stomach
and intestines, so an elk can
starve to death with a belly
full of alfalfa.
At the Northwest Hay
Expo
in
Kennewick,
Wash., mostly men, mostly
unmasked, roam around the
great hall, slapping hands
and checking out the lat-
est in twine, balers and tar-
ping technology. Pam-
phlets, ball caps and squishy
stress-balls shaped like lit-
tle tractors litter vendors’
tables.
Washington’s ag director recommends
expansion of Columbia River Office
By MATTHEW WEAVER
Capital Press
Washington’s
agri-
culture director is rec-
ommending that legisla-
tors consider a statewide
expansion of the Depart-
ment of Ecology’s Office
of the Columbia River.
Nothing formal has
been proposed, Washing-
ton State Department of
Agriculture director Derek
Sandison told the Capital
Press.
“We think it’s a good
idea,” he said. “We’ve
been dealing with seem-
ingly intractable problems
in the Skagit, for exam-
ple. Without a program
like Office of the Colum-
bia River, there’s not a lot
of answers.”
Currently, the office pri-
marily serves the Colum-
bia Basin and its tributaries
in Eastern Washington.
Before becoming the
agriculture director in 2015,
Sandison was director of
the Columbia River office.
“As we engage with
farmers, Department of
Ecology and other agen-
cies, we’ve said, ‘Hey,
this is a format and a
series of processes that has
worked pretty well in East-
ern Washington,’”Sandi-
son said. “I think it might
be part of the answer that
solves some of the problems
that we’re seeing in places
like the Skagit Valley.”
Irrigation water supplies
differ between Western and
Eastern Washington, Sandi-
son said.
In the Nooksack, Skagit,
Clark County, Clallam and
Dungeness areas, there’s no
program like the office to
expand water supply oppor-
tunities to address water
shortages for agricultural
irrigation, he said.
“So you’re unfortunately
in a zero-sum game, where
in order for someone to get
a water right, someone else
has to lose
that water,”
Sandison
said.
In East-
ern Wash-
ington, the
Derek
office has
Sandison
worked
through
conservation projects and
storage projects, for aqui-
fers and repurposing surface
storage, to expand supplies
to provide additional water
for farms and improve river
flows for fish, Sandison said.
In Eastern Washington,
Sandison pointed to “great
progress” in the Odessa
Project since 2005. The
aquifer in that area is drop-
ping, leaving some irrigators
without an adequate supply
of water.
“We remain at a point
where, really, it’s a just add-
money proposition,” he
said. “We’ve cleared all the
legal hurdles for that project.
... It’s a matter of funding.”
The legislature adds
money for the Odessa proj-
ect every biennium. The
department and stakehold-
ers have been pushing for
federal funding through the
U.S. Bureau of Reclamation
and, more recently, USDA,
Sandison said.
The Grant County Con-
servation
District
has
applied for a grant under
USDA’s Small Watershed
program, funded by the
Farm Bill.
“We think that might be a
good source of funding, not
total funding, but I think it
would provide an increment
of funding that would help
us achieve more construc-
tion of pumping plants and
pipelines to move that water
from the East Low Canal out
to the farms,” he said.
Sandison also discussed:
• The Columbia River
Treaty. The 12th round of
negotiations took place Jan.
12 via videoconference. The
department’s focus has been
on flood management post-
2024, Sandison said.
At that point, current
flood risk management pro-
visions change to a less-de-
fined approach. Half of the
flood risk management stor-
age, more than 20 million
acre-feet, that the U.S. relies
on each year is behind dams
in Canada.
In the absence of a new
agreement, Grand Coulee
Dam would assume more
responsibility for upstream
flood risk management.
Lake Roosevelt’s level
would be lowered to handle
the flood peak during spring
runoff.
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