Iowa startup hopes to revolutionize farming with 'swarm' of small, autonomous tractors

Tyler Jett
Des Moines Register

Sheryl Osantowski called 911 one night last summer.

“Hi,” she told a dispatcher. “Um… Yeah… Um… I just saw something a little strange.”

Osantowski was south of Hastings, Nebraska, when she noticed a small Kubota tractor running through a cornfield. The machine’s lit-up cab was empty.

Osantowski turned around. When she got back to the field, the machine was stopped. A farmer could have fallen off. At the very least, Osantowski told a dispatcher, an officer should inspect.

“I just — I don’t know,” she said.

All was well, a deputy later found. The unmanned tractor belonged to Sabanto, a company whose name is a Japanese adaption of the word "servant." Local farmer J.J. Granstrom had hired the company to tend his crops.

A Sabanto driverless tractor plants soybeans in a field near Nevada, Iowa, as a John Deere tractor operates in a neighboring field.

From their garage in the Story County town of Nevada, Sabanto engineers retrofit tractors to run automatically, guided by sensors, a GPS signal and an algorithmic program. Employees hauled five small tractors to Granstrom’s property. The algorithm told the machines where to plant and — about a month later — drag tine weeders through 1,000 acres of corn and soybeans.

“The future of farming,” said Granstrom, whose family has farmed since 1908.

Farmer: Big tractors create 'the hamster wheel from hell'

Automation is slowly taking over fields across the Midwest. Farmers are adopting new technology every year. The world’s biggest ag equipment manufacturers are buying high-tech startups to win over the next generation of farmers.

CNH Industrial N.V., the maker of Case IH farm equipment, bought South Dakota-based Raven Industries for $2.1 billion last November, following Raven’s rollout of an automated grain cart that works alongside a combine. Raven accelerated its business three years ago when it bought Smart Ag, an Ames startup founded by an Iowa State University alumnus.

More:UAW members go on strike at Case New Holland plants in Iowa, Wisconsin

Deere & Co. bought Blue River Technology for $305 million in 2017, giving the Moline, Illinois-based manufacturer the artificial intelligence technology to make sprayers that can automatically identify and treat crops. Deere acquired automated tractor startup Bear Flag Robotics for $250 million in August. In April, the company announced a partnership with sprayer manufacturer GUSS Automation.

John Deere's autonomous tractor will go into large-scale production this year at the company's plant in Waterloo.

In between those deals, in early January, Deere announced its first commercial automated tractor, a new edition of the 14-ton 8R. 

“The autonomous tractor will open so many doors for agriculture,” Deere Vice President Deanna Kovar said at the Consumer Electronics Show in January.

More:Iowa City startup that uses drones to spray, seed crops raises $7.5 million to add workers, expand services

True, researchers and industry analysts say. But many experts studying automated farming are intrigued by a new model for automation, one that looks more like Sabanto's than Deere's.

“Sabanto, they’ve got it about right,” said Scott Shearer, an Ohio State University agriculture engineering professor.

For decades, tractors have followed the trajectory of ag economics. Bigger was more efficient. Equipment manufacturers built larger machines. Farmers planted, sprayed and harvested larger fields with fewer workers.

More:Will rural Iowa wither as big ag becomes bigger, squeezing out farms in the middle?

Super-sized tractors, some costing more than $600,000, have been particularly important as young rural residents filtered into cities, leaving farmers with a shallow labor pool.

Automation changes those dynamics. If an operator doesn't need to sit behind the wheel, a single worker can oversee multiple smaller tractors — a formulation known as a swarm.

Swarms could change the way farms work. Smaller, less-complicated machines are more economically efficient and could save farmers millions of dollars, researchers say. Farm operations would be less vulnerable when a single piece of equipment breaks. And light tractors are better for the soil.

These advantages are, for the most part, theoretical. Few companies have brought the concept to market except Sabanto, a startup founded four years ago by a rebellious ex-Deere engineer. 

In southern Nebraska, Granstrom is ready for the change on his 12,000-acre organic barley, corn and soybean farm. He can’t find enough workers, a problem exacerbated by the fact that operating his big Deere tractors requires training.

“It’s just a huge snowball effect,” he said. “And it’s all because of the size of the machinery. It’s more expensive. It’s hard to resell. Blah, blah, blah. It’s the hamster wheel from hell.”

More:Competition is fierce for Iowa's used farm equipment, attracting bidders from across the world

When Sabanto’s tractors were working his field, Granstrom said, word spread among the community. Neighboring farmers stopped by to watch. Granstrom said he noticed trucks with Deere and Case logos.

At church, some farmers asked Granstrom how Sabanto’s technology worked. Others complained that he was hastening the decline of the family farm.

“People are just concerned,” Granstrom said. “Because this is going to change everything.”

Craig Rupp, founder and CEO of Sabanto, answers questions during a swarm ag demonstration at the Sabanto offices in Nevada, Iowa, on April 8.

The pirate behind automated tractor company Sabanto

In his company's Nevada garage, Sabanto founder Craig Rupp twisted his skull-and- crossbones ring.

“I,” he said, “identify as a pirate.”

Rupp hangs skull-and-crossbones flags from Sabanto’s tractors, just as he did from his desk at his first job out of college. He experimented with a bushy beard and tried to convince neighborhood children that he spent his days cleaning cannons and sailing.

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“We’re in uncharted waters, very dangerous waters,” Rupp said. “With autonomy, for example. I‘ve always been an entrepreneur, a risk taker. There are some people that don’t like what I’m doing. … When you start talking about taking capital expenses out of agriculture, that doesn’t make me popular with some people.”

Rupp grew up on a 280-acre corn, soybean, cattle and hog farm in Cherokee. He spent afternoons and weekends helping his father bale hay, his uncle shell corn and his neighbors milk cows.

"He hated it," said his older brother, Dean Rupp, who now runs the farm.

Craig Rupp preferred electronics, picking apart old radios and examining his TV's vacuum tubes for hours. When he left for Iowa State University, he vowed to never work on a farm again.

After graduating with an electrical engineering degree, Craig Rupp worked in the early 1990s for Motorola on the Iridium project, a satellite initiative. He helped develop the company’s satellite phone and specialized in radio frequencies.

The environment was like a college dorm, with a team of about two dozen engineers spending up to 100 hours a week together. They glued each other's phones to their desks, rewired keypads to mess up people's calls. Rupp and the crew often tested their phones at Emil’s, a bar down the street from their Libertyville, Illinois, office, where the staff hung an inflatable phone to honor their most frequent drinkers.

Corbett Kull, an Iridium engineer, recalls Rupp as boisterous, subverting expectations of a studious, introverted engineer. Rupp attended Grateful Dead concerts and partied as hard as anyone at the Register’s Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa. He set his Facebook profile picture to an image of Dr. Emmett Brown, the wild-haired inventor from “Back to the Future.”

From 'Jurassic Park' to 'Star Wars'

Iridium, which put 66 satellites in space and raised $5 billion, was supposed to capture the growing mobile phone business, allowing customers to make calls from anywhere on the planet. The business became one of the biggest burnouts in tech history.

Production costs sent the price of the big, brick-like phone to $3,000. Executives projected 500,000 subscribers in the first year. They landed about 10% of that target. Without the revenue to pay loan interest expenses, Iridium filed for bankruptcy within a year. Its legacy? "Jurassic Park III," in which a character pulls the satellite phone from a pile of dinosaur poop.

"That's my phone," Rupp said. "I developed that phone."

In fact, Rupp had left Iridium three years before the phone's failed release, starting a consulting business in 1995.

He later landed a job in Deere's Urbandale office, helping create the StarFire Receiver, a yellow GPS unit now ubiquitous atop the company's green tractor cabs. The receiver led to the company’s AutoSteer program, which in turn led to the company’s autonomous 8R.

Amid another stint as a consultant, Rupp visited his older brother. Riding around the farm, Craig Rupp explained how much data Deere collected from the tractor's sensors. Dean Rupp asked why he wasn't seeing all that information.

Craig Rupp spent another three weeks on the farm, wiring together a small computer processor and data translator that looked like a hockey puck. When plugged into a tractor’s diagnostic port, Rupp’s device pulled the sensor data and sent it to an iPad.

Rupp convinced Kull, his former Iridium co-worker, to launch a business around the device in 2012. They took Dean Rupp, a cousin and three other Cherokee farmers to a local diner, where Craig Rupp plowed them with questions, asking what they needed and what they hated most about new ag tech products.

“He’s just very comfortable talking to anyone — but especially farmers,” Kull said. “I go back to his upbringing. He’s just very inquisitive. He kind of knows the plight of the farmer.”

Rupp vowed to keep his device as simple as possible, telling the farmers they wouldn't need to do anything but plug it in. He knocked down employee ideas for enhancements, even simple features like "on" buttons or small screens. Unlike the Iridium phone, the device would be affordable — about $500. 

Venture capitalists weren't impressed by the startup, 640 Labs. Rupp felt punished because his idea seemed too simple for them.

"They don't really understand the market," Kull said. "They think they do. But … they're not really out there talking to farmers like we are."

Frustrated, Rupp said he started to think about what off-the-wall presentation could win over investors. He thought about self-driving tractors. Then he went a step further, thinking about a science fiction farm, filled with tiny robots.

“He would talk about swarms of two-row planters,” said Pat Durmstroff, an Iridium veteran who joined 640 Labs. “You pull a truck in. It’s like (the 'Star Wars' series) ‘Clone Wars.’ You just deploy, and they plant.”

In 2014, the Monsanto Co. bought 640 Labs for an undisclosed sum. Rupp’s product — the FieldView Drive — was in use across 180 million acres in 23 countries as of February, according to Bayer AG, which acquired the device when it bought Monsanto four years ago.

Rupp left the company around the time of the Bayer deal, ready to pursue his next dream. 

"I want to rock the industry," he said. "I'm skating to where I think the puck's going to be."

Cory Spaetti, director of agriculture engineering at Sabanto, discusses the company's technology during a swarm ag demonstration at the Sabanto offices in Nevada, Iowa.

Writing the code for automated tractor success

Cory Spaetti, Sabanto’s director of agriculture engineering, pulled up a satellite image of a Nevada industrial park on a flat-screen computer monitor in early April.

Over a picture of a grassy field north of the company’s garage, where Spaetti stood, Sabanto’s algorithm drew a series of straight, slanting and looping lines — directions telling a tractor with a lawn-mowing implement where to cut.

Different colors indicated different directions. A fluorescent green indicated places where the tractor would mow. Red indicated areas where the tractor would run with the mower raised off the ground. Purple indicated where the tractor would go when it finished mowing.

Spaetti clicked a button to start the tractor’s program. Outside, the machine went to work.

“This is kind of like looking into the future,” Spaetti said, his voice echoing off the concrete floors and bare walls in the garage.

Sabanto founder and CEO Craig Rupp walks behind a driver-less tractor as it plants soybeans in a field north of Nevada on April 28, 2022.

A couple of weeks before the projected start of this year's planting season, Sabanto’s eight Nevada-based employees hosted a demonstration for interested farmers, an equipment dealership owner and an investment banker.

Spaetti gave a tour of the garage, showing off the control panels and 4-row planters that employees had installed on the Kubotas.

The space doesn’t look like the home of a tech startup. Fluorescent lights buzz. A simple Mr. Coffee machine sits by the door. The small, single-toilet bathroom in the corner lacks inspirational messages.

Spaetti instead showed visitors a company workbench, where the team sorts screws, rods, cables and antennas into yellow bins. The employees spend much of their days solving hands-on mechanical problems. 

During last year’s planting season, they had to strap rubber bands around a USB cord plugged into a processor to keep information flowing from sensors to the company's software. Bumps in the field would have otherwise jarred loose the connection.

“Life as a startup,” Spaetti said.

Sabanto's process starts with an employee driving a tractor around a field's perimeter.

A GPS receiver sends the boundary’s coordinates to Sabanto’s software. On a password-protected website, a Sabanto employee punches in mission settings, such as how fast the tractor will run and how wide it can turn. Based on this information, the company’s algorithm maps the machine’s path.

Cory Spaetti, director of agriculture engineering at Sabanto, discusses the company's technology during a swarm ag demonstration at the Sabanto offices in Nevada, Iowa, on April 8, 2022.

Seven software engineers in Chicago continually tweak code to improve the company's algorithm and website. 

Sensors by the planters track seeds as the tube spits them into the dirt, calculating the machine’s planting rate per acre. Cameras on the tractor capture objects in the path of the machine, signaling to a computer to pause the tractor. The computer sends pictures of the obstacles to Sabanto staff over a Slack channel.

Iowa farmer says Sabanto could give him what he needs most: Time

“I’m thoroughly impressed,” Curtis Head said after the presentation.

Head, who farms 1,800 acres on his father-in-law’s land in Riceville, has tracked news of tractor automation for years. He began searching more intensely for a solution in January, after Deere unveiled its automated 8R.

He told Sabanto employees the usual story about a labor shortage. During the peak of the harvest season, he has six workers.

He wishes he had more. On days when the air pressure changes, his back muscles seize, the lingering effects of a high school football injury.

On the first day of harvest last fall, the weather was not on Head’s side. His back would not loosen. Any other time of year, he would have taken a muscle relaxer and waited.

But he needed to harvest as quickly as possible.

“I’m bent over 90 degrees, staring at the ground, trying to make things work,” Head recalled. “That’s definitely a situation (when) it would be nice to have more hands available.”

Automated tractors can change the way he farms on a basic level. He envisions more dinners with his family as the machines run on their own, more trips into town to watch his children — ages 2, 4 and 6 — perform in school plays.

Farming is more sophisticated than it was when he was a child and his father listened to the radio once a day, checking for swings in the futures market.

More:Iowans with sluggish internet could get boost with $400 million in planned state, federal spending

These days, scrolling his phone in his tractor, Head reads about the weather and Chinese buying patterns and grain shipments out of war-torn Ukraine. He would like to spend more time analyzing data, determining the best price he can get for his crops. Staying ahead of trends or falling behind can make a $100,000 difference.

“We have to have a tighter leash on that, on our marketing,” Head said. “A lot of people can grow really good crops. Yes, there’s guys who outproduce other growers. But it all comes down to marketing.”

Mark Fehr, a West Bend organic farmer, isn't so sure about automated tractors.

Fehr visited Sabanto's garage at the urging of his son, an Iowa State University mechanical engineering student who wants to bring automation to the farm. As he watched the presentation, Fehr thought about his property's sloping hills.

Elevation changes mean his crops sometimes grow at different paces. Corn in lower areas was particularly short and weak at times last year, requiring Fehr to slow down his tractor.

“I don’t know,” Fehr said. “To automate stuff? Nothing replaces the human mind.”

Experts say less expensive, automated tractors are better value

Automation should make farmers more financially efficient, said Shearer, the Ohio State University professor. He said most farmers don't get their money’s worth out of the priciest big tractors and implements.

A high-end tractor can run for 20,000 hours, he said. Farmers usually run them about 300 hours a year, meaning they would need to keep a tractor 66 years to squeeze all the life out of it.

Farmers don’t. With companies like Deere and Case frequently adopting new technology, Shearer said, tractors are like cellphones — tools farmers replace every couple of years to keep up with innovations.

Smaller, less expensive tractors are a better value, Shearer said. They may not cover ground as quickly. But if they are automated, a farmer can run them overnight, racking up hours.

“We want to wear that tractor out until it becomes obsolete,” he said.

More:John Deere to sell machine-servicing software to farmers amid right to repair complaints

Smaller equipment is more financially efficient for other reasons. John Evans, a Purdue University agriculture and biological engineering professor, said big equipment costs more to run per acre.

Consider a 48-row planter — 120 feet wide when fully extended. It's equipped with a system that folds the rows upon each other, narrowing the planter to under 18 feet and allowing a farmer to transport it on the road from field to field.  The design is an “engineering marvel,” Evans said. But not needing the design at all is preferable — or, at least, less expensive.

More:In patent battle over high-speed planter, Iowa-based Kinze accuses Deere of 'unlawful monopoly'

Evans estimates that a simple, six-row planter costs about $2,000 per acre less to operate than a 48-row planter. His estimate does not account for the luxuries farmers won’t need if they aren’t in the tractor's cab: leather seats, air conditioning, heaters, screens, mini fridges.

At the same time, Evans added, small engines don’t have to meet the same environmental standards that big ones do. Perhaps electric tractors will take care of that problem. For now, though, a swarm of five 50-horsepower tractors will pollute the air more than a single, 250-horsepower tractor.

“That will be an interesting tradeoff,” Evans said.

University of Kentucky agriculture economist Jordan Shockley predicts that swarm operations will save farmers money in other ways.

More:Here's why Iowa consumers can expect higher food prices to persist into next year

Lighter machines will compact the soil less and help corn grow bigger, which Shockley predicts will lead to a 7% yield increase. He also believes a series of smaller machines can more precisely treat each plant, leading to a 10% drop in spending on inputs like herbicide.

His research is theoretical, given how few real-world swarms are available to study. But he said small farmers with 200 or 300 acres stand to gain the most by a shift. He said most buy equipment that is bigger than what they need.

Aron Cory, an ag tech research manager at International Data Corp., said farmers won't eagerly transition to networks of small machines. They already have invested millions in big tractors and big implements.

Still, Sabanto's model could thrive, he said. Farmers wouldn't have to spend six or seven figures to change their operating model all at once. 

“That’s probably how it will become more and more useful or more and more accepted,” Cory said. “And as you kind of ease people into that idea, … you’ll wind up with more farmers buying into that system.”

Sabanto founder and CEO Craig Rupp, left, and director of agriculture engineering Cory Spaetti make adjustments to a planter while planting soybeans in a field north of Nevada.

Working out the bugs

Spaetti, the company’s agriculture engineering director, walked into the garage and rubbed his hand through his hair.

“We’re doing a little sanity check,” he said, smiling.

It was the morning of April 28, the first chance for Sabanto to plant on a farmer’s field this year. The team planned to drive a couple of Kubota tractors — codenamed Gatsby and Fedora — to a customer’s field that afternoon.

More:Snow, rain, cold keep Iowa farmers from planting corn, soybeans. But 'it's too early to panic.'

But the tractors were new to Sabanto. After the Nevada employees tested them on a nearby field the day before, the engineers in Chicago tweaked the computer code to fix a couple of small problems.

Now, the software was inaccurately recording the test field's boundary. It should begin marking the boundary when an employee tells it to. The employee signals the software to stop recording after finishing a loop around the field.

But the software began recording the tractor’s path before Spaetti wanted, starting when he pulled the tractor out of the garage. If Spaetti hadn't caught the error, the tractor would have run beyond the company's test field, into a ditch or parking lot.

The Chicago team searched the computer code for an explanation.

"We're looking for a ghost," Spaetti said.

Thirty minutes later, a software engineer sent Spaetti a Slack message. When the technicians wrote new code the day before, someone had forgotten to delete an old line of code. They believed the conflicting messages were confusing the computer. They deleted the old line, and Spaetti returned to the field.

“We think," Spaetti said, "we found the ghost."

After a test run, Spaetti gave Rupp a thumbs up. The team headed north to one of Kevin Gurlach's fields.

Gurlach met Spaetti and Rupp last year when they drove around Nevada to introduce themselves. The business fascinated Gurlach, and he agreed to let them plant a cover crop of oats last summer.

Gossip about the business has since spread among local farmers.

“Everybody talks about them,” Gurlach said. “Everybody watches them.”

This year, he struck a deal with Spaetti to plant soybeans on 20 acres. Gurlach declined to say how much he is paying Sabanto, though he estimated that a successfully planted crop on that land would sell for about $15,000.

His relationship with the company remains an experiment.

“It’s trial and error,” Gurlach said. “Will I be happy? Will (Spaetti and Rupp) be happy?”

For the Sabanto team, happiness is long hours. Rupp said he works from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m., fixing problems as they arise and trying to build a bigger customer base. He has 16 employees. He wishes he had 50.

Spaetti said the Chicago team is trying to improve the tractor’s vision system. Right now, the tractor pauses when the cameras detect anything in front it. Employees must restart the machines.

The computer sometimes stops the tractor when cameras spot obstacles that aren't in the tractor's path, a bug the Chicago team needs to fix. And, eventually, they hope to train the computer to automatically steer a tractor around obstacles as they appear.

The company also is building an “autonomy kit” to sell to other custom farmers this year. Employees would install processors and sensors on customers’ tractors and give them access to the Sabanto software.

Sabanto has contracted with the U.S. Air Force to provide automated mowers and is in talks with Verbio North America, a company that makes biogas at a newly acquired Story County factory using corn stover and manure.

“We’re just at the first step,” Spaetti said.

Getting down in the dirt

On April 28, when the team arrived at one of Gurlach’s designated fields, they marked boundaries and sent the two tractors on a planting path. One ran fine. But the team encountered a problem with the second tractor.

On his hands and knees, Spaetti dug into the dirt. Seed from the machine’s planter wasn’t piercing 1½ inches below the hard ground, as Gurlach wanted.

The lightweight tractor wasn’t keeping the planter low enough. Spaetti tightened a tensioner, holding the planter closer to the tractor. He hoped that would keep the implement on the ground.

Rupp pulled 75-pound dozer blades from the back of his pickup. The team slid the blades into a long crevice on the planter, weighing the machine down more.

On his cellphone, Spaetti instructed the tractor to resume planting.

“Once you get the damn things running,” Rupp said, “they’ll run all day.”

He pointed out that tweaks are common on the first day of planting, automated tractor or not. Whenever his team works through the kinks, the advantages of Sabanto’s system kick in.

As if to hammer home the point, Rupp looked to a neighboring field, where a farmer drove a large Deere tractor. The farmer parked. The machine didn’t move. Minutes passed.

“See,” Rupp told his team. “He’s fixing all his (expletive) too.”

“That guy right there is $500,000,” he added, pointing at the tractor.

He pointed at one of his Kubotas: “And that guy is about $5,000.”

Rupp considered the wide planter behind the neighboring farmer’s tractor. He estimated it cost another $300,000. The whole setup, he said, must have cost $800,000.

“You can live in a damn nice house in Iowa for 800 grand,” he said.

More:Des Moines metro's median home price hits new high of $265k. Here's what that buys.

Tyler Jett covers jobs and the economy for the Des Moines Register. Reach him at tjett@registermedia.com, 515-284-8215, or on Twitter at @LetsJett.