this post was submitted on 05 Apr 2026
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Electric Vehicles
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Look an a electric tractor actually makes a ton of sense. Even now the largest, heaviest duty vehicles are already electric.
But this write up relies on far too many hypotheticals, the number one being, how do you get the power from wherever it is, to the vehicles, while running in what amounts to continuous operation. For harvest and planting, a farm might be running it's combines or tractors continuously for weeks on end. And those equipment often service multiple farms. Swappable batteries means you then have to have more equipment to shuttle batteries, and to swap them. If they are big enough to keep a tractor pulling a drill for 12 hours, they're going to need heavy equipment to swap them.
On a small acreage, where it's not in continuous operation, it would make total sense. But it sounds like a logistical nightmare for a combine.
Not immediately viable, but much better for many applications: I'm imagining an agrovoltaic setup where the tractors use a pantograph to pull energy from an overhead line mounted off the solar panels. Effectively, it would be a trackless tractor-tram. Only a small battery would be needed for row end turnarounds and driving between fields. They already mostly drive themselves, so having the rows of panels to reference off of would actually simplify the navigation system substantially, and at that point you may as well add a pantograph and overhead line.
I wonder if you would be able to design farm implements in a way where battery swaps are necessary but you have like a trailer type situation where there's like 10 batteries you can pull to the field with your tractor and then when needing to "top up" you just drive to the trailer to swap out. Then over night all ten batteries get charged. Or throughout the day you have a second trailer charging another ten batteries for continuous 24h operation.
It would be a fair bit of upfront investment but farm implements always are, and you would save on all the fuel required and having to deliver and store it.
I think there would have to be battery swaps. at large enough scales, it might even make sense to have a separate smaller vehicle just for running batteries out to the large machines, though fields swaps would be tough to keep clean.
For smaller jobs though, I could see running the tractor for a few hours, heading back to the barn to swap out the battery pack(s), then heading back out after maybe 15 minutes of downtime. At the rate that batteries would need to be swapped out, I think it would make sense to have batteries on a forklift pallet that can be forked off the tractor and onto a charging cradle, then fork a fresh battery pack onto the tractor and head back out. or, there could be a specialized battery swapping deck that the vehicle drives over, which would be cool because the same batteries and swapping gear could be used for cars and trucks.
With autonomous tractors, they could theoretically detect when they need a swap and orchestrate the swap automatically, making them capable of running nearly continuously, 24 hours a day. It would be very complicated and I don't doubt that early implementations would have their share of headaches, but that looks like where we're heading from my perspective.
I've never been on a farm where you could get back and forth from a field to a barn in 15 minutes. Minimum viable acreage for hard red wheat is 6k acres plus in most areas of the US. Corn and soy are higher than that.
Also, quick charging these days is very good given an appropriate design, a tender vehicle utterly loaded down with batteries could pull up along side a combine, connect, and charge, all while not stopping operations. Instead of moving the batteries and just move the power. Then one tender could service multiple machines. It wouldn't be all that different than how garin carts move in tandem with harvesting equipment currently.
Your op sounds... much bigger than mine lol. My place is less than a tenth of that. I could see running a battery car out to the equipment, then running that back to the barn to charge / swap batteries. I would love to build one but I don't think it's worth it at my scale.
My rough plan right now is to throw a big old motor in an old tractor chassis, and have a bunch of lead acid batteries on a pallet that sits on top of the engine compartment, and put a solar panel roof over all of it to charge in the field + keep the batteries (and me) out of direct sun. I should be able to drive into the barn, fork the battery onto a rack with a charge cable, fork a new pallet onto the tractor, plug everything in, and get back at it in about 15 minutes, but that's 15 minutes from the time I drive into the barn to the time I leave the barn, it doesn't account for transit time to and from the barn, but that's only a few more minutes on a small farm.
That was from back in my time with USDA ars. That's just the basic maths behind wheat operation. Most farmers can't make it work unless they are farming huge averages simply because it's how the math works out for winter wheat.
Interesting setup. Make sure to take pictures and share it. On farm innovation is where most of the fun stuff happens anyways
You could either run a power cable to the Tractor from the grid, you could run it on hydrogen you made from electrolysis on the farm, or you could rethink how you farm, maybe anything from several smaller tractors to something completely different although I don't know what I would look like for common row crops