Driverless technology isn't just showing up on streets and highways.

It's also making its way into one Kentucky farm field.

One farmer in Nelson County says an out autonomous tractor is helping him do more with less.

Our Clayton Dalton shows us how he's building a challenging economy.

In a segment we call rooted.

In early 2024, Quinton Pottinger was looking to invest in a new project on his farm.

Turning spit mash from bourbon distilleries into pellet feed for livestock.

There was an international market for the product, but his accountant suggested a financial stress test to see if the farm could reasonably handle it.

The results were not good.

We didn't make it 18 months before we went bankrupt.

In that model, it scared me.

It scared my business advisors, so we took a step back.

We analyzed the numbers.

Everything checked out.

And it was that point we decided to put that product on pause.

Later that year, the agriculture economy was actually worse than their predictive modeling.

We started cutting everything seed cost, fertilizer, shifting up crop rotations, trying to figure out where we needed to invest to make sure we could make it through this downturn.

And we had cut everything we could cut.

And the last thing was equipment costs, CapEx, CapEx, expenditures on equipment and the farming sector is massive.

And so I just sit down at my desk in July of 25, and googled autonomy on the farm.

Sabine Tow, a company that outfits tractors with autonomous driving technology, caught his interest.

Some were skeptical, but he was serious.

So I said, let's bring out a tractor to demo.

Let's hook it up to a ten foot drill we had, and let's see if it actually can work in Kentucky, because where they had been testing the stuff was out in Montana.

Fields were wide open square.

You could let a tractor run if it could work.

In Kentucky, where your field boundaries are mapped by creek bottoms.

It could probably work anywhere.

And my dad, I talked to him about it.

He said, there are at least ten years out farming autonomy to the farm.

It probably won't work.

And we had the demo out.

My dad rolls up to the demo site, watches the tractor run for ten minutes, turns around, looks at me and says, I don't care how you got to make it work, just make it work.

And so he did.

Today he uses the autonomous tractor to plant in all seasons.

So we've planted, wheat, rye and barley using a seed drill, an old John Deere 750 C drill with updated monitoring technology.

And we've been able to plant the 840 acres of corn.

We're the first farm in the world to implement autonomy at full scale on a row.

Crop farm.

First farm in the world to plant a row crop like corn autonomously at a commercial farm level.

There's actually three different farms here in this massive block.

We keep we plant them all separate.

So when it gets done with one farm, it message pops up on my phone, it sends me.

It's got four cameras.

It sends me the front, rear and side view camera said, hey, I'm done.

I'm at this transit point to the next field.

Am I clear to cross?

Yes.

It crosses into the next field, says, okay, I'm in the next field.

Can I start planting now?

Yes.

And then it goes.

With his old system.

Pottinger used two tractors to plant his crops.

Those machines averaged 6 to 8 hours in the field per day.

Now, the single driverless tractor is outperforming.

Them in the fall.

When we did the drilling, we were averaging 12 hours of planting a day.

So we knew that we gained enough efficiency.

And this spring, what we found is that we needed to plant our crop in 19 days to beat the 22 day average that we have with 2ft to 40ft planters.

We planted our entire corn crop in ten and a half days.

This is the best end of crop we've had and this is the most caught up we've been at this point in the season, and we cut our planting capacity by three quarters.

The financial impact of this technology has been significant.

Being able to not have to go to a bank and borrow 70 or 80% of our operating need returned in the interest cost alone, about $300,000.

At the end of the day.

Pottinger says being adaptable is crucial to a farm success.

And for him, it's not just about his own success, but his community's, too.

We know if we are going to serve our community in New Haven, in Nelson County, we have to steward our resources we have, and that includes the soil, but it also includes the dollars.

How do we keep the dollars here so they don't get exported somewhere else to support the community?

For Kentucky Edition, I'm Clayton Dalton.

Pottinger says he would like to see Kentucky as a national leader in the use of autonomous technology on farms.

Kentucky's Agriculture Commissioner, Jonathan Schell, says autonomous technology could be the key to solving another problem for farmers in Kentucky.

And really across the U.S, are facing a worsening labor shortage.

Though there is growing concern about AI replacing workers across several industries.

She says he doesn't see it eliminating agricultural jobs, but rather filling in the labor gaps.

Every farmer that I know, if you talk to them, they could nearly double their operation.

If they could get enough help that's reasonably priced to be able to do the work that they need done.

And so that's a major issue that we're facing currently, whether it's in the dairy industry, the tobacco industry, whether it's in our vegetable and fruit industries in the state, even road crops, etcetera, having people and bodies on tractors or in the fields doing the work is an extremely big problem right now.

All across America, and especially here in Kentucky, with a lot of labor intensive crops that we have.

And so it's not a matter of getting rid of jobs that are currently there.

It's a big part of filling jobs that we currently need bill, and to be able to move those employees to other labor intensive jobs, rather than things that can be taken from automation.

Maybe a fix in order to help some of our farms across the state of Kentucky.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports agricultural employment fell by 155,000 workers last year.

And according to a report by the University of Michigan, a majority of farms in the U.S.

are operating at a 20% labor deficit.