In a mere four years since its founding, Monarch brought the world’s first 100% electric, driver-optional, and smart tractor to market. Since that historic launch, our journey and that of our customers, has been shaped by partnerships, hard work, and dedication to making the MK-V a keystone piece of machinery enabling cleaner, safer, and more profitable farming.
Today, we’re seeing many more of our customer partners adopting and deploying autonomous tractor operations. From May to July, in dairies alone, autonomy usage hours nearly tripled, bringing bigger gains to more farms. These efforts are charting the way for success across their farms and the entire Monarch community. Here’s why we’re celebrating.
The Power of the Trailblazers
Not only is the MK-V still the only fully electric, autonomous, smart tractor on the market, but it’s also the only one with a fully autonomous tractor feature that is commercially available: dairy cattle feed pushing. It’s an outstanding development, but it’s not a stand-alone narrative about Monarch Tractor. Our early adopters are part of this trailblazing mindset.
New technologies, like robotics in agriculture, come with early-adopter, first-in-market advantages. For the benefits to be fully realized, they require farms with a willingness to understand and work with the associated challenges and gains that come with new machinery, devices, and systems.
Like any new piece of significant machinery, autonomous tractors require a farm management team dedicated to the learning process, including the repetition necessary for workhands to fully integrate a self-driving tractor into the farm’s operational system. From the get-go, Monarch has worked alongside its customer partners, supporting them in their adoption and deployment journey. It’s a team effort and we are grateful for those who are making autonomous operations (full and driver-assisted) a part of their farm’s standard operations.
Data Development
The MK-V’s autonomous capabilities are enabled by MonarchOne, a modular, end-to-end, full-stack, Physical AI-driven platform integrating autonomy, assisted driving, energy management, and data intelligence. Physical AI is a type of artificial intelligence that enables machines to perceive, understand, and interact with the physical world using sensors like cameras and GPS. It gathers this real-world data, processes it, then acts on it.
An autonomous, off-highway machine, like the MK-V tractor, represents the intersection between digital and physical domains, using gathered data to navigate and manipulate its environment in the form of mowing, pushing feed, spraying, or other operations.
As the MK-V amasses vehicle, environmental, and operational data, it can work more intelligently with greater precision and effectiveness. The more autonomous operations that are deployed, that much more data is gathered and used to improve and expand features. The farmers who are actively using either full autonomy or driver-assist (e.g., Row Follow) are quite literally, building the foundation of data necessary for future success, enhancements, and use cases.
Amplified Gains
Monarch set out to help one of the world’s most essential industries–agriculture–overcome its intensifying and undeniable challenges. Fueled by the urgency of labor, environmental, and financial pressures, Monarch set a blistering pace developing new technologies in electrification, automation, and digital connectivity and bringing them to market.
While electrification and digitization have a significant positive and measurable impact on a farm’s bottom line, the gains escalate when autonomy is added to the equation. As more farmers deploy autonomous operations, we’re pumped to see them reap the associated advantages.
These positive returns amplify through farms, community, stakeholders, all the way up to the global food network. Our journey, in tandem with our customer partners, is shaping up to have a rewarding itinerary and we’re ready to overcome the challenges and notch more achievements for our customer partners. Seeing their success and empowerment is what Monarch is all about.
