John Deere has announced several updates to its 5R Series tractors from 90 to 125hp, designed to increase their versatility and suitability for small and medium sized livestock and arable farms.

Remember the old TV commercials that featured a kid riding a bicycle, hands in the air? The kid would say, “Look, Mom — no hands!” If you happen to live near one of the dozen or so farmers trying out Smart Ag’s AutoCart software this fall, your son or daughter might be saying, “Look, Mom and Dad — no driver!”

The new Case IH Advanced Trailer Brake System represents a major advance in tractor safety and can now be specified as an option on Puma 185, 200, 220 and 240 CVX models.

Lithium is a key component of electric vehicle (and other) batteries. You might have heard of ‘lithium-ion’ batteries. They are very energy-dense, and have achieved massive improvements in their performance. In a previous post I looked at the plunging cost of lithium batteries; they have fallen by more than 98% since the early 1990s.1

To move to electric transport, lithium is one of our best shots. That’s why it’s so important.

We can get lithium from two sources. 

First, it can be extracted from hard rocks in the ground, just like we imagine in traditional mines. 

Second, it can be extracted from brine – that is, water rich in lithium salt. To get this lithium, salty groundwater has to be pumped to the surface and left to sit in large ponds for months on the end. When most of the water is evaporated away, lithium can be extracted.

We keep discovering more lithium, and we get better at mining it

How much lithium does the world have? We don’t really know for sure.

What we can estimate are ‘resources’: a ‘best guess’ of deposits that we’ve discovered and studied, and some that we think are there but are undiscovered.

Not all of these deposits are feasible to extract with our current technologies, or they are too expensive. The amount of lithium that we know we can technologically and economically mine are called ‘reserves’.

In 2021, it’s estimated that the world had 88 million tonnes of lithium.2 These are ‘resources’. One-quarter of this – 22 million tonnes – was feasible to extract. These are ‘reserves’.

What’s important about these figures is that they change all the time: we’re always discovering new lithium, and as our technologies and market conditions improve, more of our resources become economical to extract.

You might imagine that a chart of known reserves or resources over time would go down. But it’s the opposite: I’ve charted them below, and you can see them going upward because we're discovering new despoits much faster than we're using them up.3

When we really want something, we get good at finding it.

The world has enough lithium for the electric vehicle transition

Is 22 million – or 88 million – tonnes of lithium enough? How much do we need to switch from fossil fuel to electric cars?

There is a wide range of estimates, which depend on several factors: how quick and widespread EV adoption will be; the size of batteries; and how much lithium we’ll need per battery.

Let’s compare a range of estimates of the cumulative amount of lithium we’ll need by 2050. These come from several sources: the IEA’s projections based on countries’ stated policies, and its sustainable development pathway which accelerates this transition; estimates from a Nature study by Xu et al. (2020); and a study by the World Bank.4

These are shown in the chart, alongside the world’s current reserves and resources.5

The difference between 6 million, 18 million, or 25 million tonnes seems really large. But I don’t think this wide range is that important. It’s easy to imagine that decades from now, the chemistry of batteries will have changed so much that they will use two, three, or four times less than today. I’m more interested in the overall magnitude of these estimates – that they’re ten to twenty million tonnes (ish)– than the precise figures.

How many electric vehicles are we assuming in these scenarios? We can do a quick sense-check. The average EV currently needs around 8 kilograms of lithium.6 With our current 22 million tonnes of reserves, we’d get 2.8 billion EVs. With our 88 million tonnes of resources, we’d get 11 billion EVs.

Some of the figures in the chart look tight, compared to our reserves. But I don’t think that this is cause for concern. Markets and innovation respond to changes in supply and demand. We will inevitably find more reserves and resources. And, the chemistry of our batteries will change so that we need less lithium per pack.

Can we recycle lithium-ion batteries?

All of our numbers so far assume that demand has to be met through new lithium.

What if we could recycle lithium from batteries at the end of their life? This would be the ideal scenario. If recycling rates were high enough, we could almost completely close the loop on producing new batteries, or at least reduce the need to dig more out of the ground.

Today, less than 1% of lithium is recycled.7 Most of the projections we looked at assume that it stays low. The IEA, for example, assumes that by 2040 just 6% is recycled.

One problem is that recycling lithium is more expensive than mining new stuff. It might not stay this way. This used to be the case with lead-acid batteries: they were rarely recycled but after these markets scaled, almost all of them are today.

A better option is to not only recycle batteries – by grinding them up and extracting the minerals – but by repurposing them at the end of their life. This could be less expensive, but we’ve still to see it working at a commercial scale.

Even if we were to quickly increase recycling or repurposing rates, the demand for new lithium might not change much. At least, not very soon. There just won’t be very much material to recycle. Most EVs are still going to be on their first life by 2040 or 2050. Only later, when many are preparing for their second or third round, that recycling could make a dent in global lithium demand.

We are struggling to produce enough lithium this decade. We urgently need more production capacity.

I’m not that concerned about long-term lithium supplies. But our capacity to produce lithium at the moment is tight, and it’s having an impact on EV prices and supply. 

In a previous article, I showed that the price of lithium-ion batteries has fallen by more than 98% since the early 1990s. But, this cost stalled last year, partly due to a rise in lithium prices. Prices are higher because supplies are tight.

We currently produce around 100,000 tonnes each year. By 2030, the IEA projects that we’ll need 2.5 to 5 times as much: 240,000 to 450,000 tonnes. 

If you want to do some quick maths on this, let’s assume an EV needs 8 kilograms of lithium: that tonnage would give us 30 to 60 million new EVs per year.

The world doesn’t currently have the production capacity in mining operations to scale to this level. And, the problem is that the minimum time to build lithium mines is four to five years. They can be even longer – especially the lithium extracted from brine because it takes a long time to pump the saltwater out, before waiting for it to evaporate.

Countries have already invested in some increases in capacity, but we will need much more if we’re to keep up with demand.

This is a short-term challenge, and one that is typical of a fast-moving market. We’re playing catch-up. But, it’s a problem that we can’t afford: it could slow the decline in battery prices, and limit the number of EVs that companies can produce.

If we want to move the EV transition forward, we need to mine more lithium. And we need to do it quickly.

  Electric vehicle batteries would have cost as much as a million dollars in the 1990s

Which countries have lithium?

Where is this lithium going to come from?

A few countries currently dominate global production. This is shown in the chart. Australia produces more than half of the world’s lithium, followed by Chile, China, Argentina, then a number of small producers.

If the world is going to produce more lithium in the next five years, it’s going to come from a small number of countries: Australia, Chile, China, and Argentina.

In the longer term, we should look at each country’s reserves and resources. Known resources are shown in the chart below. We see some of the main producers near the top of the list. But we also see several countries that do not produce any lithium. Bolivia has the largest resources. 

Our ability to increase lithium production might be limited to a few countries with production capacity already at scale, but over longer timeframes, many more countries could enter the race.

 

Hannah Ritchie 

To the casual observer, Agritechnica 2023 probably looks a lot like the last edition of the Hanover, Germany agricultural equipment trade fair – a lot of big guys drinking big beers, admiring very big tractors.

Look into the cabins and under the hoods of some of those machines, however, and you’ll find an industry in transition, as autonomous features are integrated more and more deeply into a wider range of farming systems.

At the last Agritechnica, in 2019, the only smart farm implement was a baler, says James Szabo, Agriculture Autonomy Product Manager, NovAtel Autonomy & Positioning Division, for Hexagon, a geoanalytics provider. “The baler would say to the tractor, ‘I’ve made a bale, stop. Take it out, and drive off.’ That was about the only use case that people talked about,” he recalls.

This time around, a much wider range of farm implements are able to talk to the tractors pulling them, thanks to the number of developers who have integrated Agricultural Industry Electronics Foundation (AIEF) protocols into their systems. “The implement can say, slow down, and then the tractor will automatically slow down, and the implement can say I need to be lifted up, and then the tractor will activate the hydraulics and lift it up,” Szabo says.

Crucially, the tractor and the implement don’t need to belong to the same brand. Instead, the AIEF protocols are giving tractors and implements a common language, Szabo says, smoothing the transition to autonomy.

“The instrument manufacturers are understanding that adding technology onto their implements not only helps an operator today,” Szabo says. It also “means that farmers get used to the implements being clever.” That in turn means that jobs are being done more consistently, and down the line, “when the operator is removed, then that same communication can happen directly with the autonomous platform.”

 
The idea that sooner or later the operator will be removed seems to be taken for granted, but although tractors can already till entire fields on autopilot, most people interviewed see the transition as something that will happen gradually. “We’re less concerned right now with saying that we’ve got some magical device that’s going to do it all,” says Harlan Little, OEM Business Development Manager for Topcon Agriculture, an agricultural software company.

Instead, Little foresees a gradual shift. “I think it’ll be a lot like the adoption of automatic steering,” he says.

Autonomous systems to draw farming industry interest at Agritechnica 2023
In the meantime, however, some farmers are already gaining from advances in autonomous technology. Sales representatives for autonomous systems companies ticked off a number of ways farmers can benefit today from advances in sensors and autonomous features.

Topcon’s ultrasonic sensors, which until now have been used for height control for sprayers, have now been adapted to monitor for depth control, according to Little.

Meiko Martin, Business Development Director, Off-Road Autonomy for Trimble, a software and hardware company that supports agriculture and many other industries, says that it’s now possible to get an inexperienced operator to the level of an experienced operator within hours. At the same time, he says, autonomous features reduce wear and tear on the equipment.

The increasingly rich data harvest is another plus. Martin notes that Trimble’s system can help farmers make important decisions quickly, as field data is sent to the cloud and compared to current commodity prices. “Now, you can actually decide, should I increase my fertilizer based on the commodity price to get a higher yield, or is it nor worth doing?” he says.

In addition to incremental advances, more disruptive autonomous and unmanned systems were also on display at the fair. “We’re seeing a lot of movement away from R&D and startups to companies that are breaking out into production,” Szabo says.

One of those young companies is FarmDroid, a Vejen, Denmark developer whose FD20 autonomous seed-and-weed machine has been programmed to plant and weed more than 50 different crops. “If we can seed it, we can weed it,” says Rasmus Thuesen, Regional Sales Manager for FarmDroid.

The FD20 platform navigates by GPS that it calibrates against its own base station. It is equipped with only one camera, which the farmer can use for monitoring, but the rest of its work is done with GPS.

“When it does the seeding, it’s seeding each seed on a GPS point, so it knows exactly where all the seeds are located. Then afterwards, it can go back and do the weeding, and literally weed away everything except where the plant is,” explains Rasmus Thuesen, Regional Sales Manager for FarmDroid. The system is also precise enough that the machine’s spraying attachment can reduce the use of plant protection chemicals by up to 94%.

Solar-powered and capable of a top speed of 950 meters per hour, the platform can cover up to 6.5 hectares a day and operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week, Thuesen says.

Four hundred of FarmDroid’s machines are currently in operation around the world, according to Thuesen, including Australia, Canada, and Europe. The FarmDroid platform is legal almost everywhere, Thuesen says, except for California, because of some state rules about autonomous driving.

Picking your future
Other autonomous systems are looking further afield. A joint venture between Kubota and Tevel, an Israeli startup, promises to revolutionize fruit-picking, using tethered drones armed with suction cups, programmed to pick fruit based on size and color specifications.

While the Kubota-Tevel machine is still under development, another autonomous machine whose functionality includes apple picking, is already in production. Touted as a complete farming solution, Slopehelper is electrically powered and can be equipped with 13 different attachments, including a horizontal and vertical cutter for pruning branches both vertically and horizontally and an apple picking system that marketing materials say “imitates the movements of human hands.”

Developed by PeK Automotive of Vrhnika, Slovenia, the platform operates on continuous treads that can climb slopes of up to 42 degrees and perform tasks for the entire agricultural cycle, from planting to mulching.

Despite the hectares of new machinery all around the orange Slopehelper booth, Dr. Mikhail Kostkin, the CEO of PeK Automotive, argues that agricultural innovation isn’t moving as fast as it should. What’s holding it back?

Two reasons, Kostkin says. First, the tech boom, which he believes distracts technology entrepreneurs from solving problems that matter. “Say hello to NASDAQ — it doesn’t matter what you are doing. What’s important is to create a nice picture, a lot of kitsch. And after that, you are getting big money from nothing.”

Second, the agricultural industry, which he says is still fixated on the tractor, a 19th century concept that he says is out of sync with what 21st century people want. Kostkin argues that he could stop some young man in the hall and ask him, “Guy, do you want to be a tractor driver? What he will say? He will say no, are you crazy? That is not in my plan. But what if we would ask him, Do you want to be operator of robotic fleet? What answer will you hear? The answer will be yes, of course.”

Eventually, Kostkin believes that the industry will catch up with the times – at least some companies will. “You can ignore the future, yes, but in that case, the future will ignore you,” he warns darkly.

The march of technology appears relentless in agriculture. But it’s also sometimes gradual, waiting for that trigger issue or event to drive new tools from research facility to farm. At the 2016 Farm Progress Show Case IH shared a vision for the autonomous tractor, turning the Magnum into a cab-free wonder that got a lot of attention.

The Case IH Maxxum 145 Multicontroller has been awarded the title of Tractor of the Year 2019 and Best Design 2019 at an award ceremony on the first day of EIMA International, the farm equipment show, in Bologna, Italy. 

October is traditionally a good month for South African tractor sales as summer grain and oilseed farmers are typically preparing for the planting process.

New Holland Agriculture and its local distributor, The Motor and Engineering Company of Ethiopia (MOENCO) have organized a Demo Day for the new TC5.30 combine harvester on 24th and 25th of October

One should never preannounce the focus of their next column, because one never knows what the next day might hold.

Retail sales of agricultural equipment during December 2018 were as follows:

South Africa’s agricultural machinery sales data confirms the Crop Estimates Committee’s view of increased summer grain and oilseed plantings between January and February 2019 in the western parts of the country.

It is expected that by the end of 2023, tillage equipments would continue to lead the market share capturing over 27% and registering a CAGR of close to 2% during 2018-2023.

According to records by the South African Agricultural Machinery Association (SAAMA) that stated that for the period 1 January to 28 February 2019, tractor sales of 914 units and combine harvester sales of 19 units were respectively 20,5% and 34,5% lower than the 1 150 tractors and 29 combine harvesters sold over the same period in 2018. The news figures will be available soon. 

As Craig Sutton weaves his way through John Deere’s Technology and Innovation Center’s (MTIC) Additive Manufacturing Lab (MTIC) in Moline, Illinois, his excitement about advancements in the technology – also known as 3D printing – is evident.

The idea of utilizing all four wheels of a tractor to promote traction was not an entirely unknown concept when it popped into John Fitch’s brain as he plowed a field on his Mason County, Michigan, farm in 1910.

The future of farming: Driverless tractors, drones and robots. How is the agriculture industry changing as digital technology develops?

The notable annual decline in South Africa’s agricultural machinery sales in March 2019 is unsurprising, and mainly a function of base effects. March 2018 was an exceptional month, particularly for tractor sales, which reached a record level of 726 units in a dataset starting from 2014.

The agricultural mechanisation rate in SSA is the lowest in the world. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the European Agricultural Machinery Association, roughly 65% of land preparation is done manually by labourers in SSA, compared with around 40% in East Asia, 30% in South Asia and 25% in Latin America and the Caribbean.

If you started your day wearing clothing made of cotton, eating multigrain cereal doused with milk or filling your vehicle's tank with an ethanol blend, you may want to thank a farmer.