Move over, Tesla. There’s a new driverless vehicle champ in town. And it’s a tractor. The Tesla Model S Plaid can go from zero to 60 miles an hour in 1.9 seconds and allows you drive to the mall without touching the steering wheel. But can it plow your 200-acre corn field while you take a nap? The new John Deere can.
Deere & Company has been in the news lately since 10,000 of its workers had been on strike in 11 factories, including in Iowa. This was the largest strike in the country since the three-week walkout against General Motors two years ago. Profitability at Deere was good last year, despite the pandemic, rising 11 percent over 2019 with revenue climbing to $32.7 billion over the first three quarters. United Auto Workers representing Deere employees sought and eventually won a 10 percent raise with improved benefits. Before the strike the average production worker at Deere made around $60,000.
Deere’s self-driving tractor is a 40,000-pound beast with six pairs of stereo cameras that can see in every direction like some gigantic spider creeping across the field. Its precision rivals even the best driver with accuracy to within one inch. It never needs vacation time and it never falls asleep at the wheel and runs over barbed wire fences. How much will it cost? If you have to ask, you can’t afford it. Deere reports that the tractor will be manufactured at the Waterloo Works and employ 5,000 workers. (Until robots replace them.)
As in much of the rest of the country, affordable housing in Iowa is in short supply. And so are construction workers. The solution might be 3D-printed homes. Iowa State University has recently received a $1.4 million grant to develop a system for producing houses cheaper and faster than conventional methods. The 3D “printer” which can be loaded on a semi and transported to the construction site works very much like small home 3D printers except that instead of using layer-upon-layer of plastic filament, the robotic arm builds foundations and walls, squirting on layers of cement. Instead of taking weeks or months to build a house, a 3D house can go up in as little as three days and cost half as much as a regular frame house, using hardly any humans.
ISU will be working with Brunow Contracting to build a 40-unit complex in Hamburg, which had lost entire neighborhoods in the 2019 flood, demonstrating how 3D construction can assist recover efforts. According to ISU’s College of Design, the new concrete homes are not only faster and cheaper to produce, but have stood up well to natural disasters like derechos.
Driving a tractor round and round a field can be tedious. And so is banging nails into two-by-fours, building a house. Now Roomba robots even make vacuuming obsolete. We used to complain about the drudgery. Someday, I bet we’ll miss those boring jobs when they’re gone.