Monarch Electric Tractor: The Autonomous Connected Tractor That Might Change Farming

Speaker 1: If you think moving our average passenger cars to being electric, autonomous and connected is gonna be the biggest sea change. You haven't been down on the farm lately, but you're about to be, this is the Monarch tractor. It's electric, autonomous smart, and connected. I know what you're saying. Oh yeah, they do that with cars these days. I get it. No, you don't. When you apply those technologies to a tractor, it's a very different game. Let me show you [00:00:30] rather than use its electric power to go to 60 in two seconds, or it's autonomy to let you snooze, while you get driven. This tractor uses those technologies to point toward a smarter food system that is more sustainable. And in the end, Monarch says more knowable monarch's president is ex Tesla and zoo sky mark sch swagger. He showed me around the thing, you know, I was walking around with you saying, oh, look at all the sensors and look at all this stuff. And you said the business end is right here. Speaker 2: [00:01:00] The work that it does is really based on the implement that it connects Speaker 1: The stuff you hook up back here. So Speaker 2: You think about what, um, DeWalt has with their battery on hand tools, the battery connects to a power drill, connects to a weed whacker. The battery is essentially the tractor. The thing that does the work is the weed whacker, the drill. So all the connections that connects to this tractor. So whether it's a sprayer, a mower, and under the vine cultivator, uh, a plow, [00:01:30] a disor, every single attachment has to work with the single platform we've installed the maximum number of points of control from a by wire perspective to make this platform automatable, regardless of what you connect Speaker 1: To it. So what I'm seeing here in my layperson's view is lots of mechanical connections here, here, and here, and then lots of hydraulic connections. And this is your power takeoff, your PTO, correct? This thing for those who, people who don't know, this is the most important thing in a tractor, right? This is what makes things powered [00:02:00] that Speaker 2: Attached. Correct. Speaker 1: Okay. And so all of these are smart connections attachments. Speaker 2: So the, the, the attachments are mechanical. You still have to go and connect these directly to them, Speaker 1: But your, but your places of connection are sensed, Speaker 2: Correct. They're sensed from a load perspective and they're sensed from a control perspective. So we can tilt the implement either way we can lift and lower. Um, we can tilt it front and back. Uh, we can control it from the PTO [00:02:30] and we can control via external Speaker 1: Hydraulic. So, you know, what's going on with your hydraulic pressures all the time from sensing that exactly. So a, a farmer would say, well, yeah, I can do that too. To have you do it is better. How Speaker 2: So? We don't tell farmers how to farm. We let farmers tell the tractor how to farm. And so they can do that. A number of ways they can train the tractor by driving it and performing an operation and teaching the tractor exactly how learning done. Exactly. Speaker 1: I see sensors here, uh, [00:03:00] in the front. Um, what are you using? Anything like LIDAR Speaker 2: Or no lidars, no radars. Uh, we are no, Speaker 1: Not the auto industry's Gaga for LIDAR. Uh, Speaker 2: We don't have to in our, in our industry, one is we have a policy here which is called farmer frugal, and these sensors are really, really expensive. They're also appropriate for the automotive industry because you have to be able to see if you're going 60, 70 miles an hour down the highway, you have to be able to see with pretty good fidelity, a hundred, 200 [00:03:30] yards down the road. Yeah. So you can stop in time. We don't have that problem when we're in an autonomous mode, because we're only going two or three miles an hour. That's the speed of the operation. When a, a driver is driving a tractor Speaker 1: That's work speed. Speaker 2: Correct. Okay. And so that makes our stopping distance, you know, four, five feet, um, up here in the front is where we have our EV battery kind Speaker 1: Of up in here. Speaker 2: Yep. We packaged this front and low and one, because that was the available space for the tractor. [00:04:00] Yeah. And two, because typically what you see on a traditional tractor is you need a counterbalance, Speaker 1: But of metal weights are sitting up in the Speaker 2: Front. Exactly. And so the battery actually provides that balance because it's so heavy. Um, and Speaker 1: Oh, so you guys love the weight of a battery where all the car guys hate Speaker 2: It. Exactly. Speaker 1: Let's stop for some nuts and bolts. I know you're wondering Monarch expects up to 10 hours of work time on a charge six to eight. If the work is really tough or high load, a full charge on a level two connector [00:04:30] picks about four to five hours, 40 horsepower, continuous, 70 horsepower peak. Now those numbers aren't gonna impress a car person, but two thirds of all tractors sold in the us have under 40 horsepower. According to John Deere, unlike most TVs, this electric tractor does have gears nine forward and three reverse for handling a variety of drive and implement loads and making the most of that two digit horsepower, a two wheel drive Monarch model will cost $58,000 add 10,000 for all wheel drive. Speaker 2: [00:05:00] This is a utility space for the tractor. As much as we wanted to automate farming operations, to help farmers be more economically viable. We didn't want to take away the utility capability of a utility tractor, which is the one off things that farmers have to do move this thing from a to B, right? Speaker 1: Where does the brains of this thing live? Where the computer, if you will. Speaker 2: So all of the brains live up here in the roof. Speaker 1: Oh, interesting. Okay. And Speaker 2: Basically, Speaker 1: So behind this sensor [00:05:30] and a light package, yes. By the way, what what's going Speaker 2: On here. So this is a way for the tractor to communicate to people around it. So basically what you have is the ability for a robotic instrument to communicate in a collaborative environment where you may have people in the field doing something on the farm, you should know what the tractor is thinking, and the tractor should know to communicate. If it sees you exactly what it's doing. So this is how you perform almost every function on the tractor. [00:06:00] So for example, if you want to turn on one of the autonomy modes or you want to report a route, or if you want to do one of our other modes like shadow mode, which is the tractor follows, you, you actuate it by this screen. You can also see exactly where you are on the farm. You can look through each and every camera, including the PTO camera. So if you're driving the tractor in front of you and you want to make sure that the operation's being done correctly, Speaker 1: I can watch that implement right up here Speaker 2: Rather than trying to drive the tractor forwards and looking Speaker 1: Behind you, classic farmer, stiff neck thing, [00:06:30] right? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. All right. So I haven't been in a tractor in a while, but this one feels relatively familiar in that it's got lots of manual controls, still Speaker 2: Training the tractor. Somebody's gonna be sitting in this thing, the one off jobs, okay. Somebody's gonna be sitting in this thing, but the majority of the hours, somebody won't be. And so all of these controls that we have, even though they are manual, meaning you can grab them with your hand. Yeah. None of these are [00:07:00] connected directly to the power train and the controls of the tractor. They're all completely by wire, Speaker 1: So they can pass through your smarts and you can harvest anything that I do and memorize that and make it a training. Speaker 2: Exactly. The only way to control this tractor from the cloud is to have everything by wire, all of the points of control. And so we've done that. We've actually gone through a lot of effort to put a seat and a steering wheel on this tractor. Speaker 1: <laugh> you kind of didn't want to, right. I mean, it's like, we can do [00:07:30] all this another way, but you need this, like you say, one off and training Speaker 2: Environment. Correct. And there is an emotional connection between a farmer and the tractor. Yeah. And we don't want to lose that aspect of the tractor being the center of the farm's universe and the farmer relying on the tractor for essentially making money. Speaker 1: I mean, come on. How would they do country music videos? If you didn't have shots of farmers and tractors, you can't kill that. Speaker 2: You would never want to. Speaker 1: [00:08:00] That's how the Monarch tractor does what it does, but really what is that? Monarch CEO, Pravin, Penn MEA says it's about putting electric and autonomous vehicle technologies to work where they make the most sense. Speaker 3: You know, I come from a world of building high performance, electric, super cars, right? Those were some of the things that I worked on in my previous life. So why take that technology and go at like 3, 4, 5 miles an hour. <laugh> ag for me made a lot more sense when I looked [00:08:30] at not just the technology side, which is the electric, the automated and the smart data, all those three really had a place in agriculture. So for me, it, it felt like there was a natural, uh, desire for those three things. Whereas in automotive, I felt like it was a little bit contrived Speaker 1: And let's face it. Autonomy has been a tough climb in the consumer vehicle market, finding its relevance, making it pay for itself. Yeah. Covering the cost here. It sounds like a lot of the answers are [00:09:00] just laying there. Speaker 3: We are taking advantage of all the work that's been done on the autonomous car world, right? Whether it's the hardware side, like the camera technology we have, we don't have any lidars or radars or the GPS technology. We have, we have been able to stand on the tens of billions of dollars in investment that the automotive industry put in. But again, let's look at, uh, the farm that we are on here, right? It's a much more controlled environment. There's no people around here it's structured, it's rose, right. It comes with its own challenges. [00:09:30] But I felt like this was a much more solvable problem in the immediate now than what we are trying to do with autonomous cars. And there's a higher value to what we are doing here than on the autonomous car side. So that's why I'm in agriculture, high value work. And also more hours of work. We all drive our cars to work and to back and these days, even, even less, and Speaker 1: Then park them all park them the time. Speaker 3: Yeah. Tractors on the other side are used for full days and sometimes days and nights during planting season and harvesting season. [00:10:00] So there's more utilization. And also there's a real death of people who want to do the dull, dirty, dangerous job of tractor driving Speaker 1: Tractors. I would imagine don't turn over too off and even personal cars we're hanging on to 'em for like a record 12 years, these days for economic reasons. What's the turnover forecast on tractors. How long will it take you to turn over the fleet? Speaker 3: Yeah, that's a great question. And today where it's a mechanical device doing mechanical things and the value proposition [00:10:30] is just on the tractor platform. Yeah. They don't turn over that Speaker 1: Often. They kind last forever, Speaker 3: Right? They last forever and farmers hang on to them forever because they're not getting any additional value. But now let's pause for a second. If the value of the tractor is not just in the operation, it's doing on the farm, but it's on the autonomy side with the sensors on it. And for example, if our, my next stack of automation can make an operation go faster and cheaper for a farmer, will they turn over the tractor more? Of course, right? It's an [00:11:00] ROI discussion. It's a return on investment. It's a payback discussion at that time. Speaker 1: The big picture. Now I was surprised when you and I were talking earlier about why you're doing this. I thought you were gonna say, oh, cuz electric cuts down on fumes and reduces fuel consumption. And autonomous means you can, you know, save on labor behind the wheel. You took it to a whole nother level. Your big picture is about the food that we Speaker 3: Eat. Once we provide an electric automated tool, it allows the farmer to tell the story of what's happening on the farm, using our data back [00:11:30] to our consumer. So the fact that it's electric and the fact that it's automated allows the farmer for the first time ever to collect data on what's happening on the farm, make intelligent decisions to reduce water usage and pesticide usage. And tell that story to us as consumers to say, Hey, this is how I, my, my fruit was grown. Speaker 1: That's a very interesting connection to say, this is about, uh, transparency into our food. I, I just, I didn't see that coming. Speaker 3: The tractor sits at the center of [00:12:00] every operation on the farm. While from the time the planting season starts to the harvesting season, the tractors involved in 80 plus percent of those operations. So it makes it the logical platform to also collect data at zero cost, zero additional cost to the farmer whose only option otherwise is to deploy even more labor, even more equipment like drones or satellites to collect data at a time when their margins are under pressure. Why not use a platform that's already there doing all the work? Speaker 1: [00:12:30] Monarch is certainly not the only company reinventing the tractor though. Equipment giant case. New Holland recently licensed the company's technology select track is simply focused on electrifying tractors, leaving out monarch's connected layer. John Deere recently showed tractor autonomy as a retrofit kit. No electric drive required and Z tractors models will be so digital that they'll have no driver seat at all. This Monarch tractor is a good example of [00:13:00] an increasingly loud drumbeat in my ears of the idea that autonomy, electrification, connectivity and the data from it are really gonna pay their biggest and soonest pay dirt in high value, frequent constant tasks, not being deployed in personal cars that allow you to watch Netflix for five minutes while your car takes you to whole foods.