AEM Puts AI on Farm Machines as Tractor Sales Slide

The Association of Equipment Manufacturers released a whitepaper on Sept. 10, 2026, that sorts AI on farm machines into Assist, Advise, and Act.

The Milwaukee trade group, which represents more than 1,000 off-road equipment makers, presents the tools as a way for growers to stay productive as jobs get harder. The same group’s retail tally shows U.S. tractor sales down 13.1% through July, with four-wheel-drive units off 38.7% that month.

From the field to the farm office, AI is changing how decisions get made across agriculture.

As technology evolves, farmers are gaining new tools to improve productivity, manage resources more effectively, and maximize equipment uptime. Explore the opportunities, challenges, and… pic.twitter.com/FyOgWq0Ike

— Association of Equipment Manufacturers (AEM) (@aemadvisor) September 10, 2026

What Assist, Advise, and Act Mean in the Cab?

Assist-level AI supports the person in the seat through guidance systems, implement control, and automated functions while that person stays in charge. Advise-level AI reads large volumes of machine and field data and then offers recommendations. Act-level AI lets the machine carry out work with more independence, including targeted spray and unmanned field passes.

THREE JOBS IN THE NEW PAPER

Austin Gellings, AEM’s senior director of agricultural services, oversees the Ag Technology Leadership Group that wrote the paper. He tied the work to pressure on farms, not to a product launch calendar.

AI technology is proving to help farmers in their efforts to be productive and competitive, especially as operational challenges continue to intensify for the ag industry.

Austin Gellings, Senior Director of Agricultural Services, AEM

Seth Zentner, a precision farming and systems engineer at member firm CLAAS, Inc. and chair of that leadership group, said AI is becoming an essential tool because it turns data into action and helps growers respond as conditions change. The paper also walks through responsible rollout, pointing to standards, safety rules, interoperability work, and governance practices the industry already runs.

Tractor Sales Keep Falling on AEM’s Own Books

AEM is the body that counts U.S. retail tractor and combine sales each month. Its July 2026 U.S. tractor sales report, released Aug. 11, 2026, is the backdrop the AI paper does not mention.

THE JULY 2026 RETAIL TALLY

Dealers still held 95,220 tractors and 914 combines in beginning inventory that July. High-horsepower retail, the iron that depends on row-crop cash flow, has been the weak spot: AEM’s mid-August outlook said 2026 volume in that class was on track to finish 18% to 25% below 2025, after sales through June had already fallen to historic lows.

Rural bankers see the same freeze. Creighton University’s August 2026 survey of bank CEOs across a 10-state farm and energy belt put the farm equipment sales index of 22.2, down from 27.8 in July and the 36th straight month under the growth-neutral mark of 50. Ernie Goss, who runs the survey at Creighton’s Heider College of Business, said producers are holding back on new machines because of volatility and low or negative cash flow. Bankers in that poll said equipment loans were only 5.3% of farm lending, against 52.6% for real estate and 31.4% for operating credit.

Curt Blades, AEM’s senior vice president, said in June that farmers were hurting and that equipment sales were a clear read on farm-economy health and weak commodity prices. May tractor sales had dropped 21.6% from a year earlier, with combines down 56.1%. Software that can be bolted onto a machine already in the yard is an easier invoice than a new four-wheel-drive unit when that class is down 38.7% in a single month.

5 Percent More Crop and 9 Percent Less Herbicide

The Assist and Advise rungs are not a brochure. In March 2026 AEM published The Benefits of Precision Ag in the United States, a study done with the American Farm Bureau Federation, the American Soybean Association, CropLife America, and the National Corn Growers Association. It put numbers on tools that already sit on guidance-equipped tractors, section-controlled planters, and variable-rate spreaders.

PRECISION AG GAINS AEM COUNTS

• Crop output: Production up 5% where the tools are in use.
• Fertilizer: Use down 8%.
• Herbicide: Use down 9% in the study, a farm-wide figure separate from targeted-spray trials.
• Water and fuel: Water down 5%, fuel down 7%.

AEM said a row-crop operator running 1,000 acres could add about $118,000 from those combined gains. Gellings argued the win is efficiency per pound of input, not a smaller bill for its own sake, because crop output per pound of fertilizer has risen over time.

Targeted spray is the piece that already looks like Act-level work. Cameras and machine learning fire a nozzle only when they see a weed. AEM said studies put the herbicide cut for that method at 50% to 90%, a range for the spray pass, not for the whole-farm 9% in the precision-ag study. Adam Barlow, manager of technology standards and regulatory affairs for precision agriculture at John Deere, said early systems worked green-on-brown in fallow and now read green-on-green inside a canopy, and that the same stack has moved from corn, cotton, and soybeans into wheat, barley, canola, sugar beets, and peanuts.

Barlow also said corn prices were about where they were in the 1980s, which is why a spray system that spends less chemical still sells when a new tractor does not. Mike Mills, director of sustainability solutions at irrigation maker Reinke Manufacturing, put the money choice in one line: sell the crop for more, or spend less to grow it.

A Narrow Set of Jobs for Empty Cabs

Act is the rung the paper wants readers to see as inevitable. Commercial use is still a short list, and it clusters on tasks with clear boundaries, repeatable paths, and a person who can still take the machine back.

WHAT IS ALREADY IN THE FIELD

• Operator support: In-cab prompts and alerts that sit on Assist and Advise hardware already rolling.
• Predictive maintenance: Fault data used to schedule shop time before a breakdown in a planting or harvest window.
• Precision spraying: Camera-triggered nozzles, the live example AEM uses for Act.
• Unmanned passes: Tillage and spraying inside a mapped boundary, with a supervisor on or off the machine.
• Retrofit kits: Cameras, lidar, radios, and an edge computer added to tractors that never left the factory with that electrical architecture.

Member firm Bluewhite has described that last path in AEM’s own pages: a front sensing module, a rear LTE and 5G pack, steering and function controls, and a fleet screen, sold to growers in California and Washington who want autonomy on iron they already own. That is the second-order move. When four-wheel-drive retail is down 27.0% for the year, the growth story is a kit, a subscription, and a data pipe, not another 400-horsepower chassis.

Advise-level tools also need clean data. Gellings told an ag-retail audience in 2025 that targeted spray and fully autonomous systems both fail if the data is not usable. The new paper’s middle rung is the unglamorous one: the farm has to feed the model before the model can drive the boom.

AEM’s Six-Level Autonomy Chart Came First

The three AI jobs sit on top of language AEM already handed its members. In July 2026 the group published Levels of Autonomy for Non-Road Equipment, a guidance note that sets six levels of non-road autonomy from 0 through 5. It is not a design spec and not a regulation. It is a shared script for talking to customers, staff, and people who write rules.

Level 0 is manual. Level 1 is assisted operation, with the person still running most functions; AEM’s farm example is section control. Level 2 is partial automation, with the machine handling most functions under an on-board operator; the farm example is multiple-product variable-rate application. Level 3 is conditional automation with active on-board or remote supervision; the farm example is targeted spray with autosteer. Level 4 is supervised autonomy inside a set boundary. Level 5 is unsupervised autonomy inside that boundary, and the farm example is autonomous spraying with auto-reloading.

The note repeats that an operator can take control at every level. That sentence is doing policy work. Assist in the new paper matches Levels 1 and 2. Act matches Levels 3 through 5. Advise does not appear on the driving chart at all, because a recommendation engine is not a driving mode. Compressing six rungs into three AI jobs makes the pitch simpler for a whitepaper. The six-level chart is still the document members can slide across a table when a regulator asks who is responsible if a sprayer keeps rolling.

The Ag Technology Leadership Group’s own charge is automation and autonomy, data and machine interoperability, and cybersecurity, with public perception, connectivity, power, and carbon as support goals. Zentner, speaking earlier about the 2025 guidance set, said he is not a cybersecurity specialist and that the papers give him a way to talk with people who are, and with people who are not. The Sept. 10 paper is the public-facing version of that in-house vocabulary.

Repair Tools Reach Shops Under a 10-Year Order

Once a tractor diagnoses itself, recommends a part, and then drives a pass, the fight moves from horsepower to who may open the software. That fight was in court and at EPA while this paper was in draft.

THE POLICY TRACK BEHIND THE PAPER

1. July 24, 2025: AEM publishes guidance on data layers, cybersecurity for machine data, and the six autonomy levels for non-road equipment.
2. February 2, 2026: EPA tells engine and equipment makers that the Clean Air Act allows temporary overrides of emission controls when the point is repair, including DEF and inducement systems on nonroad diesel, and that owners are not required to use authorized dealers.
3. March 23, 2026: AEM releases the precision-ag benefits study that underpins the Assist and Advise claims.
4. July 8, 2026: The FTC and five states file a stipulated order in the Northern District of Illinois requiring Deere to give farmers and independent shops the same electronic repair resources dealers get.
5. August 11, 2026: AEM’s July flash report confirms another month of falling tractor and combine retail.
6. September 10, 2026: AEM releases the Assist, Advise, and Act whitepaper.

The FTC’s 10-year right-to-repair settlement is the clearest limit on how far Act-level lock-in can go in the near term. Daniel Guarnera, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Competition, said the order lets farmers fix their own tractors without paying an authorized Deere dealer to do it. Deere must, on fair and reasonable terms, allow reading and clearing of fault codes, reprogramming and pairing of electronic parts, restarts after emissions limp mode, and access to technical manuals and troubleshooting notes. Future tools must be offered once Deere has given them to more than half of its U.S. dealer network. Dealers may not punish shops or owners who use those tools. The Commission vote was 2-0. The term runs 10 years and can stretch if Deere breaks it.

The order is also explicit about what it does not transfer. Buying or licensing the repair resources does not hand over Deere’s intellectual property in the code. Independent shops can clear a fault. They do not get the training set that taught a sprayer which leaf is a weed. Advise-level models and Act-level perception stacks live on that far side of the line. Iowa has already drafted a data-ownership bill that would keep raw yield, soil, and machine data with the producer. Right-to-repair was the warm-up. Control of the insight is the longer argument, and AEM’s paper asks for “appropriate frameworks” while its members still write most of the technical language.

Guest-Worker Visas Have Grown Sevenfold Since 2005

The paper’s food-security close is easier to hear in a labor market that cannot fill crews. USDA’s Economic Research Service counts about 385,000 H-2A jobs in fiscal 2024, up from just over 48,000 in fiscal 2005, a sevenfold rise in the main seasonal-worker program. Foreign-born farmworkers have aged by close to seven years since 2006 as fewer young immigrants enter the jobs. The Department of Labor, citing USDA, put 2025 hired-labor expenses at $53.5 billion.

Row-crop farms feel that pinch less than fruit, vegetable, and dairy operations, but the cab is still short of people during the windows that weather allows. Assist-level autosteer already lets one operator cover more acres. Act-level tillage and spray promise night hours without a second wage. That is the farmer-facing case, and it is real. The maker-facing case is that a connected machine still throws off service and subscription revenue after the retail lot has gone quiet.

AEM says the U.S. equipment industry supports 2.2 million jobs and $415 billion in economic activity, across more than 200 product lines. Those figures describe an iron business. The whitepaper describes the overlay that business wants to sell next. Gellings said that when the tools are deployed with care and backed by those frameworks, AI strengthens farm-level resiliency, supports a competitive sector, and helps keep the food system stable. The Assist and Advise rungs already show up in herbicide tanks and fertilizer bills. Act still has to clear cash flow, connectivity, and the question of who is allowed to service the model when the boom is in the field and the dealer is two counties away.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do AEM’s three AI levels map to its six autonomy levels?

Assist covers the guidance and implement-control work AEM already filed as Levels 1 and 2, where a person still runs the machine. Advise has no twin on that chart because it is a data-and-recommendation layer, not a driving mode. Act covers the supervised and unsupervised rungs, Levels 3 through 5, including targeted spray with autosteer at Level 3 and autonomous spraying with auto-reloading at Level 5.

Who sits on AEM’s Ag Technology Leadership Group?

Seth Zentner of CLAAS of America, Inc. is chair and Brett McMickell of Kubota North America is vice chair, each elected for a two-year term. Austin Gellings is the AEM staff contact. The group’s primary goals are automation and autonomy, data and machine interoperability, and cybersecurity.

What did EPA say about repairing nonroad diesel emissions systems?

On Feb. 2, 2026, EPA said the Clean Air Act already allows temporary overrides of emission-control systems when the purpose is repair, covering selective catalytic reduction, inducement systems, and diesel exhaust fluid hardware on nonroad diesel engines. The guidance also said equipment owners are not required to rely on authorized dealers for that work.

Which states joined the FTC’s Deere right-to-repair case?

Illinois, Arizona, Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin joined the Federal Trade Commission as co-plaintiffs. The stipulated order was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, and stipulated orders have the force of law once a district judge signs them.