What does the future of farming look like? Will Indian farmers continue to use livestock and human labour to work the land or will technology reduce this burden to a large extent? That’s the question that many agritech startups are grappling with. Even as farmland income is being boosted by the use of technology, more can be done to solve the burden on farmers. ADVERTISEMENTAs Tesla unveiled its self-driving truck and Uber continues to build an autonomous car network; India too has a contender in the autonomous vehicle space — AutoNxt Automation. The Mumbai-based company’s prototype autonomous electric tractor has been developed for a range of farming operations including tilling, spraying pesticides, ploughing, sowing seeds and more. Once a farm is geofenced using geographical coordinates, and the farmer has defined a route for the tractor, AutoNxt’s autonomous farmhand can retrace that path endlessly on a daily basis, making sure that any operation is conducted consistently. The tractor becomes responsive in a matter of seconds and even alerts farmer’s mobile or tablet devices when it sees any obstruction for more than five minutes. Speaking to Inc42, Kaustubh Dhonde, CEO of AutoNxt Automation, said the problem with owning a traditional tractor in India is that there is a scarcity of people with the skills to drive a tractor. It also involves high operational expense (one needs to run the tractor for 1000 hours a year to make the purchase viable), and health hazards, because driving a tractor, according to Dhonde, is like driving a car without shock absorbers on a very bad road. “You can imagine the kind of pain that they [farmers] go through continuously and they tend to ignore it because obviously the average income of a farmer is like less than INR 7000 per month (in case of a small farmer), so it does not make sense for people to own a tractor.” – AutoNxt CEO Kaustubh Dhonde In order to overcome the high ownership cost of traditional tractors, farmers usually rent or lease the tractors from big farms or businesses offering agricultural renting services. The diesel-run tractors when replaced with autonomous electric tractors effectively reduce the tractor ownership cost by half and eliminate the need for a skilled driver. However, Dhonde noted that this does not eliminate jobs as AutoNxt tractors will still need someone to drive them from the farmer’s home to the farm.