Sabanto, an autonomous tractor startup based in Itasca, Illinois, has developed a retrofit kit that turns old tractors into self-driving farming machines. Vice President Mike Burdick noted that farmers have many tasks and would benefit from autonomous operation. The startup launched in 2018, with founder Craig Rupp, a serial entrepreneur who grew up on a farm in northwest Iowa, seeking to address the labor shortage impacting American farmers. The president of the nation’s Farm Bureau said in April that the labor shortage is “holding agriculture back, and threatening the future of our American-grown food supply.” Rupp initially built his own prototype, then raised a $2 million seed round in 2019 to hire engineers. In 2021, Sabanto arrived at a working model of agricultural tech that could upgrade standard tractors into autonomous ones and began selling retrofit kits. Sabanto currently employs about 50 people and has 300 units in operation in the United States and Australia. The tech uses LiDAR remote-sensing systems similar to those in autonomous cars but is designed for fields, not urban roads, and can perform tasks like tilling, aerating, mowing, spraying, and seeding. According to Burdick, the system “probably quadruples output and capability.”