Fully driverless vehicles may still be years away from hitting a street near you, but how about your local farm?

John Deere unveiled its first fully autonomous tractor at CES on Tuesday. While self-driving tractors have been running on farms for at least a decade, the new 8R tractor takes things a step further, allowing farmers to leave the cab and control the machine remotely.

Big picture: The world’s population is growing, and that means food production needs to increase rapidly. At the same time, the people who grow that food are aging—the average farmer in the US is older than 55—and having difficulty finding skilled agricultural workers.

John Deere says automation is the answer, but that solution comes with more costs for farmers and it has not yet been proven at scale.

“Now we’re layering in autonomy, so that the farmer is no longer tied to that machine all day, but can instead focus their attention on the jobs that require more expertise from them,” Deanna Kovar, vice president of production and precision ag production systems at John Deere, told Emerging Tech Brew.

The company has not released the price point for the tractor, but the existing 8R tractor and chisel plow for tilling sell for as much as $500,000, without autonomous features.

• For context, the annual cost of production for the average farm in the US was about $180,000 in 2020, according to the USDA.

The new autonomous 8R and chisel plow will be available for 10 to 50 farmers in the Upper Midwest to rent through select dealers when it rolls out in fall 2022. Kovar said the company hopes to at least double that number in fall 2023 and eventually switch to an ownership model.

How it works

The tractor uses machine learning to till the soil and can run 24 hours a day, only needing to stop every eight to 10 hours for refueling. Farmers track its progress and monitor any issues through an app, but don’t need to be in the cab or even in the field.

• The new 8R is equipped with six pairs of stereo cameras that give the machine the ability for 360-degree obstacle detection.
• The company says the tractor uses a deep neural network, which has been trained on more than 50 million images, from farms collected over the last three years, to guide the machine, but humans are on standby to help make decisions.

Looking ahead…In addition to tilling the soil, Kovar says John Deere aims to make planting seeds, applying fertilizers, and harvesting crops autonomous by the end of the decade.

Click here to read the full piece.—GD

Ah, January. A time for reflections and resolutions, predictions and prognostications. Lots, and lots of prognostications.

Rather than add our voices to the chorus of soothsayers, we’ve collected a list of some of the most interesting year-ahead documents we’ve seen thus far. Below is a selection of three, but click here to view our full list of 14 predictions docs.

Food tech: What food-industry professionals think 2022 will hold for food tech. (FoodHack)

• Sneak preview: Cultured meat will keep gaining steam, but there’s no expectation that it will be fully approved in the US this year. There could be a shroom boom, for everything from regular consumption to use in packaging.

Crypto: Crypto theses for 2022. (Messari)

• To say that 2021 was a big year for crypto is like saying Elon Musk is a Twitter troll: Duh. So what does 2022 hold for the space? Crypto research firm Messari put together 165 pages, spanning Bitcoin to Web3, trying to figure that out.

Engineering: 12 exciting engineering milestones to look for in 2022. (IEEE Spectrum)

• This one is less foretelling the future and more marking the calendar, but it’s a helpful document—maybe even more so for the decision to sidestep speculation.

Click here to see our full 2022 predictions reading list.—DM

With gas prices soaring and fossil-fuel usage burning up the planet, it’s safe to say the entire world has gas problems.

Ethereum, the network responsible for the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency and the foundation of all things NFT and Web3, also has a gas problem. Only it has little to do with fossil fuels and everything to do with fees.

“I think the word ‘gas’ is problematic,” Garrick Hileman, the head of research at Blockchain.com, told Morning Brew. “I think actually just dropping the term ‘gas’ would be helpful, because gasoline is not involved with what’s happening here.”

Let’s break it down: Gas fees are sliding-scale transaction fees that dictate which Ethereum orders get processed first. As Morning Brew’s Ashwin Rodrigues explains in this deep dive on gas fees:

• “Unprocessed orders for ethereum sit in a ‘mempool’ (memory + pool) where miners can see how much additional ‘gas’ (also called a ‘tip’ or ‘priority fee’) an individual is willing to pay to have their order prioritized, on top of a base fee automatically generated by the network, which factors in current demand.”

Bottom line: Gas fees are a way to incentivize miners to process transactions and keep the Web3 machine humming along, but they can price out less wealthy people and be used to extract extra cash from participants via a practice known as “frontrunning.”

Click here to read Ashwin's full piece on gas fees.—DM

Stat: Global venture capital funding smashed records last year, nearly doubling the previous year’s total. In 2020, VCs spent $335 billion, per Crunchbase—last year, they spent $643 billion.

Quote: “There is not the internet of Texas. There is not the internet of Maine. There is the internet. And a lot of these issues should be dealt with at the federal level. But that message only goes so far with state legislators when what they see is inaction.”—David Edmonson, vice president at TechNet, on states taking tech regulation into their own hands

Read: Our year in review, ICYMI over the holiday.

Three of the following news stories are true, and one...we made up. Can you spot the odd one out?

• Samsung’s new remote uses radio waves to charge.
• L’Oréal announced a gadget that automates hair dyeing.
• An e-bike company unveiled a prototype of a flying e-bike at CES.
• Amazon is blasting Alexa into space.

An accursed but reliable rule of our pandemic-mired times: Supply chain and rising prices will come for most industries, eventually.

Next up: The critical, fast-growing US solar industry. A recent report from the Solar Energy Industries Association and research firm Wood Mackenzie predicted US solar will grow 25% less than previously expected in 2022.

• But despite these intertwined pressures, the US installed a record-high amount of solar in Q3 2021, the report found.
• Across the first three quarters of 2021, solar accounted for 54% of all new US energy generation capacity, but it’s estimated to make up just ~4% of the US’s overall power mix.

Catch up on the top Emerging Tech Brew stories from the past few editions:

• A brief intro to CES 2022
• Last year, experts told us what to expect for 2021. Here’s how their predictions shook out
• Quantum computing remains far from commercialization, but 2021 brought it several steps closer