Here in the Technology Corner today, we’re talking about the PTx OutRun autonomous platform — a retrofit kit that enables autonomous grain cart, and now more recently, tillage operations. Mike Schlitt, PTx strategic marketing manager, shares a few stories from the field about how OutRun is winning farmers over in the race to autonomy. 

“In some scenarios, there were several growers who specifically said someone on the farm wasn’t available, they had something they had to do, and if OutRun wasn’t there, that (tillage) pass would’ve been put on hold until they were available again.”

“Another scenario … the wife on the farm who is also raising their children was constantly being pulled into the grain cart. This freed her up. she could take care of the family, and her husband could run the grain cart through OutRun while he was in the combine.”

“It’s (autonomy) a way to add efficiency. It’s no different than planting at high speed. You’d never do it until you had confidence in it, until you believed that it works, and you saw that it worked. As autonomy gets out there, you’ll start to see that it’s a viable option, this is something that works, I can depend on it, I can rely on it, I have awareness of what it’s doing and now I have the freedom of is that the most important place that I need to be or can I be somewhere else or can someone on the farm who’s helping me be somewhere else. I think it will be adopted, it just has to gain trust.”

2026 Precision Farming Dealer Most Valuable Dealer Precision Agri Services started testing OutRun last year and even explored using it with a Horsch seeder. Precision Agri Services CEO Bill Lehmkuhl says there were a few glitches with the system at first, but nothing major that couldn’t be worked through, and his experience with OutRun has been positive so far. 

“I had experience with the systems from Raven and Smart Ag. We were originally one of the Smart Ag dealers. Things have come a long way as far as ease of install of the system, functionality of user interface, and I think it will continue to grow. It’s a viable system for those who don’t have enough help in the fall on the grain cart side of things. You can allocate that labor over to somebody else, either doing tillage and/or seeding. The other aspect of it is taking that same system and being able to do tillage and/or seeding with it like some of the OEMs are going down that road, such as John Deere being able to do autonomous tillage, etc.”

There’s a one-time hardware investment and annual service fee for the kit. OutRun utilizes Starlink to overcome rural connectivity challenges. It’s compatible with John Deere 8R (2014+) and Fendt (900s) tractors.