Farmtech, meet humanoid robots, sort of: AGCO is bringing Digit to farm equipment manufacturing
Farm equipment, meet humanoid robots. But not on the farm just yet.
AGCO, one of the world's largest agricultural machinery companies with roughly $10 billion in annual revenue, has signed a commercial agreement with Agility Robotics to deploy Digit humanoid robots at its Hesston, Kansas manufacturing plant.
The pilot starts in 2027.
The announcement lands five weeks after Agility unveiled Digit 5 and disclosed more than $300 million in committed multi-year orders. AGCO is another name added to a customer list that includes Amazon, Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada, GXO Logistics, Schaeffler, and Mercado Libre.
What Digit will actually do in Hesston
The Hesston facility makes combines, hay balers, and forage equipment for Fendt and Massey Ferguson brands. It employs around 1,100 to 1,200 workers in a city of 3,600 people, making the plant the dominant employer in Harvey County, Kansas.
Digit's assigned tasks: parts sorting and stacking, moving and placing totes for storage, and supporting "repetitive, strenuous, or hazardous assembly operations." The framing from AGCO is that robots will absorb the injury-prone, physically demanding tasks and free workers for higher-skill work.
The company is explicitly positioning Digit as a teammate, not a replacement.
That's relevant, because AGCO furloughed 900 Hesston workers temporarily in late 2023 during an agricultural equipment demand trough. In addition, rural manufacturing facilities face real challenges in attracting and retaining workers.
Why farm equipment is harder than a warehouse
Warehouses and logistics centers get most of the humanoid robot deployment attention, partly because the use case is clean: move totes, handle boxes, repeat.
Agricultural equipment manufacturing is probably a little messier.
Combines and balers involve large, irregularly shaped metal assemblies with hundreds of subcomponents, none of them easy to manage via traditional fixed automation. The workspaces in a farm equipment plant are human-scaled: designed over decades for people, not industrial robots. They have standard human-width aisles and shelving built for human hands.
Agility specifically designed Digit to operate without infrastructure changes in customer facilities, which sounds like it will work well for a facility like Hesston.
Seasonal demand makes flexibility more valuable too.
Agricultural equipment production spikes hard around harvest cycles and planting seasons, then drops. Fixed automation optimized for peak capacity is wasteful. Humanoid robots that can be redeployed across tasks as demand shifts are a better economic fit for that kind of production profile.
Thomas Enghof, AGCO's Director of Manufacturing Technology, called the relationship a view that "humanoid robotics and AI are essential teammates in building flexible, intelligent factories."
Agility's commercial portfolio is maturing
Two years ago, Agility had one anchor customer in Amazon.
Now it has a portfolio across logistics, automotive manufacturing, e-commerce fulfillment, industrial supply chain, and agricultural equipment. It's still early days and we haven't seen much from Digit 5, but that's meaningful diversification.
Agility's SEC filings show Digit has accumulated more than 65,000 hours of commercial operation across 9 committed customer deployments. (Time to update that, Agility: it has certainly increased since then.) GXO moved more than 100,000 totes at roughly 98% operational accuracy. Schaeffler hit similar numbers across multiple facilities.
One other note, of course: the timing of the AGCO announcement also lines up with Agility's SPAC transaction: the company is going public at a $2.5 billion valuation via Churchill Capital Corp XI.
The Digit 5 timing
Agility unveiled Digit 5 on September 15, 2026.
The new robot has redesigned legs, improved battery systems, and safety certifications for operating near humans without physical barriers. Early access to Digit 5 begins in H1 2027, with broader availability over the following six to nine months.
The AGCO pilot is scheduled to begin in 2027, so these two schedules overlap, and that can't be a coincident. AGCO is going to receive Digit 5 units, not Digit 4. That means the Hesston pilot will be an early-access deployment on the latest generation of the robot, which gives Agility real-world stress testing data from a genuinely demanding manufacturing environment and gives AGCO a first-mover position in agricultural humanoid automation.
The agricultural equipment sector is much larger than Hesston, Kansas, and if Digit works well there, every major farm machinery manufacturer in the world will have to decide what to do next.
And then ... maybe 5 or 10 years down the road, can we think about humanoid robots not just making farm equipment, but also working on farms?
That's a much tougher proposition. But I think it will happen, eventually.
Sources
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I tell stories with data and build startups. I've raised angel and VC funds, led software companies and startups, and chronicled the rise of the mobile economy. Currently I write for Forbes, host several podcasts, and am starting up HumanoidMegaHub. I was TUNE's mobile economist and Singular's VP of Insights, built the research team at VentureBeat, and managed teams creating software for partners like Intel and Disney. In past lives I built websites, e-learning platforms, and mobile apps, and, a long time ago, was named to Folio's top 100 of the media industry's "most innovative entrepreneurs and market shaker-uppers.”