Robots & agtech: John Deere invested in humanoids. AGCO is actually deploying them.
Robots & agtech: humanoids building farm equipment
Three weeks before Agility Robotics listed on Nasdaq, AGCO Corporation signed a commercial agreement to deploy Digit humanoid robots at its farm equipment manufacturing facility in Hesston, Kansas. AGCO is one of the 9 paying customers that made up Agility's commercial track record heading into the public markets.
The partnership, announced October 20, will put Digit robots on the production floor at Hesston beginning in 2027.
The tasks are parts sorting, tote placement, and general assembly support. Thomas Enghof, AGCO's Director of Manufacturing Technology, described the approach as treating humanoid robots and AI as "essential teammates in building flexible, intelligent factories."
The plant that furloughed 900 workers
Hesston has been making farm equipment since 1947.
The facility employs roughly 1,100 production workers across 13 production lines building combines, windrowers, large square balers, and hay and forage equipment for Fendt and Massey Ferguson brands.
AGCO has invested more than $28 million in the site since 2021.
It has also furloughed up to 900 of those workers during recent downturns in the agricultural cycle. Farm equipment sales are notoriously cyclical: when commodity prices drop, farmers delay capital purchases, and factories like Hesston absorb the shock directly. AGCO's 2025 net sales were $10.08 billion, down 13.5% from the prior year.
The company is in the middle of a restructuring program targeting up to $200 million in cost reductions. That's probably part of the reason why AGCO is careful to frame the humanoid pilot as an ergonomics play, not a headcount reduction.
The jobs targeted for Digit are "repetitive, physically demanding tasks" that AGCO says it wants to remove from human workers' daily routine. In a factory town where the plant is the dominant employer, that's important framing.
AGCO vs. John Deere: two very different bets
The most revealing context for AGCO's move is what its main competitor is doing.
John Deere participated in Apptronik's $935 million round in February 2026, alongside Google, Mercedes-Benz, and others. But while John Deere is an investor in a humanoid startup, it has not yet announced a factory deployment.
In contrast, AGCO is a paying customer of Agility.
Agility has accumulated 65,000-plus combined operating hours across its customer sites. Every hour at Hesston will add to that number, which is what moves the needle for enterprise buyers evaluating whether to follow.
The harder proving ground
Farm equipment manufacturing is a substantially harder environment for humanoid robots than the tote-handling tasks Digit performs at GXO's Spanx fulfillment center in Georgia.
Agricultural machinery involves large, irregular components, significant weight variation, and processes that require force and precision against metal and hydraulic parts. The structured simplicity of "pick tote, place tote" doesn't necessarily translate directly to supporting assembly of a Hesston windrower header.
(A windrower, by the way, is a machine that cuts hay or small grain crops and forms them into a windrow, or row, for drying. I'm adding this because I legit didn't know it either.)
This is interesting precisely because of that difficulty. If Digit can contribute meaningfully at Hesston, it expands the addressable market for humanoid robots well beyond the warehouse applications that have dominated early deployments. If it struggles, it identifies at least one of the next categories of technical problems the industry needs to solve.
Agility's pricing for Digit 5 looks to be $8,500 per month on a RaaS model plus a $25,000 deployment fee.
At 2 shifts per day, that works out to roughly $10 to $12 per hour. A production worker at Hesston earns an estimated $45,000 to $65,000 per year in base wages before benefits. The economics are closer than they look at first: a robot at $102,000 per year, versus a human at $70,000 to $85,000 fully loaded, running indefinitely without overtime, benefits, or turnover.
Digit 5, with its new battery technology, will also be able to work 3 shifts a day, if there's enough work to justify it.
Timing the story correctly
The regional agricultural press is just starting to cover this now, despite the fact that it was announced week ago. Agility's new status as a public company is turning every customer announcement into a market story.
Agility's official announcement framed the deal as an opportunity to "strengthen manufacturing processes and support employees in demanding tasks." For AGCO, it is a test of whether humanoid robotics can survive contact with the genuinely complex environment of farm equipment production. For Agility, it is a reference customer in a new sector, arriving at exactly the moment when quarterly public disclosures will make every deployment count.
Hesston has been making tractors and combines in central Kansas for nearly 8 decades. In 2027, it will start making data for Agility's training corpus too.
Sources
Written by
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.”