No need for huge expensive purpose built tractors. Even if they’re slow you could have half a dozen running 24/7.
It could provide independence for anyone with a modicum of resources.
If generalist robotic models get good enough to accomplish many varied tasks effectively, training a separate comparable specialized system from scratch for every task would be highly cost-ineffective, even if, in theory, it could have slightly higher reliability.
We're going to (and are already on the way to) train deeply general models that can be told: "go tend that field."
And if that's the case, it no longer makes sense to build specialized, purpose-built tractors to house that level of autonomous capability. You instead put it in a humanoid frame (with a little extra sauce for locomotion of said humanoid), and get that to drive your existing tractor.
I'm thinking more of the small tasks that are often needed. Mending fences. Pulling weeds. Feeding chickens. Running off coyotes. Lots of things.
The greater question centres about who will tend the machines - 4,000 hectares of seeding requires a week and more of prep work on the air seeder, hoses, points, tines, etc.
Due to the scale of pre-training going on, it seems reasonable that a humanoid could also do a lot of the preliminary work you mentioned that currently is not (or rarely) automated.
On one hand I feel like I'm sure to catch some ridicule for saying any of this, on the other it seems like it is very obviously the direction we're headed.
The Rio Tinto plans for automated mining of the Resolution Copper deposit in the USofA don't revolve about "humanoid" figures sitting in seats made for humans.
Large acreage continuously producing near fully automated tomato greenhouses don't work with humanoid shaped automata - they have poles with cameras and shaking mechanisms for pollinating, etc.
It's a much simpler fighter jet that doesn't have to carry a human.
* https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2015/01/12/376781165...