A season-long trial of eleven electric utility tractors across six farms has produced the clearest answer yet to the question owners actually ask: what can a battery tractor finish before it needs a plug.
On light duty — mowing, raking, yard loading, feeding livestock — the machines averaged 7.2 working hours per charge, enough for a standard day with reserve. On sustained draft work the picture collapsed. Pulling a disc harrow at depth, the same tractors managed an average of 2.4 hours.
Draft work is a different machine
The arithmetic is not mysterious. A 70-kilowatt tractor mowing draws perhaps 25 kilowatts; the same tractor in heavy tillage draws near its rating continuously. No battery in the current size class survives that for a shift, and adding one makes a tractor heavy enough to cause the compaction problem the industry is trying to solve.
“For chores and loader work it has quietly replaced a diesel. For tillage we did not even pretend.”
Participants were markedly positive on the things that do not appear in a spec sheet: no idling, no cold starts, no fumes in a closed barn, and instant torque for loader work. Four of the six farms said they would buy one as a second tractor, none as their primary machine.
The trial's authors suggest manufacturers stop marketing electric tractors against the whole duty cycle and start marketing them against the two-thirds of hours that are not tillage.