Sabanto Makes Hay and Solves a Labor Problem in Utah
Daren Richins (far right) met with the Sabanto Crew at our holiday party.
Daren Richins is a hay farmer from Coalville, Utah, and one of Sabanto’s first customers. His autonomy kit runs on a Kubota M5 tractor and has completed over 200 hours of autonomous seeding, mowing and raking operations in the surrounding Coalville area.
Daren was raised in Coalville, but he didn’t grow up in an ag family. He had the opportunity to work on a neighbor’s farm in high school and knew almost immediately that he was destined to be a farmer. He’s a big fan of technology and jumped at the chance to combine that with his passion for farming.
Our relationship with Daren began in May 2022 when he learned about our autonomy kits for tractors. Wanting to be first in line, he jumped in his truck and came out to see a Sabanto equipped tractor operating in Iowa.
Pace Custom Hire is a small enterprise that manages over 300 fields of hay for ranchers and other landowners in and around Coalville. Their customers don’t have the time or equipment to tend to their fields which produce feed for their livestock. Daren and his associates use a Farming as a Service (FaaS) model to serve their customers, and autonomy helps them succeed in a labor strapped environment.
A Sabanto Autonomy System completing field work for Pace Custom Hire’s clients in Coalville, Utah.
We invited Daren to our company-wide holiday party in Ames, Iowa, so he could share his experiences as one of the Sabanto’s first customers. While here, he remarked that it’s been sort of a homecoming to return to Iowa and meet everyone at Sabanto. “It’s been especially cool to talk face to face with people I’ve gotten to know over the phone and meet people behind the product that I enjoy using,” Daren said. “Everyone at Sabanto is so friendly and helpful. They’ve been with me every step of the way on my journey to adopt autonomy,” he went on to say.
Daren is a huge fan of multiple field operations that Sabanto does for his company and plans to buy more systems in the future as Pace Custom Hire continues to grow. During his visit to our shop in Nevada, Iowa, he got first glimpse of the Deere 5100E running autonomously. He said it was a dream come true as he already owns that exact model of tractor. “For me, it’s great to know that I don’t have to learn anything new to use the Deere 5100E software. All the autonomous planning and operation tasks that I would use with the Deere are exactly the same as what I do with my Kubota M5 today,” Daren noted.
The Sabanto team listening to Daren share his experiences with autonomy.
Daren spent time with our employees in a Q&A session discussing what’s been working well and areas that need improvement. Lead Product Manager, Chris Mikelson, was thrilled to get the opportunity to ask Daren how we could improve our product even further. Chris commented, “Hearing Daren’s honest feedback from his real-word experiences using Sabanto was incredibly valuable and it really increased our confidence that we are building and prioritizing the right things.”
We’d love to have you join our monthly newsletter list.
We promise not to overwhelm you — we want to share how autonomy is changing agriculture. Along the way, you’ll get to know our customers, the team at Sabanto, and the groundbreaking things that we’re accomplishing at farms across the country and beyond.
To get on the list, sign up below 👇