Groundwork

One Button, and the Sand Gets Its House in Order

Deere argued at CES that the fix for a labor shortage is removing the driver. Twenty-five days later it patented a better button for the one still sitting there.

Clay-diorama editorial illustration of a sand groomer with a raised rake.

What changes in this design

Without further detail, a reader might expect putting a vehicle's rake away to require the person using it to direct that move. What those directions would involve is not stated.

Here, one action from the person using the vehicle is followed by the rake moving to its put-away position.

That is worth knowing because it tells you the focus of the record: the rake can be put away after one user action. How the vehicle makes that happen is not stated.

Both feet busy, and a switch on the dash

I went looking at the spec sheet for a bunker rake that has been working golf courses for years, and what stuck with me was how much the driver is doing. The left foot works a pair of forward and reverse pedals plus a heel lever for the differential lock. The right foot has a brake and a throttle. Both hands are on a 14-inch wheel geared 8.3 to 1.

Then there are the implements. Rear attachments raise and lower electrically, from a switch on the right side of the dash. The front blade and cultivator run on mechanical linkage, worked by hand on the operator's right. Two implements, two different systems, on a vehicle where both feet are already committed and the surface underneath is sand.

Twenty-five days after the CES stage

On January 6, 2025, Deere held a CES press conference to reveal four autonomous machines, among them a battery-electric mower for commercial landscaping with eight cameras giving 360-degree coverage. Its chief technology officer, Jahmy Hindman, put the reasoning plainly: customers "have work that must get done at certain times of the day and year, yet there is not enough available and skilled labor to do the work." The numbers offered in support were roughly 2.4 million U.S. farm jobs to fill each year and 86 percent of landscaping owners unable to fill open positions.

Twenty-five days later, on January 31, the company filed a patent application on a bunker rake. Not to take the driver off it. To give the driver a better button.

What a single actuation buys

The application published on August 6, 2026 and is still pending. It's called Sand Grooming Vehicle with One Touch Lift and Lower Rake. The claim is a rake movable between positions, together with a one-touch input that lets the operator request the rake move to a predetermined position with a single actuation.

That is the contribution. Not tooth geometry, not a new float mechanism - control consolidation. A rival's granted patent on the same class of machine, filed in 2013, spends its background on rake plates catching and tearing bunker liners. It says nothing about operator workload. Two big incumbents, patenting opposite halves of one vehicle.

I don't want to be sniffy about the button. Given that control stack, one press instead of a hand hunting for a dash switch is a real gain for whoever is in the seat.

The machine that shipped without a seat

Now the timing. On February 8, 2026, at the PGA Show in Orlando, a Canadian company called Korechi launched a driverless bunker rake and made it available. It carries a 16.3 kWh battery, claims up to 20 hours of runtime from an eight-hour charge on a standard outlet, and takes its orders from a phone with no perimeter wire buried anywhere. A Dutch firm sells a second one that learns a route by being driven once, then repeats it, and advertises savings of up to 90 percent on labour.

I'd hold those claims loosely. The trade coverage I found from this year's superintendents' show is enthusiasm, not measurement: no price, no independent runtime figures. Still, the operator-centric filing became public about six months after an operator-free product went on sale.

Record rounds, two thousand fewer courses

The ground underneath all of this is strange. Americans played more than 500 million rounds in 2025, the sixth straight year above that line, but it's being absorbed by as many as 2,000 fewer courses than existed at the early-2000s peak. More play, fewer bunkers to rake, fewer machines to sell. Costs keep climbing too: superintendent base pay reached $121,238, up more than 10 percent in a year.

And the seasonal crews the button was meant to help are rationed. The supplemental H-2B allocation for fiscal 2026 added visas beyond the statutory cap; the 27,736-visa second tranche for returning workers was declared exhausted on April 29, 2026. Golf course maintenance is a standard user of that program.

The open question

I read this filing as a hedge, and I don't mean that as an insult. A company with a legacy platform in the field keeps improving it while it builds the thing that replaces it. The application was filed in the same month as the autonomous reveal, by the same company, and the two point in different directions.

What I can't tell is which one the buyer wants. A superintendent choosing this season is picking between a familiar machine that's slightly easier to drive and an unfamiliar one that needs nobody to drive it, on a course count that's shrinking and with a visa quota that empties in weeks. The button is the smaller bet. It might also be the one that ships.

Sources

Reporting for this piece drew on the published filing and the references below.

The record, briefly. US20260223759A1, “Sand Grooming Vehicle with One Touch Lift and Lower Rake” The abstract describes a sand-grooming vehicle that moves a rake to a stored position after a single user input.

More angles on this

The Leveling Bar Has a Very Firm Opinion About LevelAnother reading from the same A01B classification family, soil working in agriculture or forestry.
A Work Vehicle, Taking Its Job Quite PersonallyAnother reading from the same A01B classification family, soil working in agriculture or forestry.
CPC A01B: Soil working in agriculture or forestry; parts, details, or accessories of agricultural machines or implements, in generalThe official classification family this record was filed into, published in the USPTO Cooperative Patent Classification scheme.
The Seed Method's Extremely Serious Fresh StartAnother reading from the neighbouring A01C classification family, planting; sowing; fertilising.
Ruts Have Filed a Formal ComplaintAnother reading of a record filed by the same applicant, Deere & Company.

Read around this one:Public patent record USPTO published figure Patent issue-date index