The questions are prompted by a new book celebrating the Case IH brand name and dedicated to all its customers, dealers, partners and employees.

While the history of the famous farm machinery company is extensively detailed, it's the pictures in the 20-page book that caught the eye.

For some time, Case IH has been dropping the odd hint or two that commercially viable driverless vehicles are just around the corner.

The caveat has always been that safety-related issues remain top of mind for its design engineers as they seek to lower operational costs while boosting return on investment.

But Case IH's Sydney-based marketing manager, Stuart Brown, says Australian farm labour shortages could see this country being one of the first to experience the introduction of such cutting edge technology.

"We're already discussing with clients (farmers and contractors) the ability in the future to have driverless vehicles," he said.

"Certainly, the header is furtherest away so we see some of the more straight-forward tractor applications being automated first."

The thinking is that headers still need a high level of 'intelligence' to automatically accommodate the many variables associated with harvesting a variety of crops at different cutting heights and at varying throughput levels, to name but a few parameters.

Meanwhile, the big broadacre tracked tractor depicted by the Case IH artist might just surface earlier than envisaged by many industry commentators.

"With the size of farms and paddocks in Australia, you could put in a machine with a pre-programmed seeding path," Mr Brown said.

"This is a relatively straight-forward job with many of the precision seeder bars that are out there today."