The need for sustainable development has been recognized by a majority of our society and the challenge to reduce the impacts of our actions regarding climate change, resource consumption and shrinking bio-diversity must be tackled. This is especially true for the agricultural sector and food production, a field so strongly and closely connected to the ecosystem. While historically the main focus in this sector was to maximize productivity in the most effective and efficient way, largely irrespective of ecological costs, there is now an urgent need for a shift towards sustainable systems to support our planet’s future. This shift can be tackled on both an overall systemic level as well as in a detailed design of machinery required in the process. Complex products such as agricultural machines and systems, determine the broad scope of areas for improvement, creating an array of possibilities and challenges. On the one hand, we can see the implementation of new technologies can create a shift in machine process design and architecture. This shift is supported by the implementation of smart systems collecting and analysing data, which when transferred to the machinery provide the optimal response to the real world conditions. Autonomous machines, in particular, as the next step in the course of digitizing production systems allow more flexibility and increased productivity. They also allow us to move from current traditional farming procedures, to optimize the whole farming process from soil preparation through seeding to harvest for larger scale mass production, with the additional benefit of targeting and reducing the negative ecological effects on the base process level. Autonomous machines could also be used in more advanced and complex conditions and are more flexible in application than their predecessors. On the other hand, there are already established sustainability aspects of machine design and production. The use of sustainable energy for agricultural applications could be further developed for agricultural machines, with a potential to create the smart systems efficiently collecting and analysing energy use data to develop improvements. Likewise, the efficiency and types of material used in the production could be improved through changes in the supply chain or during the development process. New proposals can take place during design ideation, for example, by implementing modular solutions in the system, thus positively influencing resource consumption and production costs. Other business aspects such as planned obsolescence, fully closed internal systems and machine ecosystems, limited reparability, already deliver increased profits to the company, but transfer financial costs to the user side and ultimately create a bigger ecological burden and waste through the shorter product lifespan. Last but not least, strongly connected with automation is social sustainability, where we have to consider the impact on the community and future users. With fewer workers in industrial agriculture, new systems should allow people to work in areas, where their skills cannot be replaced, such as providing the supervision and support to the whole system. The paper addresses some areas of sustainability improvements in the agricultural sector, with a special focus on implementing autonomous machines in field applications. In addition, we discuss the relevant requirements and approaches when it comes to sustainable service and machine design in agriculture.