Most of the unmanned tractors in the process of trajectory tracking focus on the tracking performance, ignoring the operational energy consumption resulting in poor economy. Aiming at the above problems, a layered collaborative control strategy that considered economy and trajectory tracking performance was proposed. Firstly, the trajectory tracking system was established by model predictive control algorithm with longitudinal deviation and transverse deviation as the target and acceleration and front wheel angular speed as the constraints, and secondly, the binary regulating economic control strategy based on external parameter optimization was established by taking the ratio of engine fuel consumption rate and hydro-mechanical CVT transmission efficiency as the optimization target. On this basis, the trajectory tracking system and economic control strategy were integrated to form a hierarchical cooperative control strategy with the predicted speed of the tractor at the next moment and the current plow resistance of the tractor as the transfer variables. Pure tracking and one-dimensional economic control strategy were used as the comparison strategy, and the cooperative control strategy was simulated based on the Matlab simulation platform, and the effectiveness of the cooperative control strategy was verified by the hardware-in-the-loop test platform. The results showed that compared with the comparison strategy, the layered cooperative control strategy effectively reduced the trajectory tracking deviation of the unmanned tractor and improved the tractor’s economy, the speed variance was reduced by 36.7% , the longitudinal tracking deviation was reduced by 89.8% , the lateral tracking deviation was reduced by 91.7% , and the tractor fuel consumption was reduced by 11.8% .