Abstract: In modern agricultural production, agricultural tractors as core equipment are rapidly transitioning towards electrification and intelligence. Electric tractors, with advantages such as zero emissions, high energy efficiency, and high-precision operation, have gradually become a major development direction. The distributed drive system with wheel-side motors further enhances the adaptability of electric tractors to complex field terrain through its high efficiency and precise control. Permanent magnet synchronous motors, known for their high power density and reliability, serve as the ideal choice for this drive system. However, the cooperative control of dual wheel-side motors faces severe challenges under complex terrain and varying agronomic requirements. Existing methods struggle with disturbances like sudden soil changes and uneven loads, easily leading to issues such as uneven ploughing depth and trajectory deviation, which seriously constrain operational quality and efficiency. To address these cooperative control problems, this study proposes a load feedforward torque difference compensation based nonlinear predictive cooperative control to improve system response speed and anti-interference capability under variable working conditions. This strategy adopts a load feedforward compensated nonlinear predictive current control that uses the motor torque equation as its core. This approach eliminates the intermediate conversion of voltage commands and directly generates q axis current reference values that are closely related to torque requirements. Thereby, it effectively suppresses torque pulsations caused by voltage error accumulation in traditional control methods. In order to further enhance the system's disturbance resistance, the sliding mode load torque observer achieves feedforward compensation of disturbances by embedding the observed load torque into the control law. On one hand, it acts as a feedforward compensation term to offset load disturbances. This significantly reduces the amplitude of the discontinuous terms in sliding mode control, thereby effectively suppressing chattering and enhancing system robustness. On the other hand, it optimizes the control input in real-time by adjusting the q axis current reference value, thereby improving the system's response speed. In terms of cooperative control, a nonlinear predictive cooperative control architecture based on torque difference compensation is designed. This architecture can directly generate optimal torque difference commands, effectively enhancing the system's synchronization accuracy and disturbance rejection capability. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed control strategy, an experimental platform was constructed and tested under multiple operating conditions. During the straight-line and curve driving tests, three control strategies were evaluated: Strategy 1 is the PI based cross-coupling control (PI-CCC), Strategy 2 is the load feedforward nonlinear predictive current based cross-coupling control (FNPC-CCC), and Strategy 3 is the proposed load feedforward torque difference compensation based nonlinear predictive cooperative control (FTC-NPCC). The experimental results indicate that, under straight-line driving with variable load conditions, compared with PI-CCC, FNPC-CCC reduces the synchronization error fluctuation from 3.47 r/min to 2.37 r/min, a reduction of 31.7%; and shortens the synchronization error settling time from 4.3 s to 3.1 s, a reduction of 27.9%. Compared with PI-CCC, FTC-NPCC reduces the synchronization error fluctuation from 3.47 r/min to 1.11 r/min, a reduction of 68%; and shortens the synchronization error settling time from 4.3 s to 2.0 s, a reduction of 53.4%. Under curve driving with variable load conditions, compared with PI-CCC, FNPC-CCC reduces the synchronization error fluctuation from 6.11 r/min to 2.61 r/min, a reduction of 57.2%; and shortens the synchronization error settling time from 3.8 s to 3.2 s, a reduction of 15.8%. Compared with PI-CCC, FTC-NPCC reduces the synchronization error fluctuation from 6.11 r/min to 2.18 r/min, a reduction of 64.3%; and shortens the synchronization error settling time from 3.8 s to 2.2 s, a reduction of 42.1%. In conclusion, the proposed load feedforward torque difference compensation based nonlinear predictive cooperative control significantly enhances the cooperative control precision and disturbance resistance of the dual wheel-side motor system, providing an effective control method for achieving high-precision and high-stability operation of electric tractors in complex field environments.