As John Deere celebrates its 186th anniversary in the vital farm equipment industry, it is showing off how it uses technology like never before to develop electric tractors and construction equipment and its autonomous tractor undergoing field testing on Midwestern farms.
It is also investing in expanding data science and soil research to help farmers track yields year after year on precise locations in their fields in hopes of finding the seemingly magic formula for the highest and most profitable yield.
At Deere’s recent premiere Tech Summit in Austin, Texas, company officials demonstrated recent innovations on its new test farm an hour’s drive from downtown. In one field, a massive $1 million grain combine used to harvest grain moved in lockstep (via Wi-Fi) with a tractor traveling alongside and pulling a trailer to collect grain.
Nearby, a tractor balancing a carbon fiber 120-foot sprayer boom moved down a field at up to 12mph while precisely spraying weeds with the advantage of vision sensors and Nvidia GPUs. Deere designed-in ultrasonic sensors placed on the boom to measure the distance the boom rides above the ground to aid precise spraying. The boom bounces as the tractor moves across uneven terrain and can be raised or lowered if the tractor’s tires get caked with mud or sink into a hollow pathway.
This See & Spray innovation, introduced in original form in 2021, uses a computerized sprayer set-up that relies on machine learning and many thousands of images of weeds. It is designed to reduce the volume of herbicides by 60% or more, offering a cost savings to farmers.
Another demo showed how planting equipment can be driven by a tractor to precisely plant seeds in perfect rows using automation to assist a human driver to stay within field boundaries and eek out every inch of planting space. Inside a shed, two robotized planting devices under development showed how Deere is advancing precise placement of seeds in soil, even with a squirt of fertilizer timed within milliseconds of the seed drop in its new ExactShot technology unveiled in January at CES 2023.
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Deere in construction
Elsewhere, an electric Deere backhoe was described as capable of moving soil and rock at construction sites more quietly than a diesel-powered version (70 dB compared to 90 dB). With greater torque power than its traditional twin, Deere engineers claimed the electric backhoe, now in pre-production, could shorten each bucket or backhoe lift by seconds to result in hours of time savings over an entire job.
Engineers also demonstrated how the electric backhoe could be plugged into a commonplace roadside electric charger or even into a mobile charger with wheels under development that’s about the size of an old-fashioned phone booth. In an indication of its manufacturing diversity, Deere bought a majority interest in Austria-based Kreisel Electric in 2022 for its immersion-cooled battery technology.
The star of the test farm demo was Deere’s autonomous tractor introduced in 2022 and now in field-testing on some Midwestern farms. Deere executives hope its autonomous hardware, including GPUs and sensors, can be purchased as add-ons to retrofit an 8R model tractor. The tractor is priced in the $500,000 range, while the autonomous gear could add on “tens of thousands of dollars,” although pricing has not been set.
Deere knows such costs can be a heavy lift for farmers and is pushing hard on the theme of cost savings achieved by using an autonomous tractor around the clock during busy planting or harvest periods when labor can be hard to find.
Jayme Hindman, Deere’s CTO, said such a price-per-use approach is being formulated at Deere to help reduce overall costs of its autonomous vehicle. Farmers might only pay for an hour or a day of use.
He opened the Tech Summit on the theme that technology and agriculture have gone together for centuries, even as Deere was one of the original manufacturing companies around when founded in 1837. “There’s a lot of tech on the farm today,” he said. “It rivals the tech seen in any other technology company. This is all real stuff. It’s not a science fair experiment. If it’s not making a difference today, it will be shortly.”
Deere’s well-known slogan, “Runs like a deer,” could easily become, “Using tech for ag innovation” as the company continues its recent progression. With a series of acquisitions, including Blue River Technology in 2011, Bear Flag Robotics in 2017, Kreisel and AgriSync in 2021 and Light in 2022, it has acquired engineering talent along with insights that offer what some analysts believe will give Deere an advantage over competitors. Deere, based in Moline, Illinois, set up its brand new test farm near Austin hoping to take advantage of tech growth and excitement around the Texas city and to be near a capable labor pool that has enticed other tech leaders to the area such as Tesla, AMD, Silicon Labs, and more.
Deere has also increased its software engineer head count in recent years by 350% and now employs 4,300 software engineers, Hindman said.
With 8 billion people on the planet with 10 billion projected by 2050, farmers will need to increase food production by 50% in the next three decades with less arable land. “We have to do more with less and hopefully you will agree that tech, while it might not be the complete answer to that problem, it’s a significant part,” he added.
Standing near two of John Deere’s earliest green tractors from 1935 and 1952, fired up and still in working condition, Hindman concluded the first Tech Summit on the theme that Deere continues to thrive as an engineering company committed to making a global difference.
