Since the CES rollout, Deere has acquired AI assets from two other agtech pioneers. In the case of Deere's 8R model, a tractor which first went on the market in 2020, the latest version with autonomous capabilities uses technology from Blue River. Also a Silicon Valley startup, launched in 2017, Bear Flag's autonomous navigation system can be retrofitted onto existing tractors. Heraud was referring to autonomous driving, another piece of Deere's agtech puzzle that came together when it purchased Bear Flag Robotics last year for $250 million. This capability also allows the farmer, instead of being in the tractor, to operate it remotely while doing something else." "We've curated hundreds of thousands of images from different farm locations and under various weather and lighting conditions," Heraud said, "so that with machine learning, the tractor can understand what it's seeing and react accordingly. Images captured by the cameras are passed through a deep neural network that classifies each pixel in approximately 100 milliseconds and decides whether the tractor should keep moving or stop. Blue River's "see and spray" robotics platform utilizes dozens of sophisticated cameras and processors to distinguish weeds from crop plants when applying herbicides.Īttached to the autonomous tractor are six pairs of stereo cameras that can "see" an obstacle in the field - whether it's a rock, a log or a person - and determine its size and relative distance.
"The AI we use involves computer vision and machine learning," Heraud said, science that was well underway at Silicon Valley startup Blue River Technology, which Deere bought in 2017 for $305 million - a deal that also brought on Blue River co-founder and CEO Heraud. That reality reflects Deere's autonomy strategy. "But when Deere, with 60% of the tractor market share in North America, comes out with one, that's when reality sets in," Shearer said. "Prior to its introduction at CES, everybody thought was pie in the sky," said Scott Shearer, chair of the department of food, agricultural and biological engineering at Ohio State University.Īround the world, Shearer said, there are probably 30 different autonomous tractor projects in the works, though none are commercially available. The autonomous 8R represents a giant leap in current agtech, not to mention the marketing benefit.
#THE DIVISION 2 BUILD FULL#
Those steps have to be in place, Volkmann said, before you can put full autonomy around them. And even though Deere's goal is to have a fully autonomous farming system for row crops in place by 2030, Volkmann said, "in Wall Street time, that's an eternity."įor the time being, Deere is creating value and profits with well-established automated systems that can be retrofitted to its existing tractors, such as GPS-based self-steering and precision seeding that measures how deep and far apart to plant. "The total global fleet of autonomous Deere tractors is less than 50 today," he added.
While Deere made a big splash at CES and intrigued the investment community, Stephen Volkmann, equity research analyst at Jefferies, said, "We are very, very, very early in this process." "This comes from our realization that technology is going to drive value creation and increase productivity, profitability and sustainability for farmers," Heraud said. While a good deal of that R&D has been homegrown, the company also has been on a spree of acquisitions and partnerships with agtech startups, harvesting know-how as well as talent.
#THE DIVISION 2 BUILD SOFTWARE#
The autonomous 8R is the culmination of Deere's nearly two decades of strategic planning and investment in automation, data analytics, GPS guidance, internet-of-things connectivity and software engineering. But that is what the company sees in its future, according to Jorge Heraud, vice president of automation and autonomy for Moline, Illinois-based Deere, a glimpse of which was showcased at last January's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, where Deere unveiled its fully autonomous 8R farm tractor, driven by artificial intelligence rather than a farmer behind the wheel.
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