Truck & Off-Highway Engineering - August 2021 - 25

Precision ag aids
CONNECTIVITY | SAE COMVEC PREVIEW
FEATURE
SUSTAINABILITY
Deere expert Deanna Kovar, a 2021 SAE COMVEC keynoter, provides her
thoughts on the future of autonomy, computer vision and machine learning,
data management and more.
by Ryan Gehm
" The 2000s were all about GPS
and auto guidance. The 2010s
were about data management and
the cloud. The 2020s are really
all about computer vision and
machine learning. "
automated and IoT-connected vehicles enable farmers to improve
productivity and sustainability. Precision ag and the work Kovar's
group is pursuing ties well into the 2021 event's theme - Energy,
Sustainability and the Future of Commercial Vehicle Transportation.
Kovar recently spoke with TOHE to preview her COMVEC presentation,
providing insights into a range of connectivity-related topics.
Deanna Kovar, VP of Production & Precision Ag Production
Systems, Deere & Co.
T
en years ago, some " visionaries " at John
Deere made a critical decision: that every one
of its agricultural vehicles needed to be an IOT
device that connected to the cloud. That way,
agronomic and machine data could flow more easily
to help farmers make better decisions in real time.
" When we made that decision, it wasn't easy to literally
put additional costs in every machine we built.
But we had some visionaries who understood that in
the future, this data would help us to help farmers
farm even better, " Deanna Kovar, VP of Production &
Precision Ag Production Systems, Deere & Co., shared
with Truck & Off-Highway Engineering. " Over time, we
have continued to build opportunities for customers to
get value from that data. "
Kovar will kick off the SAE COMVEC event, taking
place September 14-16 in Chicago and online (www.
sae.org/attend/comvec/program), by presenting the
opening keynote address. She will discuss how highly
TRUCK & OFF-HIGHWAY ENGINEERING
Can you talk about the latest technology in precision ag?
Obviously, we're continuing to stay on the trend of 3G, 4G and 5G
technology changes. It's exciting that 5G will drive more opportunities
for farmers and farms to be connected. In rural America, we
struggle with connectivity. We're huge proponents of not thinking
about how many people there are to connect in rural America, but
how many acres there are to connect because connecting every acre
has tremendous value.
The other part of this is really moving from being reactive to proactive
because we can get this data literally in near real time. When
we started this process 10 years ago, we were sending customers
alerts that something failed; now we're using AI [artificial intelligence]
to instead say something's about to fail. With prognostication
and AI, we're able to plan for that event because in farming, timing is
so important. If you miss your planting window by a day, it's 1% in
yield. Or if you wait too long to harvest your soybeans, you can lose
1% of yield as well. So every day matters, every hour matters.
How does precision ag tie into sustainability?
One of the most exciting things for me about agriculture is that the
customer's profitability is not counter to sustainability practices.
There's a lot of energy going into how we can help farmers be more
productive and grow more food and fiber with fewer inputs. That's
the definition of sustainability and it's also how farmers can be more
economically sustainable in their operations as well. So, we're spending
a lot of time thinking about sustainability on the farm and how
technologies within precision ag and beyond can help that.
August 2021 25
DEERE
http://www.sae.org/attend/comvec/program
Truck & Off-Highway Engineering - August 2021

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