Truck & Off-Highway Engineering - August 2021 - 26

Precision ag aids
SUSTAINABILITY
" The thing that makes [autonomy] harder for us is we're not
just trying to get from point A to point B safely. We're trying to
do that and execute a job. "
Agriculture has moved from managing at the farm level to the field level, to the subfield level and now to the plant level, making sure that every seed
gets placed perfectly, that every weed is killed and every plant is nurtured individually.
What do you hope attendees take away from your
COMVEC keynote?
Part of it is helping the attendees understand how we're
leveraging technology in agriculture. I think it's a longstanding
misnomer that farmers aren't sophisticated individuals.
At the heart is just sharing, what is precision
agriculture? Why is it so important for everyone on the
planet? And how we're thinking about the next generation
of technology. We've been at this precision ag business
for multiple decades, and we've made a lot of progress.
There are items around data privacy, user experience,
automation and autonomy where agriculture is in a
unique seat to be able to provide insights to other industries
about how we're implementing technology at scale.
So other industries can look to the ag industry as a
leader in these areas?
Relative to data privacy, for example, we collect very
sensitive information from farmers. Every fall we get
their yield data, which is basically their topline revenue
information, on an acre-by-acre level. We have been
very transparent with the industry about the farmer
being in control of that data and very transparent
about what we will and what we won't do with the
farmer's data, putting them in control of who gets to
see it, how John Deere gets to use it. We just want to
help them collect and visualize and get insight from
their data and connect them to over 150 connected
software companies that are helping to close the full
loop for farmers because farmers don't farm alone. It's
not just Deere and the farmer, it's their agronomists,
26 August 2021
their landlords, their banker, their input providers. All of these people
must come together to help them drive these sustainability goals,
both economic and environmental.
Where do you see precision ag heading in the next decade?
Precision ag over the past two decades, the 2000s were really all
about GPS and auto guidance - self-guided machines through the
field. The 2010s were all about data management. With cloud and
connectivity, it really took a ton of information that was locked in
desktop computers and put on binders - literally printed maps on
binders and shelves in farmers' offices - and moved it to the cloud.
That created a whole new opportunity for easy data flow, easy visualization
and insight creation for farmers. The 2020s are really all about
computer vision and machine learning. How can we continue to augment
the farmer's senses with additional sensors and cameras, and
then use the power of machine learning and artificial intelligence to
sense and ultimately act on behalf of the farmer?
Deere bought a Silicon Valley-based company called Blue River
Technology in 2017. They're focused on exactly that, on leveraging
computer vision and machine learning to differentiate between a
weed and a healthy plant. We're on a path to reduce herbicide applications
by as much as 80 or 90%, because instead of broadcasting
we're literally managing at the plant level and only spraying the
weeds. If you think about agriculture, we've gone from managing at
the farm level to the field level, to the subfield level, because of GPS,
automation, because of cloud-based computing and data management.
The next decade is all about moving from the subfield level to
plant level management, making sure that every seed gets placed
perfectly, making sure that every weed is killed and every plant is
nurtured individually. And then at the end of the season, we can harvest
the entire crop efficiently.
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Truck & Off-Highway Engineering - August 2021

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