John Deere, the ubiquitous name in farming equipment, isn't just your granpa's tractor anymore. Though the company has enjoyed popularity throughout its 180-year history, it still has had to innovate to stay at the lead of the pack. A recent story in Network World explores the technological advancements they've added to their products - essentially adding brains to the brawn.
Network World's article explores the John Deere Intelligent Solutions Group, which they describe as a "skunk works with tractors" as an homage to the specialized Lockheed Martin aircraft design division. The Intelligent Solutions Group (ISG) is an IoT development division within John Deere and its task is add value to the products via technology. Initially, the group's task was to add adding cellular modems to the machinery for the purpose of collecting usage data and the company quickly realized the potential of allowing this group the autonomy to innovate. Now, their bread and butter is location-based tech added to the equipment. As vast as farmlands are, the industry is actually quite precise: seeds must be placed perfectly to maximize yield, sprayers must deliver fertilizer directly to the soil over them, and harvesting equipment has to be perfectly lined up with rows of crops for a speedy harvest. The ISG has developed solutions for this via their GNSS location-tracking system. Described as "hyper-accurate", this system accounts for these tiny precisions and integrates with many farming systems to ensure precision in every step.
The article reports that many John Deere employees carried an attitude of turning farming into “a science, not an art” and the gut instincts and farmers' almanacs are slowly being replaced by math and science-based decisions. The prevalence of mobile devices is aiding this transition - John Deere's applications were once limited to desktops but now they're easily accessible all over the farm and standard in the cabs of equipment. This mobile adoption enables another major advancement in farming too - interoperability. Now, teams of machinery can be connected to stay aligned during a harvest; reducing the need to go back and get missed patches and the potential loss of product if, for example, a receiving truck strays too far from the output chute from an accompany harvester. This has benefits for the humans involved too - there's less physical twisting to check alignment behind you while still needing to drive in a straight line and less mental stress trying to manage so many processes at once.
The ISG has done quite a bit in its fifteen year history, and it continues to innovate. What's next? Moving analytics to the tractor instead of the cloud. This puts local control in place to make decisions on the fly, to “[leverage] all that back-office analytics and the prescription you’re executing, but modifying it in real time based on conditions in the field,” according to John Teeple, John Deere Director of Technology. It will be interesting to see where the ISG goes with new technological innovations to add a modern twist to an ancient industry.