Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “John Deere’s self-operating tractors — CES 2016 interview”.
Greetings from the CES show floor here at the verge lounge, I’m Jordan, Golson and i’m here with corey read from John Deere. They make big green tractors, he’s the senior vice president of the intelligent solutions group, which is a very agust title. Thanks for joining us, hey Jordan good to be here, preciate it Corey, so most people think about giant agricultural tractors. They probably think of you know guys sitting up there with their Sun hats on just driving around the field, but all spit over. Exactly the whole thing you know, Wizard of Oz, something out in the Dust Bowl, but actually the modern tractor is nothing like that. So when he tell us a little bit about about autonomous tractors, yeah incredible, in fact, the technology in the last 20 years has come a long way. If you make that trip from Detroit to Miami down i-75 on either side of the road. You’Ll see a lot of green tractors running through the field. Many of them will have an operator in them, but most of them are running on their own they’re, using dual correction: GPS technology, modems, Wi-Fi modems that are in the cabs that communicate between the vehicles and they’ll guide themselves within an inch of accuracy.
We do that in over 100 countries today at John Deere and you’ve been doing it for a long time, we’re just now getting to the very beginnings of autonomous cars, but you guys been doing it for 10 years 15, more than 15. In fact, we started investing in the technology over 20 years ago 15 years ago. Around 2000 is when our first autonomous vehicles and vehicles that guided themselves through the fields hit the market and we’ve got over 200,000 vehicles in those hundred countries around the world that are driving themselves producing the food that feeds the world. That’S incredible! So, what’s what’s the advantage to want to say putting the the poor farmer out of business because he’s still got a got to be helping out, but so what’s the advantage of the tractor driving itself? Well, actually, it’s it’s not put them out of business.
It’S helping them be more productive. If, if you start from the fact that a lot of farming is very manual, very intensive and the age of our farmers continues to grow, it’s a tool that helps them gain productivity gain efficiency, reduce the amount of overlap they have in the field and overall produce More crop with less dollars, so our largest machines would be a hundred and twenty feet wide 48 rows at a time that they put into the ground. They can cover four to five hundred acres a day and incredible productivity, but the same technology applies to all sizes.
So we started in this space by building retrofit herbal technology to cover the entire fleet, no matter what size or age of vehicle you put into the field, so whether it’s a small mom-and-pop farm or at a giant agribusiness with thousands and tens of thousands of acres. They can still take advantage yeah, my dad’s, a traditional farmer he’s 74 years old in Northwest Ohio. He uses these technologies, so do the largest commercial producers in the country and in the world for that matter, one of the big themes here at CES has been connected. Cities and connected cars and connected refrigerators – and you guys have connected tractors to right there talking to the cloud and learning about what’s going on and how to improve absolutely so our vehicles and the systems that we use. Our combination of embedded technology that that technology that sits in the vehicle, mobile technologies that people carry in and out of the cab and then we also have a full suite of cloud-based services.
So those vehicles are networked together. They both guide themselves, but they communicate back and forth across various vehicles. They also communicate and deliver the data about what’s happening in the field in real time back to an operation center that every producer can log on and see from wherever they are in the world. In real time, thanks for joining us Cory, thanks for telling us everything about John Deere, I appreciate it great Jordan great to be here and come out to the farm sometime.
Absolutely, and thanks for joining us here at the verge lounge at CES, will have much more from the show floor over the rest of the week. .