John Deere Harvester Works reveals AI future of agriculture

Sep 14, 2023

Don't be fooled by the miles of grain blurring into one endless golden field as you blast past on I-88. Those stalks only look interchangeable.

Farm equipment today can see each individual plant and know which is a crop, which is a weed. A John Deere combine rattling across the Gaesser Farms in Ankeny, Iowa, can recognize what type of grain is being harvested, consider the direction of the wind and the slope of the ground before adjusting itself accordingly, orienting among the corn and soybeans with far more precision than the smartphone in your pocket can tell you where you're standing.

While the Global Positioning System satellites locate your phone within a foot or two, combines further triangulate the GPS signal with incredible accuracy, using a pair of stationary correction towers.

"We apply everything within one inch of where it's supposed to be," said Chris Gaesser, who farms 5,400 acres with his father, Ray.

Such precision is necessary if you want to, say, spray herbicide on weeds but not on the dirt between them. Or remember that one section of a field is wetter than another. A farm generates data faster than it generates alfalfa after a rain. Both must be handled properly to keep everything running smoothly.

"I would say farm work is 50-50 managing data and actually working in the field," said Chris Gaesser. "All that data is important because it affects a lot of the decisions you make."

A ROLLING OFFICE

Sometimes the effect of that data is immediate: A farmer driving a combine will pause, midfield, check his computer screen and reset his optimization settings, changing the thresher's rotor speed, clearance, fan speed and sieve openings, based on what he sees his machine collecting, trying, for instance, to minimize the dirt in his grain bin.

A farmer today is likely to be making phone calls and checking the number of likes on his latest #FarmTok post while the combine drives itself along a 20-minute row. He really doesn't have much choice.

"You're sitting in this thing 16 hours a day; many times in the fall, this is the farmer's office," said Jason Abbott, manager of value realization at the John Deere Harvester Works. "Think about it that way. You have to not only run your machine efficiently and productively, in many cases you have to run your business while you're in the machine."

And what a machine a new combine is.

City drivers are so dazzled by their shiny new hybrid automobiles' traffic sign recognition and 360-degree bird's-eye view they might never pause to realize that the same artificial intelligence revolution changing the way we get downtown has also revolutionized both farming and the way farm equipment is manufactured.

"The tech adoption in agriculture would absolutely shock people that aren't in the loop," said Miles Musick, factory engineering manager at the Harvester Works, located about 170 miles west of Chicago in East Moline, Ill.

INSIDE HARVESTER WORKS

Spend a morning at the 3 million-square-foot Harvester Works and you'll begin to see how high tech it's all become. When a Deere factory opened here in 1912, it was already toward the end of the company's first century in business. It was started in Grand Detour, Ill., in 1837 by John Deere, a Vermont blacksmith who turned an old saw blade into a self-scouring steel plow that did a better job of cutting through Illinois' sticky black earth.

For the next century and a quarter, Deere was known more for tradition than innovation, its distinctive "Poppin' Johnny" 2-cylinder tractor engines a familiar sound on farms that hadn't made the jump to more powerful machinery. World War II began to change that, as farmers turned soldiers came home and wondered why their tractors couldn't be as powerful as their Jeeps and trucks overseas had been.

The shift began in earnest in 1960 — announced at the Neiman Marcus in Dallas, of all places — when Deere made a selling point of being forward looking, first with styling, then with equipment. In 1999, it began plugging its combines into GPS.

Today Deere employs more software engineers than mechanical engineers. Top management can even flinch at the word "combines."

"I would call them mobile sensor suites that have computational capability," Deere's chief technology officer, Jahmy Hindman, told The Verge podcast. "They're continually streaming data."

There is nothing retro about any part of the manufacturing process except the color used to paint Deere farm equipment. Just like the old joke about Ford Model T coming in any color you like, so long as it's black, you can have your new combine painted in a range of colors, all of them Pantone 364C, a hue commonly known as John Deere green. (Even here, though, innovation intrudes, as there are really two John Deere greens: the pre-1989 "classic" John Deere green, and the brighter color used since then, known as "Ag and Turf" John Deere green.)

THE GOLD KEY CLUB

Arrive promptly at 8 a.m. one morning this spring and you'll already be behind a group of men in work boots, denim, plaid flannel shirts and baseball caps, hailing from Texas, Georgia, North Carolina and Mississippi. They're here for their Gold Key tours, an almost daily ritual at Harvester Works. Each $1 million-plus combine is custom-made for a specific customer — like Tesla, Deere realized they save a lot of money if, rather than build machines and then try to sell them, they instead sell their combines first, and then build them to order. Customers decide whether they want to pop for the heated floor mat option or any other variables — except color — that add up to 3 million different theoretical combine combinations. Partially constructed units have a piece of paper stuck to them with a name, such as "Kevin R., North Platte, NE," and a bar code.

"It's kind of neat to come and watch it get built," central Iowa farmer Brant Voss told Missouri Farmer Today after his 2015 Gold Key tour.

When it comes time to fire up the engine of a new combine for the first time, the owner is invited to turn the key, which is indeed gold-colored. Sometimes the timing isn't quite right, so some Gold Key farmers have to settle for riding their new combine around the Harvester Works test track.

Before that can happen, however, Harvest Works must gather together, or fabricate, more than 18,000 parts — three times as many as needed to build a car — from tiny screws to thousand-pound threshing rotors, and assemble them into a vehicle that can weigh 50,000 pounds with a top speed of 25 miles an hour — more important than you might imagine, as getting from one field to another has a way of burning up precious harvesting time. The whole assembly process takes about a week.

First, a bit of nomenclature. If everything you know about farming came from guiding plastic cows and chickens across a playroom carpet, you used tractors — pair of big wheels in back, two tiny ones in front, pulling various implements. Tractors are still important — pulling planters, tillers and the grain carts that catch harvested grain. But the harvesting itself is exclusively done by combines, which are called "combines" because they combine several functions: cutting the crop, threshing it to separate kernels of grain from seed covers and stalks, and windrowing the leftover straw. The business end of a combine is the "header," a specialized, changeable front-end arrangement — say 12 or 14 or 16 plastic cones for dividing and cutting corn rows, or a rolling belt meant to pick up cut straw.

The Harvester Works prides itself as the largest combine plant in the world — Deere also makes combines in Horizontina, Brazil, for the South American market, and in Zweibrucken, Germany, for Europe, where smaller combines tend to be used on smaller farms. And yes, their European business has been affected by the Ukraine war. "Our German factory has taken a hit because Russia and Ukraine are in their market," said Musick.

POST-COVID REBOUND

While Deere has expanded into construction equipment and even recreational all-terrain vehicles, its core business rises and falls in step with the ups and downs of agriculture.

At the height of the pandemic, the factory was jammed with half-constructed machines that couldn't be completed because the necessary parts were waiting in tractor-trailers parked a thousand miles away. Some weeks the Harvester Works had 40% absenteeism. Workers were in such short supply, Deere took to training welders themselves by the hundreds in intensive round-the-clock classes. Not to forget the five-week strike that closed the factory in autumn 2021.

"Supply chain was massively disrupted last year," said Jim Leach, factory manager at East Moline. "We had hundreds of machines that were partially complete. We still haven't seen a return to normal yet."

But they're getting there, with about 2,100 employees now working three shifts.

"We've basically doubled our workforce in the past 24 months," said Leach. And on May 19, Deere's latest quarterly earnings report topped Wall Street expectations on strong sales of its tractors and precision agriculture equipment. The company raised its net income forecast for the rest of the year, with booked orders remaining robust. The new target for fiscal year 2023: net income in the range of $9.25 billion to $9.50 billion, higher than the previous forecast of $8.75 billion to $9.25 billion.


THE SMART FACTORY

One way to minimize the wait for parts is to make them yourself. The Harvester Works has eight industrial Trumpf fiber optic laser stations turning sheet metal into combine parts, chassis components and grain tank sides, which are then molded on 10 press brakes — large industrial presses — in a process that is almost totally automated. The only need for human hands are to transfer the components from the lasers to the presses. The plant turns 60,000 tons of sheet steel a year into combine parts.

"We make a lot of what we need," said Musick.

As big a challenge as making the parts is then keeping track of where they go, spread across Harvest Works' 71 acres of floor space. Two years ago employees were manually conducting daily inventory of what parts and aborning combines were where. Now a large white refrigerator-size autonomous mobile robot that factory workers affectionately dubbed Ruth purrs its way through the facility, scanning the RFID chips in various components to map the inventory, down to every bin of bolts and transaxle.

"We put trackers on every machine," said Musick. "Before, we were paying people with a clipboard to write down what machine was there. As soon as you'd get done, you'd have to start over because everything was always moving."

How to make sense of the sprawling process of combine manufacture involving thousands of parts, hundreds of workers making thousands of welds, attaching rivets and tightening bolts at dozens of stations over a solid 24-hour-a-day week? Perhaps the best way to envision what happens at Harvester Works is to divide combine creation into two tasks: attaching pieces together and then checking what had just been put together to make sure it's been done correctly. The second task takes twice as long as the first, transpiring on two different combine lines and six front-end header lines. (A combine without a header, as one Deere employee put it, "is just a slow ride.")

Where possible, the assembling and checking are done simultaneously. Michael Churchill uses an impact wrench gun containing an RFID chip that talks to Deere's central production computer system — known internally as the SCF, or Smart Connected Factory — a program that knows when Churchill has tightened any given bolt enough and tells him to stop.

"We used to use guns that weren't tied to the computer — you'd see a lot more loose hardware, missing bolts," said Churchill, 34, who has worked at Deere for 16 years. "The computer nowadays tells you if you missed a torque, or if a bolt or a piece is missing. There's more error-proofing the machines. You can't go on to the next step — the computer will tell you, 'Hey, stop, you missed something.'"

Though nearly 10 miles of overhead tracks convey smaller components hanging from chains around the plant to central lines, where they are assembled into finished combines atop yellow Strothmann conveyors — low German-made rolling platforms that won't move forward to the next assembly point along a recessed track until all the functions at a particular station have been performed properly.

Some stations build and check; others just check. A subassembly pauses so that the SCF can examine hundreds of criteria, including counting the number of threads on exposed bolts to determine if a hidden washer is in place or missing.

Two years ago this check would be done by a Deere employee with a clipboard and take 20 minutes. Now it is done by a quartet of cameras mounted on tall poles and takes 1.5 seconds.

THE CONSUMER EXPERIENCE

Like many consumers, farmers have a fraught relationship with the technology transforming their lives. On one hand, they embrace tech because it generally works better. One Mississippi farmer beta testing the "See and Spray" technology Deere introduced in 2020 reports that it cuts herbicide usage by 85%. Steve Pitstick, who farms 5,000 acres of soybeans in Maple Park, Ill., estimates yields have gone up 50% since he started farming 45 years ago.

"A combination of everything: better genetics from seed companies, better job on our part as farmers, better equipment from companies like John Deere," said Pitstick.

On the other hand, the more computerized systems on a combine, the less chance a farmer can fix a problem with pliers and a can of WD-40. Prices of pre-GPS combines have been driven up sharply in recent years by those who don't want to bother with all the technology.

If you've ever been frustrated by losing your phone signal, imagine driving a 25-ton combine across a field when its systems go dead.

"Some of this stuff, you lose your signal and it just won't work," said Chris Gaesser, allowing that it only happens rarely and not for long — sometimes one part of a field is a dead zone. That's why Gaesser Farms keeps its visual field markers in place, "just in case" they have to guide their combines the old-fashioned way.

As with smartphones, "right of repair" is a hotly debated issue among farmers, one that causes some Deere owners to sue the company, claiming it was hampering their ability to fix the expensive combines they'd purchased.

"Deere also prohibits farmers from doing their own repairs on Deere equipment," the American Economic Liberties Project wrote. "Farm machinery is now so technologized that even a basic repair job requires interacting with software that Deere owns. It is zealous about its copyrights on that code — which forces farmers to pay a Deere dealer to fix things rather than maintaining their equipment on their own."

For its part, Deere maintains it does not stand in the way of farmers repairing their equipment. "John Deere supports a customer's decision to repair their own products, utilize an independent repair service or have repairs completed by an authorized dealer," the company said in a statement. "John Deere additionally provides manuals, parts, and diagnostic tools to facilitate maintenance and repairs."

That said, the lawsuit continues, and in February, the federal government issued a blistering statement siding with plaintiffs accusing the company of using its dominance to monopolize repairs.

"During harvest season, time is of the essence," the DOJ argued, pointing out that delays could come from independent repair shops being driven out of business and from Deere computer systems refusing to recognize the presence of a replacement part until an authorized technician "unlocks" them, or a range of other needless impediments.

Farmers wouldn't pay $1 million plus for a machine if they didn't want the features it offers, and Deere's defenders would argue that the company can't be expected to honor the warranty of a machine that has been laden with off-market parts and manhandled by whatever mechanic is available in Eufaula, Ala.

BRAND LOYALTY

Despite the lawsuit, Deere's brand is a synecdoche for farm life in general, the same way the Bible represents faith. "She's a little up there, down here," sings Jake Owen. "Puts a little King James in my John Deere."

When Darren Bailey ran for governor of Illinois, his campaign put out a video of his Gold Key tour, set to Joe Diffie's anthem, "John Deere Green." Painting the iconic green itself takes one wing of the Harvester Works — a 13-step electrocoating process of dip tanks, coating baths and robotic spray gun arms.

The parts are cleaned in solvent by being dipped in 50,000-gallon tanks, primed, dried in a furnace, then painted electrostatically — the paint particles are given a positive charge, while the metal parts are charged negatively, allowing the paint to bond to the metal in a uniform thickness and particular hardness. Each combine takes about 20 gallons of paint.

Workers in spacesuits still need to go in afterward with handheld sprayers and touch up spots where the robots can't reach.

Harvester Works produce two "families" of combines: four models of the older S series and the new X series. One of the factors considered in the X series design was ease of assembly: quicker manufacture means lower price. That includes trying to design away potential mistakes by, for instance, reducing the number of welds. Though welding is a task that can be done quickly by robots — the factory has 115 robotic welding arms, and half the welds are done by robots, half by humans — a weld involves heat, which can distort metal. The last thing Deere wants to do is throw a 33-foot augur out of alignment. So fewer welds, more rivets.

The new machines roll on special factory tires; both to reduce height clearance and so the tires won't show wear from testing when the combine is delivered. The machines are fired up — by the owner, if he's there on his Gold Key tour — driven around a speed-bump test track to rattle it a bit and make sure nothing will fall off the first time the new $1 million combine hits a rut. Farmers don't like that.

AUTONOMOUS TRACTORS

How long that farmer is going to be behind the wheel of a combine at all is anyone's guess. Last year Deere unveiled a completely autonomous tractor, the R8, which orients itself using a "geofence" and frees the farmer to check his email in the comfort of the farmhouse.

Deere is already sending autonomous tractors to spray herbicides, and farmers are expecting autonomous harvesters to be operating within the next decade. Or sooner.

"I think that's the direction we're going, for sure," said Gaesser. "Right now everything's bigger and quicker. I'd say within 10 years, and probably sooner than that, we'll see smaller pieces that run all the time instead of man-operated larger pieces of equipment that run during the day."

Though right now, he points out, you still need a skilled driver to, say, adjust to a row of crops that have been battered by a breeze, quicker than a machine can.

"If you're going into good corn, you can get into down corn, and by the time it adjusts to the down corn, you're back in the good corn," said Gaesser. "You still need that person to know what's coming."

A reminder that, right now, in both field and factory, technology only goes so far. Before each new John Deere combine leaves the East Moline Harvester Works for its — on average — 17-year life working the fields, divided among an average of four future owners, there is a step that does not get celebrated in the company tech stack, yet is vital nonetheless. "The last line of defense," as it was described: An employee lies down on a mechanic's creeper, rolls under the new combine, and checks out its underside with a flashlight.

Neil Steinberg is a Chicago writer and a columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times.

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