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How Big Tech Ruined Farming
How Big Tech Ruined Farming
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If you were in Las Vegas, in January 2023, sitting in the audience of the opening keynote
0:05
of CES—perhaps the most influential tech conference in the world—you likely had one
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question on your mind: “Why is John Deere here?” After all, they’re the tractor company,
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right? They make machines that push and pull and move and dig, that’s their thing,
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right? Well, not according to their CEO, John May. “We’ve quickly become one of the world’s leading
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robotics and AI companies. Our solutions leverage technology like computer vision,
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advanced sensing and compute, machine learning, and data analytics.”
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There’s one key word there: solutions. That’s a word that gets thrown around a lot by companies
0:46
like Apple “…solution…” “…solution…” “… solution…”; Microsoft “…we provide an
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end-to-end tooling solution…” “…deceptively simple solution…” “…the best end to end solution…”;
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Google “…bespoke AI solutions…” “open sourcing solutions…” “…a great solution…”.
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This linguistic mimicry, their mere attendance at an event like CES, it’s all… peculiar for a
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tractor company. Unless, does John Deere think it’s a tech company? Well… yes,
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they do. At least according to themselves, in this LinkedIn post, sharing an article entitled
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“John Deere: ‘We’re a Technology Company.’” And that assertion appears increasingly less
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absurd. While the company lays off hundreds in its manufacturing plants, it’s simultaneously
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staffing up its tech divisions. Of fifteen current US job listings, twelve are in software, data, or
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robotics—just three in manufacturing. The company has been going through a metamorphosis from one
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that makes machines to one that makes solutions. Apple, for instance, does not merely make
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computers or phones or tablets. They make integrated technology solutions,
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blending software, hardware, and services into an ecosystem that envelops ones digital experience.
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Correspondingly, John Deere no longer merely makes tractors or combines or loaders, but
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rather integrated production solutions—blending software, hardware, and services into an ecosystem
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that envelops a farmer’s day-to-day experience. At the extremes, the company appears entirely
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disconnected from its original form as a small Illinois storefront selling shovels and
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pitchforks. Never could John Deere himself have imagined that his company would eventually go on
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to operate, for instance, a satellite network. But waxing nostalgic about humble beginnings
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would mask what the company now truly is: it’s not an endearing family business, it’s not a scrappy
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underdog, it’s a market-domineering behemoth. It has the business of agriculture, especially in
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America, in a stranglehold. And so might Apple, with consumer electronics, but farming is not
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something you pick up or put on. It’s not one’s digital experience, it’s one's entire experience:
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it’s your job, it’s where you live, it’s what your family does, it’s what your neighbors do,
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it’s what your descendants do, it is an all encompassing way of life whose future is now being
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dictated by one tractor company that’s decided it’s big tech. But John Deere’s power, their
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influence, their ability to change the course of history has been centuries in the making.
3:24
It started with this—the self-scouring steel plow. Plows had existed in some form
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for millennia—so many millennia, in fact, that we can’t even say how old they are—but by the 1800s,
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they’d been refined and refined into this: a single-piece cast-iron plow. These could be
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pulled by an animal, and would efficiently loosen the soil to bring nutrients to the surface before
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planting a fresh crop. And these worked great, for the time, except for here—the American midwest.
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The soil of Illinois and its neighbors was thick, moist, and rooty, in a fashion that would lead
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it to clump on the plow, forcing farmers to stop every once in a while to clean it off.
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But John Deere had an idea: he would manufacture the same plow,
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but of polished steel. This cut straight through the midwestern ground with far greater ease, and
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the soil would shed right off rather than clump. While he was not the first to invent this concept,
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he was the first to start manufacturing a steel plow en masse, and his production
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steadily grew into the hundreds per month, and a later thousands. This innovation played
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an instrumental part in spreading agriculture across the region, and transformed John Deere
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from a mere shop into a growing manufacturer. By the turn of the century, after the company
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had passed through the generations of the family, Deere had become a leading agricultural implements
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manufacturer, but the industry landscape was changing beneath them. Like the plow, tractors
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as a concept, had long existed. Through the 19th century it was typically animals like horse or
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oxen that pulled plows and other implements, yet around the world, across industries, animal
4:56
power was being replaced by steam power. Whereas horse-drawn stagecoaches dominated the past, steam
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trains were now the dominant form of long-distance transport, so the logic carried that steam-powered
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tractors could replace animal-power on farms. And they certainly could, the technology existed,
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but steam-powered tractors never became ubiquitous due to their high up-front and operating cost.
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But with the turn of the century came gas-powered tractors: cheaper to buy,
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cheaper to operate. Popularity exploded, and while Deere was originally reluctant to stray beyond
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their agricultural-implement core, they eventually realized they had no choice if they wanted to
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stay relevant. They tried to design their own, and it was plenty capable, but it was just not
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competitive. At about twice the price of that of equivalent machines, their tractor never had any
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shot of commercial success, and then its designer died from pneumonia following a week of testing in
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the wet and cold, so John Deere rather elected to just simply buy their top competitor. With that,
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the Waterloo Gasoline Engine Company was folded into John Deere, and over the following years,
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their tractor, the Waterloo Boy, enjoyed wild success. Once again, like with the self-scouring
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steel plow, Deere didn’t invent the technology, but they popularized it—they identified the
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opportunity, scaled up manufacturing, marketed successfully, and helped transform the tractor
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from a niche, novel technology into the solution for moving power on the farm.
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Over the decades that followed, the company transformed again from primarily an implement
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company into a machine company—offering combines and balers and planters and sprayers:
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essentially anything you needed to turn a field into a farm. Through much of the 1900s they were
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always a significant, but underdog player in the industry until the 60s and 70s when their primary
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competitor, International Harvester, began to falter. And with its collapse in the 80s,
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John Deere took a firm lead in the industry—becoming the go-to,
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ubiquitous source of agricultural equipment in the United States. But then, another monumental shift
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in the field. Like the tractor introduced the mechanical era of farming, information
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technology introduced farming to the digital age. And again, John Deere had to adjust on the fly.
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This started on June 23, 1995 when Rockwell International Corporation, traditionally a US
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defense manufacturer, unveiled its proprietary Vision System—effectively firing the first shot
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of the digital farming revolution. It seems so simple now, but Rockwell’s Vision System
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was poised to usher in a new age of efficiency by using defense satellites to pinpoint and track a
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tractor from above, which, in turn, would allow a farmer to better monitor their field’s yield,
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or when it came time to plant, better disperse seeds and spray chemicals. Precision farming
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had arrived, and while Rockwell was first, competitors such as Case Corporation, and Agco
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Corporation were close on the company’s heels. So too was Deere, which took it one step further.
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To the late-90s American farmer, GPS and precision agriculture was a handy tool, but still a finicky,
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expensive, and difficult-to-use luxury. It helped, but it wasn’t required.
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At least, not until Deere made it a practical necessity. As they did when developing their
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tractor, Deere looked further afield for help. This started at Stanford,
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where the company collaborated with engineers to develop an autonomous GPS-controlled tractor.
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While it worked, it didn’t work well enough to take to market. The problem was 1990s GPS
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just wasn’t accurate or dependable enough. So, more partnerships. Now Deere, along with
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NavCom Technology and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, sought to figure out how to create a more reliable
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positioning system to support not just yield maps but autonomous guiding—the former a helpful tool,
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the latter a potentially revolutionary product. While autonomous guiding may have seemed a
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lofty ambition, its use case was well grounded. Before the rise of precision farming, farming was,
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well, remarkably imprecise. Take, for instance, actually planting a field. Now, laying down seed
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is actually a rather complicated process with a whole host of decisions to make and factors
9:02
to consider from when to seed to how to establish then plant the field’s headlands and borders. But
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regardless of such considerations—or what crop one is even planting in the first place—each and every
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farmer, since the dawn of the tractor, has dealt with one major inefficiency: overlap. In farming,
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overlapping is practically unavoidable—as a tractor operator threads rows back and
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forth across their field, it’s nearly impossible for there not to be slivers of field—whether it
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be where rows meet headlands, or just between rows themselves—where the farmer doesn’t pass
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over a small section twice. And considering the alternative—what farmers call sparing—this makes
9:38
sense: if a farmer is to miss a small sliver entirely while drilling, there will, of course
9:43
be no crops, if they miss it with pesticides or fertilizer, the section’s yield will drop,
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if they miss it during harvesting, well that’d be an expensive and embarrassing mistake, too.
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So farmers overlap. But they try to do so as little as possible. Experience helps with this, as
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hours in the chair, along with a long-established sense of pride in maintaining straight rows,
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keeps overlap down. So too do generally normal, rectangular fields, should a farmer have such a
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luxury. And then there are tricks: spray foams to mark areas already hit, guideposts along
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fences for visual reference, thoughtfully laid out tractor paths calibrated to align with the width
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of the farmer’s equipment. But tricks only go so far. One study has put numbers on the overlaps.
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Across the study’s 17 locations and four years of planting, the combine driller overlapped at 7.7%,
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spin disk fertilizer at 9.5%, while the sprayer overlapped at 15.7%, and the cultivator reached
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19%. At every step of the process of growing something, then, the farmer’s overlap is costing
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them—8% of their seed is being wasted, 10% of their expensive fertilizer is being overapplied,
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nearly 16% in pesticide and herbicide is doing more harm than good, and almost a fifth of their
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field is being turned over by the cultivator for no reason. This means more materials. It
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also means more fuel, it means more time in the field and in the chair, it means more hours put
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on the machines, and therefore more hours in the shop and fewer functional seasons. Such
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costs really add up, too, as a bad year will see costs outpace income, while 10 year averages, in
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the case of Kansas farms from 2010 to 2019, will only net meager 11.8% profit margins. With such
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touchy and tight finances, unnecessarily wasting 8 to 19% of one’s time and money on overlapping
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is a massive inefficiency. One that Deere was seeking to address at the dawn of a new century.
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The answer was called Starfire which, by correcting notoriously inaccurate GPS data
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with ground location data, offered farmers field mapping accurate to within 3 feet or 1 meter,
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rather than the 10-to-30 foot or three-to-ten meter accuracy of traditional GPS. With further
11:48
work on the product, by 2004, Starfire 2 provided accuracy within 1.5 inches or 4.5 centimeters.
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Through the collaboration with Stanford, NASA, and Navcom who they eventually acquired, Starfire
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positioned the company again on the cutting edge of the precision farming revolution—not only
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did their product provide superior accuracy for yield and seed mapping, it was accurate
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enough to address the fundamental inefficiency of overlapping. Simply equip a machine with a
12:14
Starfire receiver and a monitor then purchase Deere’s Autotrac program and farmers could now
12:19
guide by precise lines laid out on a screen and even let the autonomous feature take the wheel.
12:25
Today, through a combination of six uplink sites on three continents, 46 reference sites around
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the globe, and leased bandwidth from Inmarsat satellites, the shovel and pitchfork company
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is able to provide greater accuracy than the public global positioning alternative, optimizing
12:39
every single thread and turn across a farmer’s field. The influence of such guidance can’t be
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understated. Only 10% of farmers used any sort of auto steer and guidance system in 2004, but as of
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2019, those numbers stood in the mid 50 to 60% range, and on bigger, thousand-acre farms where
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the economies of scale blunt the upfront cost and the waste of overlap is only magnified, adoption
13:02
rates of such systems have reached over 80%. By applying the same playbook they did with the
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plow and the tractor—embracing then perfecting new technology through upfront R&D investment
13:11
while also acquiring sector leaders like Navcom—Deere helped push farming into a
13:16
new epoch. But that epoch isn’t over, and Deere’s only dug themselves further into the digital turn.
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Across the dozen American companies Deere has acquired since 2007, only four are traditional
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hardware manufacturers, the rest, broadly, are in tech, and increasingly in artificial intelligence,
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machine learning, and automation. In 2017, for just north of $300 million, Deere purchased Blue
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River Technology, who had recently been testing their new product called See & Spray—what they
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called the world’s first smart sprayer, which, by feeding hundreds of thousands of plant images
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through deep learning algorithms was capable of identifying crops and weeds before then spraying
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herbicide within a quarter-inch accuracy. Not long after, Deere’s See & Spray Select entered
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the market. Then, in 2022, See & Spray Ultimate became available for factory installation on 2023
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model 410R, 412R, and 612R Sprayers. With a camera positioned along every meter of the carbon-fiber
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spray boom, the product would reduce spray volume by two thirds, saving money on herbicides and, by
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extending trips between refills, saving time and fuel. The benefits of the next step in precision
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agriculture also provided an environmental benefit beyond the farmer too, as this product, the
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company projected, would reduce the airborne drift of chemicals by up to 87% and chemical run-off by
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up to 93%. In this new era of AI and machine learning precision farming, John Deere was not
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the first, as a Dyson subsidiary entered the smart spray space earlier. Nor is it alone, as AgZen,
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a commercial outgrowth of MIT research, is pushing into the space, too. Whether John Deere wins out
14:54
here, as they have so many times in the past with new technological innovations, remains to be seen,
15:00
but given their history, it feels like a safe bet. Regardless of competition, though, this service,
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capable of plugging right into the broader John Deere ecosystem, should be a boon for
15:11
the American farmer conscious of cost, yield, and overall environmental impact of their work.
15:16
Or at least, that’s what it would seem. By standard metrics, farming in the US
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has gotten better across the sector’s digital revolution—we’re wasting less,
15:25
making better informed decisions, and growing more than ever: just
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look at average yields for corn, soy, and cotton. But consider the position of the American farmer.
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In the past, being an all green farm—that is running strictly John Deere equipment—was a point
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of pride. Today, though, it’s increasingly feeling like an expensive necessity without alternatives.
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New-found hyper efficiency comes with a cost, or really, a whole host of costs. Say an Illinois soy
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farmer is sizing up purchasing a See & Spray attachment—well, first they’ll need to have a
15:56
fairly new sprayer to begin with, which if they don’t have, will be in the ballpark of $50,000.
16:02
Then add on another $25,000 for equipment and install, which can only be done at an authorized
16:07
dealership. Still, given that soybean pesticides have reached an all-time high this decade coming
16:11
in at $77 per acre in 2022, and given that this farmer owns the median sized farm for the
16:16
state at 4,500 acres, considering scale, such an upfront investment may well be worth it. Without
16:22
See and Spray, pesticides would cost $350,000, with the product, assuming it cuts spraying
16:29
down to a third, the farmer would only need about $117,000 in pesticides—so with upfront costs,
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savings total about $62,000. But then another cost: See and Spray subscriptions cost $4 per
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acre so cut out another $18,000 and the economics become slightly less appealing.
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And then there’s the less tangible costs. Fundamentally, precision agriculture is
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changing what it means to be a farmer. What was once an occupation defined by individual autonomy,
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problem-solving, and improvisation is now increasingly beholden to monitors, screens,
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software subscriptions, and the availability of manufacturer-authorized technicians. Undoubtedly,
17:07
this is an issue of nostalgia, but it permeates in costly and frustrating ways too.
17:13
Consider the solar storms that pushed northern lights as far south as the American midwest. While
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it might’ve been a once in a lifetime experience for the farmers who stayed up late to see it,
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it caused far more costly problems when the storm knocked out their navigational systems. Just at
17:27
the moment farmers needed to be out planting corn their precision navigation systems failed them.
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While solar storms are few and far between, issues with software programs and machinery
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that’s now more complicated than ever are far too common and far too difficult to get figured out
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for your life-long farmer. Rather than hauling a tractor back to the barn to fix a hydraulic
17:46
leak and get back out on the field that same day, when new-era hardware fails, there’s a
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good chance a farmer will be out of their depth if it’s on the technology-side of the machine,
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which as the far more finicky side, it likely is. So rather than fixing it and getting back
17:59
out on the field, the farmer’s left waiting for an authorized technician who will be expensive
18:03
to pay and costly on time, as it’s unlikely they’ll be available at the drop of a hat.
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And all that’s without considering whether the farmer has the tools and information to make the
18:11
fix in the first place—which is also a matter of contention. Across the past decade, John Deere has
18:17
found itself in the middle of a battle over the right to repair. For those savvy enough or bold
18:22
enough to fix their own issues, they often need access to the diagnostic software to begin with,
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which is something Deere’s been slow to hand over. Their stated reason to keep software restricted is
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a matter of liability and responsibility. If they hand over the keys, they figure,
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their machines might get used and altered in ways they shouldn’t. But for an increasingly
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boisterous farming community, this withholding of key information is simply another way to make
18:44
sure that farmer is also on the hook for costly repair bills that make their way back to Deere,
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thus providing the company yet another revenue stream. Regardless as to who is really telling
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the truth, what’s undeniable is that the farmer is as financially squeezed as ever,
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and with the rise of big tech in farming, they are increasingly being moved out of the driver’s seat.
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But Deere is facing their own financial pressure—competition is rising, so they
19:08
have to adapt to maintain their relevance. Over the past decade, venture capital money has poured
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into startups that insist they can disrupt the world of food production. Whereas in 2013 there
19:18
were 42 funds focused on the AgriFood space, today there are almost 300 reaching a peak
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of $53 billion of investment in 2021. A simple thesis is presented to potential investors—the
19:31
global share of land dedicated to agriculture is peaking as more and more of the world urbanizes,
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yet simultaneously, the global population is expected to continue increasing for at least
19:41
half a century more. Therefore, it is objectively true that we will have to produce more from less,
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and these startups believe the way to do that is through technological innovation.
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Different companies have different solutions to this problem—some are focused on “controlled
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environment agriculture,” growing indoors to eliminate the threats and resource-losses from the
20:00
outdoors; others are leveraging big data analytics and machine learning to remove the inefficiencies
20:04
of guesswork; while still others are working to increase outdoor production yields and lower labor
20:09
cost through various forms of autonomy. Building on early successes in precision agriculture,
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John Deere has committed to developing a fully autonomous production system for corn and soybean
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by 2030—that means every step from plowing through planting through harvest without direct
20:23
human involvement. And that’s remarkably believable. Corn and soybean are planted
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in straight rows with relatively high distance between each plant, meaning there’s already the
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predictability and margin for error that makes it easiest for autonomous systems to succeed.
20:38
The combination of innovations like precision agriculture, indoor growing,
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autonomous production, and more will yield amazing benefits for us all: in sum, they create a food
20:47
production system that is less expensive and less resource intensive. But they come at a cost—a very
20:53
literal, incredibly significant, upfront cost. The economics of paying an exorbitant amount for
20:59
a fully autonomous wheat production system work out first for the absolute largest farms. Just
21:05
as with See & Spray, every innovation promises to improve efficiency by a certain, small percent,
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so the larger the overall operation, the more valuable that small percent can be,
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and therefore the more likely the upfront cost is worth it. So innovations can be worth it,
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but only if you grow a ton of food. This has been true for a while—there have been
21:25
greater and greater economies of scale in agriculture—which has contributed to
21:29
a long-term trend of consolidation. Over the past 25 years, the average size of an American farm has
21:34
grown by 7% even as total farmland has declined 8%—as small farms face increasing cost-pressure
21:41
by more-efficient big-ag operations, they either shut down or sell their land to big ag.
21:48
And as big tech encroaches into farming, innovation is accelerating, which is great
21:52
by itself, but this leaves the small family farm behind. A layperson’s perception of farming,
21:59
as a mom and pop living in a homestead in Kansas, working the fields around, answering to no boss
22:03
but themselves, is becoming a cinematic fiction. Increasingly, those living in regions dominated
22:10
by agriculture work not for themselves, but for landowners holding hundreds of thousands
22:15
of acres. Often, the owners of this land live time zones away, meaning profits from
22:20
production are not spent at the local diner or car dealership, but rather distributed to
22:24
a multitude of investors and left to sit in mutual funds. This contributes to a further
22:29
gutting of the economy of rural America—one of the rare ways to build a business outside of cities is
22:35
becoming an increasing impossibility, and rural resources are being extracted for urban gain.
22:42
This is, in many ways, inevitable. Tech innovation, across essentially any industry,
22:48
has primarily benefited larger corporations and incentivized consolidation. Farming,
22:53
being so far from urban areas and so culturally isolated from Silicon Valley, has long been
22:59
shielded from these forces. Yet today, John Deere and others have recognized the upside of bringing
23:05
these two worlds together. But this progress will hurt. The death of the family farm is upon us,
23:11
and the autonomous tractor sits just beyond the horizon, waiting to unleash its destructive
23:16
ability to incrementally optimize yields. The reason why John Deere’s See & Spray
23:22
technology is so powerful is that it’s able to interpret visual information and make decisions
23:27
on what a given plant needs in an instant, at a huge scale. What makes this possible behind
23:33
the scenes is a neural network—the software was fed millions of images and taught to interpret
23:38
them as a human would. Neural networks are fascinating as they’re essentially recreating
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