194: The Power of AI Farming - Interview with John Deere

[Music] hey everybody in this episode of still to be determined we're going to be talking about receiving a Dear John Letter oh wait I misre that we're going to be talking about John Deere tractors hey everybody as usual I'm Sean frell I'm a writer I write some sci-fi I write some stuff for kids including my on the book store shelves recently released the Sinister secrets of singe please take look for it at your local bookstore and with me as always is my brother Matt he's that Matt I've undecided with Matt frell which takes a look at emerging Tech and its impact on our lives Matt how are you doing today I'm doing great how about yourself I'm doing well it's been a rainy windy weekend but I think we're weathering it and it looks like the sun is actually out right now so let's get to recording so I can go outside in today's episode of still to be determined it's going to be a break from our normal normal pattern we occasionally have these long form interviews that Matt conducts and when they are of particular interest or dive deep into a subject we like to share the entire conversation with you all so in this one Matt is going to be talking with Sarah schneck who is the director of emerging Technologies at John Deere we are all of course familiar with John Deere as one of the leaders in uh tractor and farming equ equipment manufacturing and I mean I don't know about most of our listeners and viewers globally but it's not uncommon for us in the US as kids to actually have toy John Deere tractors it's yes I even ones that kind of worked like little levers to move the different parts and so it's uh kind of a flash for the in from the past for me in introducing this conversation Matt and Sarah talked about what John Deere is planning with Automation and machine learning something that's on everybody's radar it's bubbling up in literally every field including farming equipment so think of self-driving tractors think of self-driving combines do not think of Stephen King's movie Maximum Overdrive oh God no think about CA and spray technology and this one I think is fascinating technology where the machines would spray the crops that are only showing signs of bugs or disease as opposed to blanket carpet bombing of a field and they're also going to discuss the fears around this kind of Technology taking jobs from people so on we go to the conversation with Sarah so to kick things off I just want to say thank you so much Sarah for for joining me today um to kick things off I was hoping you could just kind of give me a little information about yourself like what is it that you do at at John Deere for sure yeah so great to be here thanks for having me uh my name is Sarah shinkle my title is director of emerging Technologies at John Deere which I think means I have maybe one of the coolest jobs at John Deere so I lead a team of technologists and we basically look at new and emerging technology and try to understand it but then we also build lots of prototypes and proof of Concepts to see how does this work in our applications how might it work for our customers how might it benefit our our equipment and so I've got over 18 years at John Deere I've always been in our technology space so started in embedded software and then kind of just moved into different roles always in our technology sack and so working on technology that was either in the cab or in our web and mobile devices and now I have this super cool job where we where we experiment with new tech that is awesome yeah one of the reasons I reached out to John Deere and hoping to talk to somebody like yourself is that when you think about agriculture and something like John Deere tractors and things like that you don't think of cuttingedge Technology but it does sound like John Deere has been always pushing that envelope um especially since there's a group that's dedicated to this exact thing yeah absolutely and it's one of my favorite things is to talk to people who aren't familiar with all the technology that's in our equipment um because they're always surprised and it's really fun to to kind of share our journey with them and so we've been putting technology on equipment for over 20 years so a lot of people are surprised to learn that over 20 years ago we introduced our autot track product which is hands-free steering while you're going up and down the field so for 20 years Farmers haven't had to necessarily drive while they're in the field we have we use GPS and the onboard technology to do that steering for them and then over that 20 years we've just been adding more and more technology to make things easier for Farmers to help them do their jobs better um and do jobs more precisely Farmers work really long really hard hours and so we found uh over the past you know couple decades the more we can automate what's happening in a cab the the more we can help that farmer do their job and do it well farming is fundamentally a hard job there's not the the growth rate of farmers is like 1% over the next few decades and the the population is expected to go I think from eight billion to 10 billion people and so we've got to grow a lot of food but in the US we don't have a lot of farmers that growth isn't there that labor force and so bringing technology onto our equipment has been one of the ways we've helped Farmers be more productive more efficient but then also help them just get through their really long hard days there's a lot of concern there's there's excitement and concern around when you're talking about AI machine learning applying these technology you brought up the autonomous tractors like being able to kind of like steer itself um to help the to help the driver out there are concerns that this will end up taking jobs but from everything I've been seeing the farming Market is kind of shrinking there's not enough people to fill all the rules so what is what is your position or John Deere's position on how you're trying to alleviate those concerns that this might end up taking jobs yeah so I think there's a statistic I think the average US farmer is over 55 years old and working at 12 to 18 hour a day and then like I said I think the the farm labor force is has been growing at like 1% it's really it's not growing is is kind of the short story there and so you know like most of us a to-do list is always a little bit longer than we really have time to do and on a farm I think that's that's very true there's always more work than there are people to get the job done and so what we've been really focus on is how do we help those farmers do the job that they need to do under really tight uh windows for being in the field so if you think about weather conditions that are totally out of control of the farmer when a when it's planting season you have to plant and you maybe have a two-e window before the weather turns or it gets too warm same thing with Harvest when it's time to get the crop out you've got to get the crop out you're working against weather you're working against time and so anything we can do with technology to help farmers be really productive in those windows of of time that they have to do their job it just benefits them so it's to me it's it's really about how can technology help farmers get their job done and that's really where we focus on that productivity and that efficiency so s why could you walk us through the basic steps of the farming practice just kind of give us an overview of how it works yeah absolutely so I'll speak for us farming and and the way it really works is there's there's four main steps so first a farmers are going to plant their crop and so that happens usually in the US in the spring and it's a really tight window so the the soil has to be warm enough for the the seed to grow but you've got to work around Spring weather and you've also got to got get the crop in that soil early enough that the crop's going to have enough sunlight and enough growing time through the summer and so planting is a really important time of year for Farmers um they use a tractor and they the tractor pulls what's called a planter and that's how they get the seeds in the ground and then in summer they'll do a spraying operation or a spraying passes and what that is is it's really nurturing the plants so if you think about if you have a garden or grow plants you know you can't just leave them alone and hope for the best and so during spring we're looking at weeds we're looking at pests and we're really making sure that the plants have all the nutrients all the space all the opportunity to be as healthy as they can as they're growing once the the crops have grown and fall usually in the US we come into Harvest and harvesting is done with a machine called a combine it's a huge basically a factory on Wheels and it takes the crop out of the field it it sorts it and it puts it into a bin and then that's what's going to go into storage or to be sold and so this Harvest is a super busy time at the field because you're trying to get all the crops out before they get too mature before the weather comes in before everything freezes and then at the same time you want to do do a tillage operation which is where you prepare the soil for the next year's planting and again especially in the northern us you've got to get that done before the ground freezes and so that Harvest and tillage time of year can be really busy for farmers and so because of all that stress and the importance of that time of year tillage is where we started with autonomy because can we take an operator out of that cab and free them up to do a different job during that really busy season was really the goal there so it was kind of like the lwh hang fruit of the entire process it's like the busiest part where you we're trying to help first absolutely yeah can we make that tractor pulling that tillage equipment be autonomous so that somebody can remotely monitor it while also doing a different job to keep Harvest going and harvest efficient because the logistics and the busyness of harvest is it's really amazing to see to be out on a farm during Harvest it's just constant movement constant work how long ago was that that you kind of f started focusing on the tillage part well we introduced autonomous track factor in 2022 and so we've been working on it obviously before that but it started to go out with customers in 2022 and it's still with customers now so um it's you know early in the adoption curve but we're getting a lot of positive feedback and it's really been amazing to see I mean there's really something to be said for seeing a tractor out in a field and there's no one sitting in the cab yeah I was going to ask you about the feedback uh I'm assuming they're really liking the extra hands the feedback has been really positive uh just continued interest and then frankly a lot of curiosity about it too it is it's something novel it's something different and so um it's really fun to see the interest kind of just gain momentum as we continue to work on this right so talked about a couple different specific pieces of technology that you are doing like one of the ones that caught my attention it was earlier this year was the sea and spray technology could you kind of walk through what that is and how it works absolutely so I'll start with maybe um what the job of spraying is for Farmer so after you've planted your crops and they're growing and they're healthy in the field you've got to manage those crops and keep them healthy and so there's things like insects there's weeds all of these things can attack plants on top of just you need the right weather conditions for the plant to grow and so farmers will go through their fields and and historically they'll go through and they'll spray the whole field with maybe an herbicide to control weed pressure well what CN spray does is we've added so sprayers too if you haven't seen a sprayer a self-propelled sprayer they're really cool machines they're really tall they're probably I'm a little over 5et they're just almost as tall as I am is where the the wheels go that's how tall the wheels are the tires and um and they go through sing crops and so there's a boom which is where all of the nozzles are for the sprayers and it can be 120 feet wide so that's almost half a football field and on that boom we have put 36 cameras and they're looking forward and they use machine learning to say am I seeing crop or am I seeing weed and if they see weed through the embedded systems on the the machine they tell the sprayer turn on and it'll turn on and spray only that weed and so rather than spraying the entire field we're looking at probably like we think about a 2third 66% savings on herbicide if customers use these CN spray machines because the the machine learning the AI can see just the weeds and spray only though so huge benefit to the farmer from a cost savings but also just a huge benefit across the to on on overall herbicide savings yeah I was going to say it's beneficial for the environment it's beneficial for the the pocketbook of the farmer yeah and for those of us that are concerned about overuse of pesticides it benefits us as well exactly yeah so it's over 60% you said yeah that's that's what our research so far tells us our feedback is 67% 66% I think right so so for the AI for these for these models that you've created for being able to detect the the weed to be able to spray it are you constantly improving that like from the SE and spray they in the fields are you collecting more data that you're using to refine the model to make it better and make it even absolutely so yeah so we have trained this on you know millions of images and then as we collect more data from Fields we're continuing to train and refine it and you can also think about too as we move into different crops you know those will take we'll have to learn those crops and differentiate a weed from some other crops too so it's just this continuous engineering puzzle from my standpoint being an engineer is you know the job is never done we've got it working in the field now we're getting great feedback but we can keep making it better we can keep making it more exact for another product the going to the autonomous tractor thing again how autonomous are they today like how much can they actually do on their own so right now we've supported autonomous tractor with tillage so tillage is where we prepare the soil for planting and so you usually do it in the harvest season and today we have it with customers in the field and there is no one in the cab so autonomous tilling is happening with John Deere autonomous tractors um you can monitor the farmer can monitor the operation we have a John Deere Operation Center mobile application so through that they can monitor the tractor they can see you know if the tractor pauses because it seees something they can see what the tractor sees on there and they can say nope that's just some trash go ahead and keep going um and so yeah those are in the field now and then we have a road map where we we think we can get to an autonomous Farm by 2030 wow do do farmers typically have multiple of these running or do they just have one and they just keep an eye on it I think today because we're really early in the adoption of autonomous tractors I think usually Farmers just have one right now but you know I think that's one of the things that we'll learn as adoption grows and we've seen adoption grow with Automation in the tractor so we expect autonomous tractor adoption to grow as well um I think we're we're going to learn how do farmers use autonomous tractors on the on their Farms as especially as we introduce more um autonomous functionality well between between all those Technologies are there any specific crops or farming conditions that benefit the most from these Technologies or is it kind of just it applies to pretty much all kinds of farming yeah that's a really good question I think right now we're focused mostly in corn and soy and cotton as crops but a lot of our automation technology Works in regardless of the the crop you're in so if I think back to autot track which is that hands-free steering that works in in any crop in any conditions and a lot of the sensors that we use on our equipment will work measuring you know yields or rates that we're applying regardless of of what crop we're in and so that's the benefit of a lot of the technology we're working with is that it works for all Farmers regardless of what they're doing um the the benefits and the efficiencies are there for everyone now obviously with greater technology comes more complexity sometimes so from a farmer perspective Farmers wear so many hats they're an accountant they're a business operator they're an engineer because they have to fix the tractors when they break how much of this are they able to set up on them by themselves how much handholding do they need from John Deere if there's training that they have to go through to be able to do this yeah absolutely that's a really great question I think one of the things that makes John Deere really special is our dealer Network and our dealer channel so um and it's a little bit different so you maybe know like car dealers and think about how you work with your car dealer it's really different for John Deere dealers and customers so dealers are really um there to help our customers all the time and so they understand they usually have a personal relationship with with a a given farmer um they understand that Farmer's business and then they're there um to help support help diagnose um help repair but also you know teach the farmer how to use some of the stuff as well so a lot of times those dealers are are one of our first lines of of both getting technology to our Farmers but then also supporting that technology with our farmers and it's really amazing like if you're out at a farm during harvest season which is one of the busiest times of years for Farms those dealers are just as busy as the farmers are going out and helping out and taking phone calls um it's pretty impressive to watch so it's really it's a partnership absolutely yes I love that word okay are there I don't know if you'll have any details on this but do you have any kind of success stories or case studies of customers that have used these Technologies and how it's changed how they Farm absolutely I think we've I mean we've just got so many so because automation has been in the hands of our customers for over 20 years there's just a lot of farmers that are using this successfully and to the point where they don't want to run without using it so just like maybe uh you know Farmers used to be able to farm without air conditioning and now they really want air conditioning in a cab just like you or I would want it in our car um autot track is that way they don't want to have to steer through their fields anymore they're used to the benefits of auto track track they're used to that hands-free experience they're making phone calls they're running their business from their cabs and so all of those Farmers that have adopted autot track and use it regularly that's become a must have for many of our Farmers another really cool example is our combine advisor project or product and what it does is it senses what's happening in a combine so the the machine that's used during Harvest is called a combine and it goes through and it harvest the crops from the field and it's a really huge complex machine and it's hard to get all of the settings exactly right and there are expert operators who know exactly how to like tune in all of those settings and get it to operate exactly how they wanted to operate for their fields for their crops and combine advisor is a window for for Farmers to see what is happening in my combine and then they can adjust those settings themselves and it gives maybe an average operator some extra insights to help them have that expert operator capabilities this is something I've heard a bunch of times from different companies I've talked to but when it comes to machine learning it takes somebody who might be average at being understanding how to do something and it like gives them superpowers it like accelerates them to be able exactly and when you think about the labor shortage that we have in agriculture that's really important because the person driving the equipment might not be an expert operator they might be somebody that was just available today you know a lot of times on at least on Family Farms it's kind of phone a friend like Hey we're down a person today can you come help out and that person you know doesn't Farm full-time and so anything that we can do with technology to make that operate more productive and more efficient whether it's the expert operator and giving them superhuman powers or whether it's a less experienced operator and helping them get into a more of an expert range technolog is really helpful for that so so how do you see this is going to be kind of a put on your uh prog PR uh like prognostication hat like this is not specific to John Deere but more of the industry how do you see AI machine learning evolving in the agricultural industry over the next decade for for all yeah that's a really great question and it's one you know myself and my team think about a lot all of John Deere thinks about that a lot I think we're just going to keep seeing growth in Automation and in autonomy so like I said we have a 2030 goal to get to an autonomous farm so that means autonomous planting autonomous spray autonomous harvest in addition to the autonomous tillage we already have and if you think about what is going to take to achieve that goal it's going to mean more sensors more AI more machine learning because we got to understand what is a human doing in those machines and then we have to be able to automate everything that human is doing or give them visibility to it through technology on a on a Remote device and so um it's if you have my job it's just a really exciting place to be because there's no end of really great useful challenges and problems to solve for our customers and so if I think about going from where we are today where we can you know spray weed by weed what's the future what can we do plant by plant can we get to a place where where we're managing each individual plant in that field and using technology to do that and helping each farmer say you know we're going to make sure that this plant needs nutrients and give it just the nutrients it needs it's lots of interesting problems out there and Technology will help us solve a lot of them can you discuss any of the challenges that John Deere is facing at implementing this new technology as it's rolling out like absolutely I think you know other than just general technology advancement and adoption which isn't necessarily a challenge but an opportunity one of our biggest challenges is probably around connectivity so if you think about an autonomous tractor and I talked about you know we have the John Deere operations center that's on a mobile device well that needs connectivity to that tractor so that the the farmer can see what's happening can monitor the the operation can see the status of the operation and there's just a lot of parts of Rural America that still don't have great connectivity um I was looking at some stats and I think I'm looking at my notes here yeah I've got a statistic that says over 14 million Americans still don't have rural Americans don't have access to broadband access and that extends into the field and so for data to share between equipment for data to flow into our operations center so that we can do this remote monitoring and do autonomous activities we've really got to have that connectivity and so um in 2022 we announced actually a request for proposal for a satellite connectivity so looking for a partner there and we plan to have something in the market by 2024 to help address that because connectivity is just essential for a lot of these technology products yeah that's a that's a really good highlight I hadn't I've been I just moved into a new house and I've been experiencing the same thing where I am there's internet connections but it's more of Monopoly and there's very limited things I can get and so it's like I can totally understand that if you're I I have family that was on Iowa and Nebraska and I know that when you get remote it is remote so it's like getting connection like that is can be difficult yeah and it's just really important for the future of what we see happening with Precision agriculture is you've got to be able to share data you've got to be able to have that connectivity and so um that's just a really big challenge that we're constantly looking at and and trying to figure out how to overcome well that does raise a very techy kind of question it's like is is it is the actual machine learning it's like it's happening on location but I'm assuming it needs the connection to kind of phone home to share what it's been experiencing to update right yes does it need it in real time or is it okay that it can be disconnected for short periods right so something like CN spray the machine learning is happening on the machine and all of that is happening you know near real time for something like autonomy we definitely do need the connection because we need the farmer to be able to see you know the operator is remote um not even an operator at that point right the farmer is remote and needs to be able to have that connection to see what's happening another you know current example of a product that's out there they running is we call it infield data sharing and so if there are two machines operating in the same field which can happen pretty frequently on large Farms they need to know where the other one has been in the field and so that again that real neartime data sharing happens up through the cloud and it connectivity is needed there and so you know if you and I were in the same field farming we harvesting this fall you know you've got a computer basically in your cab showing you a map of where you've been I've got a computer in my cab showing me a map of where I've been but really we need to know where both of us have been and so infield data sharing allows us to share those Maps but we've got to have connectivity to do that I gotcha okay so kind of going to the I don't know how much details you have on like costs and benefits but when a farmers implementing these I'm assuming some of this Tech newest technology typically is a little more expensive uh than non-smart technology but the benefits that you get out of it should offset those costs um do you have any kind of stats on like how much uh a farmer benefits from like the CN spray from the autonomous tractor that can help them with like you can do more with less are there any kind of stats that you have around that yeah probably the best stat that I have is that 67% savings on SE or sorry 66% savings on CN spray um you know that's an immediate kind of Payback right there is just less input costs and then I think the other thing that we see a lot is the efficiency gains as well so um you know being able to have an autonomous tractor doing tillage in a field freeze up that operator to go be doing something else on the farm and if you think about like I said Harvest Time can be just such a busy time on a farm there is a a value to having an operator free to maybe go run a different piece of equipment while that field is being autonomously tilled um so that's how we think about it with our Farmers the the other big piece of that too is just the efficiency of of how a machine goes through a field too um you know with autot track with auto track Turn automation which helps a machine turn around at the end of the field we can just be really efficient about how we go through a field and again freeing up that Farmer in the cab even when somebody's still in the cab to be doing all the other jobs that a farmer is doing all of the time taking phone calls running their business I I don't know why it's popping my head it makes me feel like of um to to relate it to somebody like at your house you have a robot vacuum cleaner it seems very similar to that it's a lot like that I like I kind of love that analogy because it is it's you've you just set it up and you let it go and if something happens it beeps or it notifies you and you come resolve it and then you go about your day and so it's not that you're sitting around necessarily but maybe you're cleaning the kitchen while the robot vacuum vacuums so that's awesome yeah I love that it's you have to be aware of what it's doing it might need a hand but it frees you up to do other things while it's working out absolutely yep yeah so we've talked about automous tractors we've talked about CN spray Technologies uh and the combine are there other Technologies or advancements that uh you'd want to touch on from John Deere like is there anything around zero missions tractors or anything like that that you can touch on yeah I mean I think you know one of the big things is just our vision for this 2030 autonomous farm and so if I think about how do we get to an autonomous Farm it's really about automating a lot of things that are already happening in equipment today and one of the things I love about that is as we automate our existing equipment to get to this autonomy goal there's immediate value in a lot of that automation so again if I go back to combine adviser you know understanding what's happening in the combine and being able to say this is this this setting needs to be adjust well that's going to have to be there for autonomy well we've already given that capability to our Farmers today so that they can be adopting automation learning to trust the automation but also making their jobs easier today and so as I look at our goals as a company um there's just all these interesting stops along the way that we're going to be able to make our current equipment that much more useful that much more efficient and productive for our our farmers and at the end we're going to get to this place where where the farmer can make that choice to be in the equipment or to be out of the equipment remotely monitoring it one of my final questions I have for you is how Okay so agriculture is not like a sexy topic that grabs people's attention when you're talking about autonomy and Ai and machine learning people tend to focus on you know Tesla self-driving cars and things like that what why should the average person on the street really care about this like what what what is the message that you want them to understand that they need to take away from this yeah I mean at John Deere a lot of times we talk about feeding and clothing the world and it's true Farmers Feed and clothe the world so whether you're talking about corn or soybeans or cotton we all care care about what farming Farmers farmers do for us and so um I think it's it's really fun to talk to people who don't know about agriculture because it seems kind of disconnected and not not something really related to a lot of us but then you stop and you think about well so what did you have for breakfast today I had yogurt and some berries and so that yogurt came from cows the berries were obviously grown somewhere like all of that started in farming and so farming actually impacts all of us and and we all at some point are very invested in Farmers being successful because we want to go to the grocery store and we want to buy food we want to have you know clothing and so the more we can educate people one about frankly how cool the technology is in farming um I think that's just interesting for a lot of people and surprises them when they hear about it but then too like we're all really invested in Farmers being successful and so I think when when we get to talk to people and explain that to them and slow people down and have them really think about where their food comes from where their clothes come from then it's a really obvious jump for a lot of people to say oh wow but you're right we've got to have that moment to stop and talk with people about it yeah it's it's abstracted away because we go into a grocery store we just get the stuff we want to get and we don't it's just there which is you know a sign of how successful our farming farmers are in the US um but we've got to make sure we keep helping them be successful that's awesome so is there anything else you wanted to touch on while we're talking no I mean I'll just I'll just kind of maybe go back to like you know farming is a super hard job it's there's the labor shortage there's the the weather um there's the growing population that we've got to feed and then technology is really going to be the answer for those Farmers so whether it's automating existing equipment automating existing functionality but keeping someone in the cab or it's this 2030 goal that we have of autonomy where a farmer can choose to be out of the cab technology is going to help farmers keep feeding the world that's fantastic I really appreciate you uh taking the time to talk to me today well I appreciate you taking the time we're like I said we're always excited to share this message with people so thank you for being interested in it all right so Matt in your conversations with Sarah I'm curious about it one particular thing the scale that they're talking about they're talking about industrial farming large scale farming they're talking about machines that are going to like roam around a field of crops and spray for bugs the combines are going to harvest the tractors are going to PL all of that sort of thing are they also working on smaller scale for the homeowner that's a really good question we didn't talk about that uh part of the reason for that was they they don't talk about they weren't talking about like unannounced advances that they're working on but it would not surprise me if some of their smaller sized equipment eventually down the road starts to get some of these advances for I wouldn't say homeowners like for me but maybe for a very small little bitt Family Farm that kind of scale it wouldn't surprise me if this trickles down but on that note even for homeowners now it's like for me it's like I have a robot lawnmower already it's like it goes out and to toles around by itself and mows my lawn so it's that's kind of already here for homeowners yeah that's the kind of thing I was thinking about and I just didn't know if I mean that's that's a very different Market from where we traditionally think of that company so it'll be interesting to see where they land in a few years so thank you to Sarah for taking the time to speak with Matt it was a very interesting conversation and I hope all of you listening or watching enjoyed it please jump into the comments let us know what you thought what did you think about what Sarah had to say and if you had any follow-up questions that you think Matt could or should try to follow up on put them in the comments below we love to hear what everybody has to say as always if you enjoyed this please go back to wherever it was you found this that might be YouTube it might be Google Spotify wherever it was you found us go back there leave a review don't forget to subscribe and please do share it with your friends all of that really does help the channel and don't forget if you want to directly support us you can click the join button on YouTube or you can go to still tbdm click the become a supporter button there it allows you to throw some coins at our heads we appreciate the welts and bruises and then we make the podcast thank you so much everybody for taking the time to join us today we'll talk to you next [Music] time

2023-12-06 18:37

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