John Deere

Deere & Company (operating as John Deere) is the largest US-headquartered agricultural and construction equipment manufacturer across its Production and Precision Agriculture, Small Agriculture and Turf, and Construction and Forestry segments. Founded in 1837 by John Deere in Grand Detour, Illinois (with the company's self-scouring steel plow as the original product), the company trades on NYSE as DE and employs approximately 78,000 workers globally. The company is headquartered in Moline, Illinois, with major manufacturing operations across the US, Mexico, India, China, and Europe.

John Deere's tractor and combine product portfolio is the dominant US large-farm-equipment platform — the iconic 8R and 9R series tractors, the X9 combine harvesters, plus a comprehensive lineup of precision-application equipment (sprayers, planters, tillage). The Construction and Forestry segment includes the John Deere construction-equipment line (skid-steers, excavators, graders) plus the Wirtgen Group (the asphalt and concrete paving equipment specialist acquired 2017). Financial Services is a meaningful business segment providing equipment financing to dealers and customers.

John Deere has been the most-AI-aggressive major agricultural-equipment company. The acquisitions of Blue River Technology (2017, $305 million; the original See & Spray weed-detection company), Bear Flag Robotics (2021; autonomous-tractor startup), Light (2024; depth-sensing camera technology for autonomous applications), and the more recent SparkAI (autonomous-driving software) signal a deep AI-acquisition strategy. The fully-autonomous 8R tractor was announced at CES 2022 and has been progressively deployed across customer farms. The See & Spray Ultimate AI weed-detection system reduces herbicide use by approximately 60-70% by spraying only weeds, not crops. The John Deere Operations Center is the company's farm-management software platform integrating data across the equipment fleet. Major competitors AGCO (Fendt, Massey Ferguson) and CNH Industrial (Case IH, New Holland, via the Raven Industries acquisition) are following with AI-equipment programs. John Deere's AI strategy is heavily intellectual-property-protected, which has been the subject of right-to-repair scrutiny.

At the Farm Progress Show the company introduced JD, a generative AI assistant built into the Operations Center that answers plain-language questions about a farm's own planting, spraying and harvest data — how fuel use compared across seasons, which operator covered the most acres, what the data suggests about when to start harvest — instead of requiring the grower to assemble the answer from dashboards, reports and map layers. It opened as a limited early-access program for selected US customers, with web, mobile and eventually in-cab display availability planned, and is free to Operations Center app users. Alongside it Deere published a ten-point farmer data commitment stating that growers own their data, that the company does not sell it, that growers choose what is shared with third parties, and that it is not used for commodity trading — a direct response to the data-ownership question that has followed precision agriculture since Deere began collecting field telemetry at scale.