John Deere CEO: Farming's Future, Autonomous Tractors and AI in the Field

I have a farm myself and I bale hay. And the quality of the bale that I can produce is only as good as my experience set. So, you know, when I think the hay is at a point where it can be harvested, I get in the moco, I cut it, and then I sit in the tractor and I'm baling it. I'm listening for things. I'm looking at the computer, but the end product is going to be as only as good as I am. Hi, everybody. I'm Nikolat Tangeen, the CEO of the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund. And today, I'm joined by John May, the CEO of John Deere. Now, when you think of John Deere, you may think of green tractors. And indeed, there is a green tractor standing behind John here on the screen. But the company has become one of the most advanced technology companies in farming. Tractors that dry themselves, AI that tells a weed from a crop. And John is the man behind the shift. He spent almost his entire career at Diere and now he is trying to turn the maker of farm machines into a real technology company. John, warm welcome. Thank you. It's great to be here and thanks for including me on your podcast. Fantastic. Now John, you became CEO in 2019 and then very quickly after that you launched what you called smart industrial strategy. What is that? Well, really what we wanted to do is get more focused on the customer itself and the jobs that our customer do. You know, in the past, what we would do is focus on building the best planter. And we wanted to shift to helping our customers plant better than they ever had in the past by leveraging technology. So we realigned the customer around production systems and then really invested heavily in technology that would make our customers more productive, more profitable and more sustainable. And how is it different from how DARE used to run? You know, in the past we didn't focus on necessarily the biggest challenges that our customer had. So for example, when you're planting, your biggest expense is actually the seed, the cost of the seed. So the importance of getting seed placed exactly in the proper spot at the proper depth ensures the highest yield and helps our customers manage their costs. So we really focused on understanding what are our customers biggest pain points and what's the biggest cost to them and how can we help them reduce their costs. So you say that the goal is to help customers to do more with less. You rather help the farmer plant better than than to sell the best planter. Why? Why is that important? Yeah, let me give you an example and I'll talk about spraying. So everywhere around the world after the crop comes up and it's it's it's standing crop, one of the biggest challenges is manning, managing weeds, …