John Deere showed off new equipment for orchards and vineyards at Hort Connections 2024. The 5mL tractor, Global Unmanned Spray System, and SmarterPlay sprayer are built to handle labor shortages with semi-autonomous features that let growers do more with fewer people.
Hello and welcome to hawk connections for 2024. My name is Steve Wright. I'm the director of sales and marketing for John here. It's great to be down here. It's an exciting industry. If you think about National Farmers Federation, they've got a goal to hit $100 billion by 2030. Horticulture today is about $18 billion. So it's already 20 to 25% of the industry. It's exciting business, it's big business, but also challenging business. So coming down to the stand, talk to the team. We've got some new products that we're going to walk through. The 5mL, we've got the Gus, we've got Smart, Apply and most importantly, come down and get a John Deere beanie.
Hi, my name is Erin Wagstaff, territory business manager for John Deere. And here today we have our 5mL tractors. The 5mL has been specifically designed for orchard and vineyard customers. It comes in three horsepower models. Here today we have our 130 horsepower model. We also do a 120 and a 105 model. The fiber mill is packed with a bunch of great features for our orchard and vineyard customers. For those in orchards, we've got our limb lifter kit here to guide branches up and over the tractor towards the back of the machine here too, you can see our catfoil filtration kit. So if the customer's doing a lot of application, the Capful kit helps keep those in the cab safe. The fiber ML is also packed with a bunch of great precision ag features here and you can scale those up or down depending on your needs. At the moment, you can spec with a base level auto track and dash for basic straight line A to B auto track. You can also add in a display as well if you want to do more advanced auto track applications. The 5mm has had a lot of innovation go into it to make it the ideal tractor for our orchard and vineyard customers. And we look forward to showing up with you.
Hi, I'm Rigo Molina, strategic marketing lead at John Deere Limited. And today we're here with gus. Now GUS stands for Global Unmanned Spray System. And together in a joint venture we with John Deere, we're here to bring this product to the Australian market. So what's really unique about this product, it has been designed specifically to target a need from growers and that need is tackling the shortage in skilled labor. So this is a semi autonomous spray system which can be utilized in orchards and also vineyard cropping systems. We can have up to eight units monitored by one supervisor. In the joint venture between GUS and John Deere, we have seen some John Deere technology move into the GUS system. So here we're standing in front of the 4045 John Deere engine, which now powers the Gus, as well as utilizing John Deere GPS antennas on the system.
So this is SmarterPlay. It's an exciting new product part of the John Deere family. What the system does is it utilizes LiDAR and GPS to essentially turn your traditional sprayer into a smart solution. What happens is you run down the road, and as you run down the road, that LiDAR system is reading your crop as you make passes, and it's giving you spray exactly where you need it and exactly how much is required.
So this is just a glimpse of some of our products that we're bringing to market. On behalf of John Deere, thank you.
