John Deere traces its farming legacy from a recovered shipwreck plough to today's autonomous tractors and precision agriculture. The company's innovations have transformed efficiency and sustainability across Africa and the Middle East, moving farming from traditional methods to plant-level technology.
The John Deere plough was retrieved from a shipwreck in 1878 along the eastern Cape coast. The plough was in a ship that's from America to I believe India on its way and at the eastern coast it was maybe a storm and the ship sinked there. And that is how they recovered the plough from the ship. The plough was working very well and that is how John Deere started doing business in South Africa.
The evolution of farming is very dear to me. I was privileged to be born into a family of avid John Deere veteran tractor collectors. And on these days, these plough days, which they held on a nearby farm, I got a appreciation of the way that they have farmed in the past. It was done on a farm level and doing the tillage, tillage practices, everything was basically, it was a bit of a struggle. It was hard work to get a get seed into the ground and get the season started. Then we progressed and we went into a field level approach where we realized after years and years, basically similar to machine learning, a farmer and his father and his father, they realized that this specific field has got a set potential. They knew that there's a set average that they can achieve.
So looking back at history, it all started with the steel plough where farmers were doing uniform tillage. But now today with the John Deere technology, with Truset specifically, farmers are now able to run the variable depth tillage prescriptions and that caters for the changing soil conditions.
So in the past, a farmer would go with the scale and a notepad and then take down the weights of each bag that he has harvested. And this process was very inaccurate. In today's world, technology has evolved so much that we have combines the S series combine and that has active yield which has mass flow sensors that automatically calibrate on the go to give you that accuracy that the customer needs.
With the upcoming technology from Johnjay, we're seeing now the autonomous tractors and in future we're going to see the autonomous tillage from Johnjay.
Nowadays we're looking at zones. So moving away and evolving from a field level, we are at a zone level where we can farm a specific zone to its agronomic potential and we can eliminate over application and under application of fertiliser and expensive inputs.
To add on to active yield, you have combine Advisor which automatically adjusts the combine to changing conditions to reduce grain loss.
One of the things that I can mention is a lot of farmers don't realize the potential in their, you know, in their farms in their land by applying precision ag practices, then I mean, like, they can actually unlock the full potential that is actually on their soil. And that means, like more profits for their business as well. A farm is a business. That's the most important thing. And in order for your farm to keep afloat, you need to be profitable.
So using John DS, its technology to measure your yield, you know exactly how much you're getting out.
And looking into the future. And what we want to unlock in future is looking at each individual plant and the need each plant has addressing those needs. Key moments for the company was the acquisition of Blue River Technology, Harvest Profit and Bare Flag Robotics. We are setting ourselves up for success in the journey to build farmer resilience and to further improve our farmer sustainability and their success in the market.
So precision agriculture is the future of farming. Why? Because we can get more yield, maximize more yield and put more food on the table.
So we don't know what the future will look like when we are able to solve the needs of each individual plant. But what I do know is that John Deere has a proven track record of solving customer needs.
