John Deere Africa Middle East | Nampo 2023 | GUSS

Foreign I'm Chase Szupanski, I'm chief technology officer and co founder here at Gust Automation. The mini Gust that you see behind me is a fully autonomous orchard and vineyard sprayer designed to work in any type of orchard, from almonds and pistachios all the way down to vineyards like wine grapes and table grapes. The Autonomy software in Gust allows one operator to remotely control up to four machines at one time from the comfort of their pickup truck. This allows them to operate much more efficiently. They can run sprayers with about a 90 to 95% uptime, very little downtime to get the job done in the tight windows that we work with here in agriculture. And this is the first one that we have in South Africa. We've got about 200 spread across the world, primarily in the US and Australia, and this is the first one here in the country. We're really looking forward to getting out onto some growers farms. We're looking at macadamia and pecans as well as citrus for our first crops, but definitely looking to expand across the country here.