3 Questions: Deere's CTO Jahmy Hindman

LAS VEGAS (DTN) -- Attending CES 2024 this week in Las Vegas, DTN/Progressive Farmer had the opportunity to sit down with Jahmy Hindman, chief technology officer at John Deere. Hindman is responsible for building Deere's "tech stack," the company's end-to-end equipment solutions made up of hardware and devices, embedded software, connectivity, data platforms, and applications. He also leads the company's Intelligent Solutions Group (ISG) and is responsible for Deere's network of technology and innovation centers.

Deere has been exhibiting at the CES since 2019. This year, the technology and machinery manufacturer is highlighting fiber production -- the displays and actual farmer-customers -- showing the tech world how Deere's technology packages make them more productive, efficient and sustainable.

Deere has named their CES 2024 endeavor Dirt to Shirt.

In fact, Deere employees were wearing shirts made from cotton grown on Tanner, Alabama, Bridgeforth Farms, a black owned and operated farm established in 1877.

Here, we've chosen three questions from our interview with Hindman. But watch for the complete interview in the coming days.

DTNPF: Some farmers would tell Deere and other OEMs that equipment, the technology on it, is getting pretty expensive; that modern equipment lines are hard to maintain financially.

Hindman: The goal for us is to drive efficiencies and value to the grower. If we're not doing that in a way that is commensurate with their business, then we have to think how we create more value with the solutions we provide in the market. It's one of the reasons we go into the market in some cases with new technology with small sample sizes and pilot builds to test value with the growers and [learn] whether it's creating value on their farm, or not. Every farm is different and that value equation for every farm is different. With some of this technology, it is expensive if you look at the technology that is deployed in See & Spray for example, where you've got a significant amount of computing capability. You've got 36 cameras, a carbon fiber boom -- how do we approach the market with a different business model that helps a customer digest that technology in a different way than they have in the past where it is pay for everything up front and depreciate it over time? There is this opportunity of 'solutions as a service (a license fee),' a pay-as-you-go opportunity. [But] that gets complicated because every technology creates a different amount of value. So, we end up experimenting with growers to understand how they want to digest that technology, what's the best business model for their farm. The answer often is it's not just one. It's going to create more options in the marketplace for how farmers and growers can consume the offerings that we have.

DTNPF: How does the 'solutions as a service' model bring benefit to the productivity of a farm?

Hindman: At its core, it is trying to lower the upfront cost of the value creation, the hardware and distribute some of that cost into a licensing model -- an annual arrangement or a per-use fee to help spread the cost of the technology across the use the grower has for that technology. They only pay for it when they use it and that makes it somewhat proportional across the range of growers that are going to be consuming it. [This] also opens the opportunity for the technology to get better with time. If the hardware set exists on the tractor or the sprayer, we can add value through software creation, as opposed to new incremental, new hardware. You can continue to use that same hardware set in a second life of that machine ... to create more value. If you think of See & Spray. Today, we run in corn, soybeans and cotton. But the same hardware set is being used in other production systems. If you are a grower farming corn, soybeans, or cotton, plus something you can use the See & Spray technology for whatever that plus-something is when we get the models trained for that production system. You don't have to buy new hardware in that case, it's new software that unlocks that value opportunity.

DTNPF: Everyone is talking about AI, artificial intelligence. What does AI mean for the grower, for the production system on the ground?

Hindman: It's probably a 10-hour long answer. But AI is already happening in agriculture. The autonomous tractor is running an AI algorithm for perception through stereo cameras. See & Spray is running an AI algorithm to discriminate weeds from healthy crops and spray only the weeds. It's already here. It's already happening. Machine learning, computer vision types of artificial intelligence -- farmers are going to see more and more of that. In some cases, they can create significant value, but not in all cases. The caution then is we have to test it against what makes sense for agriculture and if it doesn't add value to the agricultural industry then we shouldn't do it. But second, it's a changing field. AI isn't static. It will mean different things over time. The latest and greatest thing 12, 13, 14 months ago was ChatGPT. It took the world by storm. This idea of generative AI. This is interesting in agriculture. We're just beginning to explore what are the use cases for those. But I think they will have uses in agriculture to make sense of data. We talk about this data problem, you're data-rich and insight-poor. In many cases, these artificial intelligence technologies are better than humans in doing complex pattern recognition. So, looking through all the data and trying to understand patterns, what makes sense and what influences the outcomes. I think we'll see AI deployed against those large agricultural data sets on the farm level to help surface insights for growers and what that data is actually telling them.

Dan Miller can be reached at dan.miller@dtn.com

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