Farmers have long self-segmented solely on the paint color of their favorite brands of farming equipment.
Oh, you’re a green guy? You prefer John Deere tractors, combines and sprayers.
Or maybe you overheard someone make an offhand remark that your farm is “all red.” That’s not a shot at your political party affiliation. It means Case IH is your preferred brand of equipment.
No matter how you slice it, if you spend any time hanging around farmers it’s clear: they value loyalty and relationships. These long-standing, dyed-in-the-wool equipment allegiances do not die fast. They’re passed down like coveted family heirlooms from grandfather, to father, to son and daughter, and so on.
It’s rather fitting then that AGCO Corporation, a major farm equipment player long left out of these pigment-based affinity groups, has signaled another evolution in its go-to-market strategy.
How is AGCO shifting gears?
The company is planting its flag as the farmer-first, mixed-fleet leader for aftermarket and OEM precision ag technology and data solutions .
This new game plan correlates with what AGCO has been up to of late: The Duluth, Ga.-based manufacturer built its precision technologies segment via big dollar acquisitions, the same way Manchester City football club built its Premier League soccer dynasty.
AGCO acquired aftermarket solutions innovators such as Precision Planting (2017) and more recently Trimble (2023), the latter being the single largest ag tech acquisition by dollar amount to date. Trimble cost AGCO upward of $2 billion, to be exact. The company has a storied history of acquiring machinery brands since its inception in the 1990s.
That’s all a long way to say that today, this AGCO – a legacy equipment company most known for its Gleaner combines and RoGator self-propelled sprayer series – says it no longer gives a rat’s you-know-what the color of equipment farmers want to use.
OK, so that’s not entirely true. The company still intends to sell plenty of machines from its family of large equipment brands such as Fendt, Massey Ferguson and others, to farmers.
But when it comes to precision ag technology, AGCO is done rowing upstream against the green and the red guys. Now it’s time to play nice and make sure the only kid in the sandbox AGCO says it cares about – the farmer – is content.
That means taking a different approach: Gone are the days, in AGCO leadership’s minds, when you must buy new to get the latest and greatest technology. As long as the equipment is 10 years old or newer, you can bolt this aftermarket kit onto your tractor and experience similar smart farming capabilities as the guy up the road who just plunked down half a million on a brand new 2024 model.
According to AGCO, there are a lot of users who see value in the hole it’s trying to fill: a brand agnostic technology partner. Its recently unveiled PTx Trimble, AGCO’s newly imagined precision ag tech brand, intends to be just that for farmers going forward.
Setting the Scene
The company detailed its new tactics last week at its 2024 Tech Days event, held at Ade Farm, a 3,300-acre soybean and wheat operation outside Salina, Kan., that runs its own mixed fleet of machines and is a loyal AGCO customer.
AGCO says globally it has 55,000 active users across 158,000 connected ag machines planting, spraying and harvesting across 84 million acres worldwide annually.
“It’s about having one comprehensive solution across all brands,” says Corey Buchs, senior director – data cloud, PTx Trimble. “We see an opportunity, a missing piece in the market we think will help our farmers by helping them manage their operations in a mixed fleet environment, regardless of make, model or age of the machine.”
Full Cycle Autonomy – Coming Soon
The concept on display at Ade Farm was visually intriguing: laser precise planters equipped with the latest fertilizer application technologies, smart sprayers that can target tiny weeds in a field full of crops and driverless tractors pulling tillage tools and grain carts. It was all there to showcase the potential of upgraded autonomous machines in an ag environment challenged by labor woes along with razor-thin profit margins.
Even the farm office data management process – shown in a small but spacious converted shipping container replete with flat screen monitors and multiple computing terminals – was accounted for.
At each stop, product managers in crispy white polo shirts made their presentations as the various machines worked autonomously off in the distance. It would have been nice to get closer to the machines, and you can bet farmers will want to look inside the cab and see some of the components of these aftermarket kits up-close before they buy, but apparently that would have triggered the safety features on the autonomous tech, stopping the machines dead in their tracks.
Another 2030 goalpost?
Unlike some of its counterparts, AGCO is not putting a 2030 finish line in front of the project. Many of the concepts we saw in Salina were just that: concepts in the alpha (which is PTx Trimble’s internal description for its earliest stage of product development) or beta stages. Once a solution hits beta stage, AGCO says it is ready to be tested with real farmers on real farms, such as the Precision Planting Vision System we saw working on a John Deere sprayer, making the 2018 sprayer a selective spraying “smart” machine. The new Vision System is PTx Trimble’s green-on-brown aftermarket kit – able to tell small weeds from corn or soybean plants at an impressive 25 mph, AGCO says.
Perhaps most notable was the automated grain cart system PTx Trimble showed in beta stage. Dinen Subramaniam, product and marketing manager, PTx Trimble, says there will be 10 Outrun.ag autonomous grain cart units testing on farms throughout the Midwest this harvest season. Plans are to have it available for purchase in 2025. The first target is single cart configuration, while the next logical evolution is enabling two autonomous grain carts.
The autonomous tillage system PTx Trimble has in alpha stage also appeared quite capable. Many farmers would happily give up running a tillage tool across the field to a machine. Running the PTx Trimble system and connecting your Panorama FMIS app in the cab will also capture that elusive-yet-critical data layer that Farm Journal ag tech columnist Steve Cubbage talks about from time to time: tillage data.
One clear differentiation point that emerged is AGCO/PTx Trimble’s reliance on cellular connectivity and edge computing versus the growing-in-popularity low orbit satellite connectivity offerings that others are putting forth to connect and control machines. Once fully autonomy is unlocked, satellite connectivity will likely be a requirement, according to PTx Trimble reps, but the company says it can connect machines and provide comparable performance without the need for high-cost satellite subscription services.
Questions Remain
Chiefly among them, will farmers buy in?
Historically, AGCO has been pigeonholed as the third or even fourth option when it comes to OEM ag tech solutions, so that begs the question: Will farmers in large numbers get on board with PTx Trimble’s tech stack?
PTx Trimble reps attempted to address those concerns by stressing:
- quick, year one ROIs on most of its hardware solutions.
- a 3% to 5% average increase to net farm income for farmers who adopt its autonomous technologies, based on how the machines performed on Ade Farm during it’s pilot phase.
While that sounds good on paper, farmers know each farm is different, and what pencils out on a wheat and soybean farm in central Kansas might not be a dollar to donuts fit elsewhere. PTx Trimble acknowledged that fact, and, again, keep in mind the bulk of what we saw in Salina is still in development and will likely evolve further before hitting the market.
It is a bit perplexing, though, that attendees of the 2024 Tech Day weren’t provided the opportunity to meet or hear from the actual farmer that runs Ade Farm, where all this autonomous technology has been field tested. His perspective – if it were a positive one – could have hammered home the message AGCO worked very hard to convey. Maybe he was just too busy that day? Farmers will always put more stock in hearing it straight from another farmer, so that was a bit of a missed opportunity, if I’m being honest.
Then there’s this: PTx Trimble is hoping to lock farmers into one single data management log in, via what it is calling the PTx Data platform, which includes elements of Precision Planting’s Panorama app, PTx Trimble Ag Software, and AGCO Connect. Reps at the event claimed to have research that shows 65% of farmers are using digital technology such as FMIS software and apps. Our own Farm Journal Smart Farming research report from earlier this year, however, shows a much lower level of farmer adoption of those tools.
Consider the crowded company this campaign to lock farmers in to one single agronomy and machine data platform places AGCO in: battling it out with the Climate FieldView’s, Corteva’s and the SMS’ of the world. Will farmers ultimately believe in and switch all their data management to this new software package? And potentially pay for it, too?
That seems like a tough mountain to climb.
Will Farms Be Able to Depend on Automation?
Another roadblock that AGCO might run up against (this isn’t exclusive to AGCO/PTx Trimble) is a general skepticism of advanced technology – fully autonomous tech is about as high-level as it gets – being reliable and dependable when the farmer needs it the most. Where some see tractors motoring around fields with empty cabs and think ‘Wow, that’s some amazing technology’, there are farmers who just see more things that can go wrong, more potential troubleshooting headaches and more downtime waiting for a service technician to get you back up and running again. That’s the KISS crowd, not that I must spell that acronym out for anyone here, and they will likely stick with humans over autonomous tech for as long as they can afford to.
AGCO has an answer there, too, it says. Its new FarmerCore mobile service network and the recently announced same day direct-to-farm delivery of parts campaign will be crucial enablement pieces in delivering the timely service that could put farmer minds at ease and get them to adopt.
“The feedback we’ve gotten so far – not only do the farmers like it, but the dealers like it a lot – because it’s a much more flexible way for them to grow with these mobile truck service units, instead of having to put up brick-and-mortar,” says Eric Hansotia, AGCO president and CEO .
Questions were also raised around the recurring subscription revenue model that AGCO/PTx Trimble is eyeing for some of the aspects of its autonomy stack. The good news there is the company does have ideas for ensuring farmers are billed fairly – they detailed a metric called “active task hour” that measures when the actual autonomous capability is engaged and only charges farmers for that time – but AGCO executives did acknowledge that farmers historically have not taken kindly to technology that requires annual subscription fees.
Still, all that being said, what AGCO showed last week in Salinas could potentially raise it up on a parallel track with its competitors, all of whom are chip, chip, chipping away at the autonomous farming future. Deere and CNH both are on record with 2030 as the goal in demonstrating a fully autonomous production system in row crops.
PTx Trimble is eyeing that same deep pool, although right now it appears to be dipping its toe in to check the temperature versus sending it with a full-on cannonball. Automating things such as tillage passes and grain carts are relatively simple at this point in the game. It’s those ultra-important practices such as planting and spraying where building farmer trust in the technology will drive adoption by the tech skeptics.
“We’ve got an evolution [in mind] and we think it’s a combination of two things. One is, how automated is that process? Because you’ve heard us talk for a number of years about applying smart features to a machine so we can automate that feature, and as you automate more features you can have the option of pulling the operator out, so one is tech up,” Hansotia says. “Another one is farmer back. If you look at our planter, it’s super automated, so it checks that box. But where is the farmer going to feel comfortable giving up control? Tillage is like ‘Well, if I get it wrong I can go back and fix it,’ but getting planting wrong? There’s nothing I can do to catch that back up. It’s not a technology problem but one of farmer confidence. So, we’ve got these laid out at the intersection of those two critical questions: Where can we find an autonomous technology solution and where can we build farmer trust fast?”
Key Takeaway
Building farmer trust in its newly imagined tech stack should be priority numero uno moving forward at PTx Trimble. How that work fares will likely have a huge impact on whether this latest transformation garners farmer buy in and, ultimately, increases its relevance in the future of autonomous farming.
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