"LAS VEGAS. Torsten Kreutzer likes to say that he "grew up green and yellow". These are the colors of the American agricultural machinery manufacturer John Deere. Kreutzer's family has a farm in Diepholz, Lower Saxony, and, according to his description, has long been a loyal customer. He himself has worked for the German subsidiary for almost twenty years. He is now based at the Kaiserslautern site and is responsible, among other things, for projects that have to do with autonomous driving technologies. John Deere is now also presenting itself at the CES in Las Vegas. Agriculture is not one of the traditional focuses here, but the trade fair has recently expanded its range of activities far beyond consumer electronics.
John Deere presented its first fully autonomous tractor here three years ago.
Kreutzer says that his company's main aim at the trade fair is not to meet customers who buy its machines. Above all, it hopes to gain additional "visibility", among other things to make itself more interesting as a potential employer. Many people are not aware that John Deere is also active in future areas such as autonomous driving systems. They associate the company primarily with heavy agricultural equipment, but not with software. Kreutzer remembers how John Deere took part in a hackathon in Germany for the first time a few years ago, astonishing the other participants.
In Las Vegas, the company has now presented a new generation of its autonomous driving system. This technology will now be used in significantly more machines. Until now, John Deere has limited itself to autonomous tractors that are used for tilling the soil, for example in large corn fields. Now tractors for fruit growing are being added. They will be used, for example, to spray nut trees with pesticides. John Deere sees a large market for this, especially in California. Chief Technology Officer Jahmy Hindman said that more than three quarters of the global production of almonds grows there.
The autonomous technology in fruit growing works somewhat differently. Because the lighting conditions are worse here due to the dense treetops, the company has installed additional lidar sensors.
In addition to tractors, John Deere also showed an autonomous electric lawn mower for commercial landscaping. It is intended for use where large lawns have to be mowed regularly.
For the first time, the company is also installing its autonomous driving system in one of its construction machines, an articulated dump truck designed for transporting materials in quarries.
Hindman said that John Deere is targeting areas with its autonomous driving technologies where there is an acute shortage of labor. Farmers in the USA, for example, are now an average of 58 years old, and it is estimated that 2.4 million jobs in American agriculture are currently unfilled every year. Given the growing world population, the global demand for food will also increase significantly. Autonomous driving systems alleviate the shortage of personnel and enable farmers to concentrate on other tasks.
"When we talk about autonomy, we mean complete autonomy. Nobody is in the machine anymore."
Torsten Kreutzer and his team in Kaiserslautern are helping to develop John Deere's autonomous technologies. So far, however, the self-driving machines have only been available in the USA. The conditions there are more favorable, for example because the fields to be worked are often very large.
In agriculture, the framework conditions for autonomous driving are somewhat different than for cars. What happens in normal road traffic is a lot more complex than in fields, says Kreutzer. "Where we are on the road, there is relatively little traffic.
Our biggest challenges are weather, dust and animals." [1]
1. Roboter zwischen Mandelbäumen: John Deere weitet den Aktionsradius seiner autonomen Traktoren aus - und bringt die Technologie auch in Steinbrüche. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung; Frankfurt. 08 Jan 2025: 20.
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