You know how some guys are about visiting ballparks around the country? They'll go to, oh, Baltimore, just so they can put a Camden Yards notch on their belt. I've always been like that about publications. I still like to add a new scalp. Particularly a publication like Crain's Chicago Business, a first rate, must-read title.
It helps that I really, really enjoy visiting factories — I can't think of another journalist in Chicago who makes a habit of that — and have been itching to get to John Deere, a mere 170 miles west of here. I loved every aspect of this story, both immersing myself in the company lore and rich history of a vastly cool cultural icon. I loved figuring out how to present the complicated manufacture process.
It was difficult, when Crain's posted the original 3200-word story two weeks ago, not to post the first graph here and then link to their site. I wanted to crow. But they have a solid paywall, and it didn't seem fair to catch your interest and then frustrate you.
Besides, I knew the Sun-Times would be running an abbreviated, 2100-word version. To pull off that double play, honestly, took some gymnastics. Running a big article in a competitor and then a version in our own paper is not exactly standard operating procedure. But fortune favors the bold, and it seems to have worked. This is running in Sunday's paper, and I am, in theory, free to do more work for Crain's, provided all involved have a chance to sign off.
Enough prelude. I hope this is half as fun to read as it was to write:
Those stalks might all look the same to you. But farm equipment today can perceive each individual plant and know which one’s a crop, which is a weed.
A John Deere combine rattling across Gaesser Farms in Ankeny, Iowa, can recognize which type of grain is being harvested and consider the direction of the wind and the slope of the ground to orient itself with far more precision than the smartphone in your pocket can tell you where you’re standing. GPS will place your phone’s location to within a couple of feet. But a modern combine triangulates the signal with even greater accuracy.
”We apply everything within one inch of where it’s supposed to be,” said Chris Gaesser, who farms 5,400 acres.
Such precision is necessary if you want to, say, spray herbicide on weeds but not on the dirt between them. A farm generates data faster than it generates alfalfa after a rain. Both must be handled properly to keep everything running smoothly.
If your image of a farmer is a man in overalls and a straw hat driving a tractor, daydreaming of peach cobbler, welcome to 2023. A modern farmer is more likely to be making phone calls and checking the number of “likes” on his latest #FarmTok post while the combine drives itself.
He doesn’t have much choice.
”You’re sitting in this thing 16 hours a day, many times in the fall, this is the farmer’s office,” said Jason Abbott, manager of value realization at the John Deere Harvester Works. “Think about it that way. You have to not only run your machine efficiently and productively, in many cases you have to run your business while you’re in the machine.”
City drivers are so dazzled by their shiny new hybrid vehicles’ traffic-sign recognition and 360-degree bird’s-eye view they might not realize that the same artificial intelligence revolution has revolutionized farming and the way farm equipment is manufactured.
”The tech adoption in agriculture would absolutely shock people that aren’t in the loop,” said Miles Musick, factory engineering manager at the Harvester Works, about 170 miles west of Chicago in East Moline, Illinois.
Spend a morning at the 3 million-square-foot Harvester Works, and you get a sense of how high-tech it’s all become. When a Deere factory opened in the city in 1912, it already was toward the end of the company’s first century. The company was started in Grand Detour, Illinois, in 1837 by John Deere, a Vermont blacksmith who turned an old saw blade into a self-scouring steel plow that did a better job of cutting through Illinois’ sticky black earth.
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