Deere & Company: CEO History

Deere & Company has deployed commercially autonomous tractors that operate with zero human presence in the cab. The technology is not a prototype. It is sold to commercial farming operations in North America. The company that a blacksmith started in a Grand Detour, Illinois forge shop in 1837 — using a broken saw blade to manufacture a self-scouring steel plow — now employs more software engineers than many Silicon Valley companies. The $51.7 billion in FY2024 revenue tells only part of the story. The John Deere Financial division manages a receivables and lease portfolio exceeding $65 billion — larger than the total assets of most regional banks — and contributed approximately $1.9 billion in net income in FY2024. That financial services operation funds the equipment purchases of the farmers and contractors who buy Deere machines, creating a relationship that extends well beyond the equipment transaction itself. The See & Spray technology — which uses computer vision to distinguish between crops and weeds in real time, spraying herbicide only on weeds rather than broadcasting across entire fields — reduces herbicide usage by over 50% on treated acreage. The precision matters economically and agronomically. The farmer pays less for inputs. Deere charges a premium for the technology and the connected data services that accompany it. The machine-to-machine data that flows from that interaction improves Deere's agronomic models with every acre treated. The right-to-repair controversy — Deere's software locks that prevent independent mechanics from repairing modern equipment without manufacturer authorization — is the most politically visible expression of a fundamental strategic choice: convert the hardware installed base into a recurring revenue platform.