The Washington, D.C.-based American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF) on Monday announced it had reached memorandums of understanding (MOUs) with equipment firms Agco and Kubota on allowing the so-called “right to repair.”

The MOUs, reached separately with each company, follow similar pacts the AFBF made in January with Deere and Co. and in March with CNH, the maker of Case IH and New Holland equipment.

READ MORE: Deere agrees to independent equipment servicing

The agreements lay out a framework under which farmers and independent repair facilities in all 50 U.S. states and Puerto Rico would be able to access Agco and Kubota manuals, tools, product guides and information to self-diagnose and self-repair machines.

The pact also provides for support from the manufacturers to directly purchase or lease diagnostic tools and order products and parts. Farmers or independent repair shops would be able to obtain specialized tools, software or documentation from authorized repair shops on “fair and reasonable terms” via subscription or sale.

Barry O’Shea, vice-president for customer support at Agco — whose brands include Massey Ferguson, Fendt and Challenger — said in AFBF’s release that “Agco’s farmer-first focus guides us in everything we do, and we support farmers’ ability to repair the equipment they own.”

Todd Stucke, senior vice-president of marketing for Kubota, said in the same release that the company, through its dealer network, makes shop tools, parts, guides and manuals available to owners who choose to work directly on their machines.

“We strive to ensure that our equipment is manufactured to the highest engineering standards to maximize performance for our customers, and this agreement is a good step toward further protecting their safety while operating, maintaining and repairing it,” Stucke said.

The agreements emphasize that the manufacturer isn’t obliged to divulge any trade secrets, nor to allow farmers or independents to override equipment safety features or emissions controls, nor to sell tools, software or documents that either never existed or are no longer available to either the company or its authorized repair sites.

Taken together with the Deere and CNH MOUs, AFBF said the four agreements cover about 70 per cent of the farm machinery sold in the U.S.

“Farmers and ranchers urged us to find a private sector-solution to the challenges of repairing their own equipment,” AFBF president Zippy Duvall said in the same release. “These agreements represent ongoing efforts to ensure farmers have access to the tools necessary to keep their equipment running, and to keep food on the table for families across America.”

The MOUs with Agco and Kubota both took effect as of May 17. They also commit the companies and AFBF to meet at least semi-annually to assess how the MOUs are working and suggest changes as needed.

The MOUs also allow for the AFBF or either company to withdraw on delivery of written notice, but the parties agree to “co-operate in good faith” to schedule a meeting within 30 days of that notice to discuss the “ongoing viability” of the MOU.

The MOUs’ “intended beneficiaries” are farmers in the 50 U.S. states and Puerto Rico; neither agreement mentions any commitment to provide the same services to farmers outside U.S. territory. — Glacier FarmMedia Network

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As the agriculture sector accelerates its adoption of technology, the reliance on high-tech machinery such as GPS-guided combines and tractors has become more commonplace.

But equipment makers such as Deere have generally required customers to use their parts and service divisions for repairs and until recently, only allowed authorized dealers the means and tools to access the complex computerized systems of their tractors and other machinery.

The Farm Bureau’s memorandum of understanding with Deere “will ensure farmers everywhere are able to repair our own equipment,” Farm Bureau president Zippy Duvall said, speaking at the federation’s convention in Puerto Rico.

“This will enable you and your independent mechanics to identify and fix problems,” he said. “You will have access to the diagnostic tools and information you need. And you’ll get it at a fair and reasonable price.”

Dave Gilmore, Deere’s vice-president of ag and turf marketing, said the company looks forward to working with the farm group and “our customers in the months and years ahead to ensure farmers continue to have the tools and resources to diagnose, maintain and repair their equipment.”

The MOU aims to find a solution to the “right to repair” debate in the private sector, rather than through legislation or regulation, according to the document. It benefits farmers and independent repair facilities in the United States and Puerto Rico, for the “lawful operation and upkeep of Agricultural Equipment,” the MOU states.

The MOU states that, among other things, equipment owners and independent technicians cannot compromise any safety measures and protocols on the equipment; that Deere’s intellectual property, including its software, are protected from infringement; and no federal and state emissions control requirements can be compromised because of modifications made to the machinery.

The “right-to-repair” movement has gained steam as input costs have surged in recent years — as has the price of repairs.

For Deere and rival equipment manufacturers such as CNH and Agco, repairing machinery has given them a solid boost for their parts and services business. Consumers have filed a slew of lawsuits against Deere over the issue, and the Biden administration has been pushing for more competition in the rural economy amid rising inflation.

Duvall said Farm Bureau officials will meet regularly with Deere to discuss “solutions to the challenges farmers are facing in repairing their equipment” and said he hoped other farm equipment makers would take similar steps.

— P.J. Huffstutter reports on agriculture and agribusiness for Reuters from Chicago.

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In a world with a dwindling number of grain producers and a growing population, Deere and its rivals are developing self-driving equipment loaded with the latest software that is harvesting a new kind of bumper crop: data. All that translates into recurring revenue, something companies such as Apple have long enjoyed and industrial manufacturers like Deere hungrily eye.

“The more technology we can develop to allow farmers to get productivity out of their land without having to spend so much money on fertilizer and inputs, the better off everybody is,” Julian Sanchez, Deere’s director of emerging technology, told Reuters.

Investments in automation for high-horsepower equipment is only at its inception for Deere and rivals Agco and CNH Industrial. The next step is to equip machines to plant seeds using satellite imagery and soil data, Sanchez said.

While Deere has not outlined what that could mean to its bottom line, last fall U.S. automaker General Motors said it was targeting up to $25 billion in software-driven services by 2030, and added its Cruise self-driving unit could achieve $50 billion in annual revenue within six years (all figures US$).

The race among farm equipment companies to automate agriculture has accelerated amid a burgeoning food crisis. And Deere’s strategy around scaling its suite of tech products is now in the spotlight, after the manufacturer’s stock plunged 14 per cent on May 20 following a quarterly revenue miss. It was the biggest drop for Deere in 14 years.

The timing comes as the war in Ukraine and widespread drought in key grain-producing countries have roiled commodity markets, causing grain and farm input prices to spike as supplies shrink. That, in turn, has U.S. farmers scrambling to boost crop yields, yet limit their fertilizer and pesticide use.

That and a shrinking farm labor workforce has opened the door for Deere and others to make their high-tech push. For farmers, the prize is higher crop yields. For Illinois-based Deere, it’s the revenue.

Autonomous machinery is where Deere is placing its bet as artificial intelligence becomes more integrated in farming. Its self-driving 8R tillage tractor will be the latest addition to the company’s algorithm-enabled offerings when the green machines go on sale in the fall.

The new tractor will be priced at $500,000. However, the autonomy feature will be sold separately. Deere executives told analysts at a conference that the company will largely maintain its “point-of-sale” model for equipment, but will integrate a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model for its autonomous solutions. That will likely include their self-driving tractor.

“While it may take us a few years to build out a base of recurring revenues, autonomous solutions, on top of our underlying machine forms, will be recurring,” said Joshua Jepsen, Deere’s deputy financial officer.

The recurring revenue model can be economically favorable to heavy machinery manufacturers “based on those data insights,” said Michael Staebe, a Bain and Co. partner focused on machinery.

In Deere’s case, using a subscription model by either selling or leasing its driverless tractor can result in higher margins.

“After expenses, every incremental dollar falls straight to the bottom line,” Edward Jones analyst Matt Arnold said. “We would expect it to be an attractive offering to farmers given the efficiency it offers them, and lucrative to Deere.”

Agronomic data helps bottom line

Farmers have long been wary about how machinery and supplier firms profit off the data gleaned from their operations, and how secure such data is. But with farmers facing economic pressures, Deere and other manufacturers said it is easier to sell farmers on making such investments.

One key reason: The ability to glean crop insights from huge amounts of agronomic data takes the guesswork out of when to plant and how many seeds to use — which saves farmers money.

“Everybody in the industry is much more data-focused than we have ever seen them,” said Michael Boehlje, a professor at Purdue University. “(Companies) can do profit projections by geographic space in fields. That takes you to a different level of thinking and analysis.”

In 2020, Deere acquired Harvest Profit, a farm profitability software company that has been integrated into the John Deere Operations Center. The platform stores and lets farmers access their machine data from the cloud.

“When I look at what precision ag has done for our operations and what we can accomplish in a day’s time compared to 10 to 20 years ago, it’s so much easier,” said Jeremy Jack, a row-crop farmer in Mississippi and chief executive of Silent Shade Planting Co.

Ron Heck’s fleet of Case IH combines and tractors are equipped with automated steering to harvest his 4,000 acres where he rotates soybeans and corn.

The fourth-generation farmer in Iowa said some of his new equipment is loaded with technology. “Unfortunately for us it costs more, but hopefully the costs will be paid back in the long run by better efficiency.”

— Reporting for Reuters by Bianca Flowers and Joseph White.

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Telus Agriculture and Rabo AgriFinance, which is headquartered in St. Louis and serves U.S. farm customers, announced Monday they’ve jointly bought software firm Conservis for an undisclosed sum.

Conservis comes to the joint venture already handling farmers’ financial reporting data via the Rabo AgriFinance platform since 2018, along with data from Climate Corp.’s Climate FieldView platform, the John Deere Operations Center and Crop Data Management Systems’ crop chemical database.

The Minneapolis company’s products are meant to allow a farmer to integrate as-applied and yield data directly from those platforms into a “unified view” of the business, with “no extra hardware or manual data re-entry required.”

Thus, “with all your activity records in one spot, you can decide to share reports with landowners, regulators and lenders using data directly from your fields at any point in the season,” Conservis says on its website.

“Understanding your true cost, including cost per bushel and per acre will help ensure you make informed decisions that yield higher profits.”

Calgary-based Telus Agriculture has been shopping for farm management platforms since before Telus created the new ag unit last year, among them Decisive Farming, Farm At Hand, Muddy Boots and Feedlot Health Management Services.

The joint owners said their vision for Conservis is to deliver an “even more robust” platform across a “diverse range of crops and livestock.”

For its part, Telus Ag’s existing tech portfolio is expected to “help enhance the Conservis platform’s functionality” and include access to Telus’ Agricultural Data Exchange (ADX) and Agricultural Services platform (ASX).

The new owners said they “remain committed to Conservis’ strict data privacy standards,” emphasizing farmers on Conservis will still own their data and will still control when partners — Rabobank and Telus Ag included — get that information. — Glacier FarmMedia Network

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John Deere on Nov. 12 announced it has acquired Fargo-based Harvest Profit for an undisclosed sum.

Harvest Profit — whose software was already integrated with the John Deere Operations Center system, as well as Climate FieldView and Agrimatics Libra Cart — will “retain its brand name” under Deere ownership, the company said in a release.

Harvest Profit’s current software offering will continue to be available through the John Deere Operations Center, Deere said. The acquisition “ensures current and prospective John Deere customers will have access to this analytical capability and provides them with continuity moving forward.”

That said, “Harvest Profit has and will continue to have API (application programming interface) connections with other farm management information systems,” Lane Arthur, Deere’s vice-president for data-applications and analytics, added via email.

Harvest Profit customers, he said, “have the choice to use the solution that best meets their needs.”

Just in August, Harvest Profit had announced “enhanced integration” with Bayer-owned Climate FieldView, which previously allowed the two systems to share information on fields and boundaries, but now also allows transfers of “as-applied data,” such as at plantings, sprayings and harvests.

First set up in 2015, Harvest Profit has said its products are meant to give farmers “more visibility into the financial side of your farm… making it easier for you to track your farm’s costs, profits, grain marketing positions and inventory.

“Spreadsheets are amazing tools that we are huge fans of, but they aren’t well-suited to the complex task of managing all of the inputs and outputs of a modern farm.”

Harvest Profit’s software “provides financial visibility for the customer of their operations enabling confident and proactive management decisions that make them more profitable and sustainable,” Arthur said in Deere’s release.

The Fargo company’s products, he said, “will provide John Deere customers with a forward-looking financial lens, better visibility into their farms’ profitability, and insights to help them make the best possible decisions managing their operations.” — Glacier FarmMedia Network

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Winnipeg-based AGI announced Thursday it has bought all outstanding shares in Oakville, Ont.-based Affinity Management Ltd., developer of the Compass brand of farm and agribusiness management software, among other business management tools.

Affinity, which was founded by Neal Dilawri in 2007 and built up through partnership with chemical firm BASF, today has 18 employees. Dilawri will now take a “senior leadership role” working on the AGI SureTrack platform and provide “vision and guidance” going forward, AGI said.

The Compass product line, which today serves over 8,000 individual farmers across North America, includes an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system for growers and ag retailers and an agronomy tool, AGI said.

The ERP system “provides full accounting functionality, including management of accounts receivable, accounts payable, payroll and inventory tracking.”

The Compass system, AGI said, “also acts as a central data repository and portal which allows for the sharing of information with a grower’s trusted advisors, including agronomists, accountants, lenders, and insurance providers.”

Affinity’s staff also includes accountants who provide bookkeeping services to the company’s grower customers, AGI said.

The Compass product suite is “highly complementary to AGI’s current offering and will be a key component of the full AGI SureTrack platform.”

The SureTrack platform, formerly known as Intellifarms, includes the SureTrack Farm system for use by farmers and the SureTrack Pro system for use by processors, merchandisers and grain buyers to source product directly from farms.

The platform is meant to bring together data from “across the farm, providing our customers with the ability to manage their crop production, manage their overall business, and market their grain based on content and robust traceability,” AGI CEO Tim Close said in Thursday’s release.

Compass, he said, “takes AGI SureTrack to the next level, adding comprehensive ERP capabilities for AGI dealers and agriculture retailers, and significantly adding to our offering for farmers.”

In an update Thursday on its fourth-quarter financials, AGI said it has “demonstrated the success of its AGI SureTrack subscription model” in 2019, by “increasing retail equivalent sales by 70 per cent, despite capacity constraints and a challenging U.S. ag market.”

In 2020, the company added, “that growth is expected to continue as AGI builds on existing relationships with processors, merchandisers, grain buyers and producers throughout North America.”

Investments in sales, marketing and technical resources for AGI SureTrack are meant to “address capacity and accelerate the future pace of new user additions, thereby increasing our recurring revenue stream and adding significant equipment cross-sell opportunities.”

Financial terms of AGI’s deal for Affinity weren’t disclosed in Thursday’s release, except to say the purchase was “funded from the company’s operating facilities.” — Glacier FarmMedia Network

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Farm At Hand, which makes the cloud-based Crop Planner software suite for farmers and the Farm At Hand Agronomy suite for agronomists, announced Tuesday it has been wholly acquired by Telus for an undisclosed sum.

Few specifics of the deal were available last week, though Farm At Hand on Tuesday described it as “a natural fit” toward its goal to “simplify complicated tools to be user-friendly and match how you plan, work and keep track of what’s happening on your farm.”

Working with Telus, it said, will further that goal “by making Farm At Hand the hub that links together leading-edge software and IoT devices.”

IoT, or Internet of Things, refers to connected physical devices, such as farm equipment and crop monitoring systems, sharing data over networks without human involvement.

Farm At Hand recently announced it would work with tech firm Agrimatics to connect that company’s Libra Cart grain cart display and data management system with Farm At Hand account, and in May it announced integration with Deere’s MyJohnDeere system.

Through the Telus deal, Farm At Hand said Tuesday, it will be “better able to alert you to key changes, and offer advanced tools and information — a way of keeping track of everything in one central platform.”

Both companies emphasized last week that nothing will change immediately in Farm At Hand’s operations.

A Telus spokesperson said the Vancouver-based telecom firm “will continue Farm At Hand’s proven commitment to helping farmers best manage their farms, adding new features and services in the future.”

Farm At Hand, on its website, said its customers will “still have access to the tools you rely on,” adding “one of the things that we love about Telus is their approach to data transparency and privacy. They too believe farmers should own their information and be empowered to choose who they share it with.”

Asked whether Farm At Hand’s operations will directly connect to Telus’ in the future, the Telus representative said “we’re always looking at emerging areas where we can leverage data and technology to spur innovation, help organizations be more productive and improve the lives of Canadians.”

Telus — which provides consumer and business phone, cellular, broadband and cable service across Canada — said it “has long partnered with farmers to help connect, track and modernize farms and welcoming Farm at Hand to the Telus family will further that effort.”

Farm At Hand was founded in 2012 in Saskatchewan and relocated its operations to Vancouver the following year. In 2015 it became an arm of Winnipeg-based grain marketing consultancy FarmLink Marketing Solutions; co-founders Kim Keller and Himanshu Singh left the company the following year. — Glacier FarmMedia Network

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But after five years of sitting in a tractor, planting crooked rows of corn, he decided to do it his way instead.

“Even when I was a kid out discing or out drilling, I thought, ‘There’s got to be a better way,’” Laird told FarmTech attendees last month.

“I spent all this money on RTK (real-time kinematic) guidance, but I thought I could do better.”

So he did. In 2015, Laird — who worked as a computer programmer before coming back to the farm — automated his grandfather’s Massey tractor using less than $1,000 in parts and some basic computer programming.

That’s when things got really interesting.

He sent the tractor out to plant 50 acres of corn in the field across from his house using the simplest algorithms he could come up with. And it worked.

His first ‘tractobot’ was up and running.

“Automated tractors do not have to be expensive or complex,” said Laird.

You just need the know-how — and the freedom — to build one. That’s where open-source software and hardware come in, said Mannville-area farmer Brian Tischler, who also spoke at FarmTech.

Think of it a little like a cookie, he said. If you want a cookie, you need the recipe, and if you want a better cookie, you need to change the recipe.

With open-source software and hardware, anyone can tweak the recipe however they want. Closed source, on the other hand, is like buying a box of cookies — you can eat them, but you can’t make them yourself, and you can’t change them to suit your tastes.

Agriculture is mostly closed source.

“Open source is the absolute unicorn of agriculture,” said Tischler. “It basically does not exist. But it’s starting to.”

Open-source future

For most farmers, that’s fine — they don’t want to rig up an autonomous tractor on their own anyway. Moreover, in some cases, tinkering with your tractor to automate it could void your warranty.

But for others, open-source technologies will usher in the high-tech future of the agriculture industry.

“It will change agriculture,” said Tischler.

He started exploring open-source options when he hit a wall with ISOBUS, a system that helps ensure precision tools (such as displays) are compatible with different types of machinery. All he wanted to do was track where he had last seeded into the heavy residue on his field.

“It was the most frustrating experience of my life,” he said. “You can’t get the codes; it’s so locked down. To begin to play, you need at least $100,000 to start.”

So he decided to make his own app. The first thing he did was grab some open-source computer code. Well, almost. A quick Google search into open-source precision-seeding code turned up nothing.

“There was nothing out there. In terms of open source in agriculture, it didn’t exist.”

Tischler looked instead to the marine sector, which uses GPS in a lot of its systems. After scouring YouTube and online forums, he finally found the answers he was looking for.

AgOpenGPS was born.

“It’s literally a game. Instead of you running a game controller, the tractor is the controller.”

Using a visual display on a smart device or computer, the GPS system maps what has been seeded (in green) and what has not (in black).

“I turn the section on when it’s black and turn the section off when it’s green. It’s so simple.”

And the possibilities are pretty much endless — marking rocks in the field using Google Earth; tracking weed resistance in the field; controlling the sprayer or seeder; even automating the tractor itself.

“All of these things are doable with open source,” said Tischler. “You can build whatever you want.”

‘It should be simple’

And that’s what has farmers excited about this type of do-it-yourself technology.

“The more traditional approach is to wait for the big companies to come up with it,” said Ken Coles, general manager of Farming Smarter. “These guys don’t want to wait. They realize what’s possible.”

In a lot of ways, agriculture technology is behind the times, and farmers are starting to get frustrated by the snail’s pace of true innovation in the industry, said Coles, who also farms near Coaldale.

“I look at smartphones and what they can do, and then when I go into a tractor monitor and try to do the same thing, it’s like going back in time to the Apollo space mission,” he said.

“All these technical barriers are there. It’s ridiculous. It should be simple.”

This growing trend toward DIY equipment automation is one of the ways farmers are pushing back against this perceived lack of progress.

“These guys are going outside the box and bending some rules to do what they want to do,” said Coles, adding that the legality of reprogramming your equipment is still up in the air.

“It highlights the limitations that are placed upon us by big corporations.”

Right now, the people who are doing these on-farm automations tend to be “really techy,” but there are already some examples out there of what’s possible — and how easy it could be.

“Right now, the technical guys are doing it, but if enough people start doing it, there will be more easy solutions out there,” said Coles. “I think it will get to the point where it’s not that hard to do.”

Eventually, companies will start offering more automated solutions for farmers (the industry is already seeing some of that now), but the inevitable march toward automation will be taken in baby steps, said Coles.

“I feel pretty strongly that this path toward automation is the single biggest opportunity that’s going to shape agriculture over the next 20 years.

That makes some producers a little nervous, he added.

“I think some of them are terrified by this,” said Coles. “They’re wondering, ‘Well, what am I going to do now?’ There’s a fear of being replaced.”

Still lots to do

But the family farmer won’t become obsolete any time soon, Laird said.

“A lot of people think, ‘Great, I can go on vacation and check in from the beach,’” he said.

“I think of it as I can do all the things that it takes a human to do instead of trying to be a robot and stay on the line.”

Instead of relaxing on the couch while his tractor does the work, Laird is out in the field to check that seed is being properly placed or running to get fertilizer — things he can’t do from the cab of a tractor.

“I’ve been in the cab, and I planted very poorly,” said Laird. “If you want to know if you’re planting well, you need to get on the ground.”

For Laird, who has also done some automation on his grain cart and his combine, autonomous equipment eliminates the tedious parts of farming.

“I could only spend a few hours in a tractor before getting pretty fatigued,” he said. “With this auto steer, I could go all day and all night. What a huge difference.”

By supervising the operation from his truck or from the field itself, Laird is able to go about the business of farming.

“I’m in the truck answering calls or emails, and I look up and it’s done another 10 acres. The ability for me to concentrate on other things is a whole lot different.”

So far, the results speak for themselves.

“This year, I planted all of my corn — 535 acres — without being on the tractor while it was planting.”

And yes, the rows were perfect.

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DuPont — which as of last week had all regulatory approvals and clearances lined up to complete its merger with Dow Chemical — announced Wednesday it has signed a deal to buy software firm Granular, Inc. for an undisclosed sum.

Granular, set up in 2014, now serves growers covering nearly two million acres in the U.S., Canada and Australia. Its products include its Farm Management Software (FMS) line and, in the U.S., AcreValue.com, which it bills as “the leading digital marketplace for farmland real estate.”

DuPont executive vice-president James Collins, in a release, described the deal for Granular as “an important component of our commitment to leading and shaping the ag tech market.”

Specifically, DuPont said Wednesday it’s creating a “digital agriculture ecosystem to support information sharing, services and commerce.”

Buying Granular, the company said, “will enable the business to connect growers, analytics and public and private data to advance our vision for a digitally connected, more sustainable agriculture industry.”

Collins hailed Granular as “a clear market leader, as evidenced by its rapidly growing customer base and its existing partnerships with agriculture industry leaders, such as the recently announced integration of Granular into John Deere’s Operation Center.”

Granular’s affiliations other than Deere include Precision Planting, the planting equipment arm of Monsanto subsidiary The Climate Corp. Farm equipment manufacturer Agco last month announced an unrelated deal to buy Precision Planting for an undisclosed sum.

DuPont’s takeover of Granular is expected to close in DuPont’s third quarter. Granular CEO and co-founder Sid Gorham then becomes head of digital agriculture for DuPont, an arm that also includes DuPont’s Encirca agronomic software business.

“I am confident that as part of DuPont we will make a bigger impact even faster. DuPont shares our vision for using technology to help farms improve their dollar yield, not just their bushel yield,” Gorham said in DuPont’s release.

Granular’s advisory board today includes a Prairie producer as one of two non-U.S. members. Kristjan Hebert, managing partner of Hebert Grain Ventures (HGV) at Moosomin, Sask., is also board chairman for Global Ag Risk Solutions and a member of Bayer Cropscience’s Grower Advisory Forum.

DuPont and Dow recently agreed to close their merger deal effective Aug. 31, at which point they plan to spin off their combined seed and crop protection businesses into a separate company. — AGCanada.com Network

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Producers can plug their yields from the 2015 harvest into the software and find whether their cropping plan can break even or make a profit. They can also enter target gross margins to see if they can achieve them.

The software can analyze up to 40 dryland and irrigated crops on up to 32 fields.

CropChoice$ is different from other decision tools, because it also measures the risk associated with each alternative, each crop mix, and each management scenario.

The software is available as a free download at agriculture.alberta.ca. It is updated every year with new insurance premiums.

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