Electric Vehicles and Agriculture

With your Southeast Regional Ag News, I am Haylie Shipp. This is the Ag Information Network.

Mention electric vehicles in conversation and you’re bound to get a plethora of opinions and, let’s face it, armchair experts. Bring the topic up with John Deere and they’ve got a strategy. Denver Caldwell is their Director of Sales for the U.S and Canada.

He says for this technology to come to light in ag equipment, it needs to be in stages…

“The first stage, what you saw in the Z370R, that infrastructure are things we all have in our homes: the 120 outlet. We can plug that in and get going. We see the second stage as being a stage that largely we all have in our homes. We may have to reconfigure some of the plug-in infrastructure to make that work, but it’s not going to require a lot of infrastructure development.”

Stage three is a bit more intense.

“The third stage, the things that we’ll see around electric backhoes and skid-steers and the larger things, sure that’s going to take some infrastructure to make sure we’ve got the proper plumbing into whatever venue it is if it’s a dealer, or if it’s a farm operation. We’ve got to make sure we’ve got the right current.”

As you look at this market, he says there is likely a lot of infrastructure investment coming at us. He predicts that growth could come not in the next few years but likely very soon after that.