John Deere's Recent Focus on Specialty Crops

Tim Hammerich
News Reporter
John Deere is arguably the most well known farm equipment brand, but traditionally they haven’t had a lot to offer specifically focused on specialty crops. That has changed in recent years with a series of moves by the company. Sean Sundberg is a business integration manager with Deere focused on specialty crops.
Sundberg… “ We made significant investments, whether on the planting side with Monosem, on the precision ag side of application with Smart Apply with our joint venture with GUSS, even a Mazzotti sprayer, we're making some key bets in this market. You dial back and people think of Deere you think corn and beans and midwestern ag. We also want to be known for, hey John Deere is here to stay in high value crops globally.”
One of those he mentioned was a joint venture with autonomous spraying company GUSS Automation.
Sundberg… “When Deere took that step and said, Hey, we want to be a part of this and can we help it? It's really trying to stay out of their way to allow them to be super fast, to be super nimble, to take the resources, put 'em to use and design and solve those problems. And we help scale it. So we're opening up our channel, utilizing the dealers. We utilize John Deere's supply chain. We utilize some of our manufacturing expertise, our supply based management. We help scale the business.”
Sundberg says this furthers their commitment to growers of specialty crops around the world.