New Technology Only Counts If Farmers Use It

This is Tim Hammerich of the Ag Information Network with your Farm of the Future Report.

Adding more technology to farm equipment is only worthwhile if a farmer is actually going to use it. But how does a large farm equipment manufacturer like CNH know whether or not farmers are finding value in new features? CNH’s Chris Dempsey says tech is helping them get a better understanding of how their machines are used in the field.

Dempsey… “And so one of the things that data analytics has really done for us in the last three to five years is it, it lets us understand what customer base we have that's actually using some of these features and functionalities, especially as you put more technology into the base of your products. A very real example of that is, you know, we released our. harvest automation, harvest command on our flagship combines, and we've progressed to the point of putting that offering into base. So every machine comes with it. Well, you need to know if a customer's using it to recognize the value, you know, to make sure that they wanna buy another Case IH combine, right? When we started that journey, we had strong adoption in penetration somewhere in the 60, you know, 60 to 70%. But through some targeted actions and understanding where we had customers that weren't using it and getting to the field quickly and talking to them to understand whether they didn't know it had that capability or whether they were having some challenges with it, you know, that's allowed us to really quickly get to the point of where, you know, we see utilization well over 90%.”

Dempsey says anything new built by CNH now has capability metrics to look at utilization.