John Deere

John Deere (officially Deere & Company) was founded in 1837 by blacksmith John Deere in Grand Detour, Illinois, and is headquartered in Moline, Illinois. The company is publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker DE. It employs over 75,000 people globally.

Deere & Company is best known as the world's largest manufacturer of agricultural machinery, but has invested heavily over the past decade in precision agriculture technology — embedding GPS guidance, machine-learning-based automation, and IoT connectivity into its equipment.

John Deere's primary business is the design, manufacture, and sale of agricultural, construction, and forestry machinery. Its IoT and technology division centers on the John Deere Operations Center, a cloud-based farm management platform, and the StarFire GPS receiver network that enables sub-inch field positioning for autonomous and semi-autonomous field operations.

The company sells to large-scale commercial farmers, agribusiness operators, and construction contractors, primarily through an extensive global dealer network rather than direct or self-serve channels.

The John Deere Operations Center is the flagship digital platform, allowing farmers to monitor equipment telemetry, agronomic data, and field records in a single interface. The See & Spray technology, developed through the acquisition of Blue River Technology in 2017, uses computer vision and machine learning to identify and spray individual weeds rather than entire fields, reducing herbicide use. The Autonomous 8R tractor, unveiled publicly in 2022, is capable of fully driverless field operation using six pairs of stereo cameras and a neural network for obstacle detection. John Deere also offers the JDLink telematics system, which connects equipment to the Operations Center for remote diagnostics and utilization tracking.

John Deere competes with CNH Industrial (which manufactures Case IH and New Holland equipment) and AGCO Corporation (Fendt, Massey Ferguson) in the agricultural machinery market. In precision agriculture software, it competes with Trimble Agriculture and Climate Corporation (a Bayer subsidiary). John Deere's scale — its dealer network and the volume of connected machines already in the field — provides a significant data advantage for training its agronomic and autonomy models.