John Deere Unveils an Electric Excavator, Robot Planter

Speaker 1: I'm here to learn about John Deere's sustainable tech and what better weight than by sitting in the company's brand new, fully electric excavator. Let's dig in. Speaker 1: Sitting in a excavator is always a cool experience, but there's a lot of really cool things to think about when you're in something that is futuristic like this, having it battery powered. Uh, sure it could be used [00:00:30] in road construction, farming, but also indoor construction because you don't have a giant diesel engine pumping, and there's not just pollution being eliminated, uh, with zero emissions because it's electric, but noise pollution is way down. You can work at different times. Uh, this is more expensive for companies to be able to invest in. Obviously, uh, John Deere isn't given a price just yet, but the enticement for a company to be able to invest in this is to hit, uh, their goals for being greener and [00:01:00] for having less carbon emissions. Obviously, there's not a lot of construction vehicle charging stations, but John Deere's working on that problem. Speaker 1: This is an example of one type of charging station. They might be even portable, so you could take 'em temporarily to a job site. It is fascinating to see construction vehicles move to electric, and what John Deere did to still keep the whole machine familiar to operators is they had to get that battery down to a certain size. So the whole machine isn't wildly different than what they're used [00:01:30] to. The excavator made its world premier at CS 2023, but this isn't the only sustainable tech that they came out with. A lot of it helps with farming. The sea and spray is another example of what John Deere's doing for sustainability. It's 120 foot boom that has 36 cameras on it. These cameras are able to sense exactly where a weed is on the field and only spray herbicide where the weed is not wasting [00:02:00] all that herbicide on the whole entire field. It's better for the earth, better for your wallet. Speaker 2: Our theory is if we can balance that equation of making sure that our customers are more profitable by buying this technology, th they're more productive and we deliver a big environmental outcome. It's a really winning value proposition for our customer and for the environment. Speaker 1: Another brand new product from John Deere is called the Exact Shot. This [00:02:30] is helping farmers make sure that they are very exact with their fertilizer. So the technology here with the exact shot is very complicated and pretty incredible. Uh, when you're farming and planting seeds, it's a very exact procedure. So you're having a trench and other machines right now are just dropping seeds, but they have to be at a certain distance away. Here is a cutout of one piece of their exact shot machine. Speaker 1: [00:03:00] We're gonna get a little demonstration here. This wheel is one of the components that's kind of digging out that trench, and you have seeds that are spinning around going through. There's a brush on the bottom. All of this very technical stuff is making sure things are going at the right time, depending on how fast the driver is going down and able to go. All right, does that seat need to be six inches away or one and a half [00:03:30] inches away depending on the crop? And as it's flying down, you have an exact shot of fertilizer hitting that seed just at the right place. So you're not having a continuous spray, which is what's used today, which is a lot more wasteful. That's saving about 40% of fertilizer that they don't have to waste now. And this is closing that trench back up. It's all happening so fast. So let's turn this on and get a sense of it here. It's able to hit right exactly [00:04:00] when you see is going down, and it'll change based on the ground speed. It's just able to go pop, pop, pop. Fascinating stuff. Speaker 1: So yeah, it's nice to say, Hey, you're not wasting, uh, all this fertilizer on just one crop, but pan back a second. Take a second to think about what this really means on the big scale. If you think about how much corn is produced in America alone, you're looking at about 90 million acres every year. And when you're a continuous [00:04:30] sprain, that's about 130 million gallons of fertilizer. This saves 93 million gallons of fertilizer being used per year. That's about 650 million worth of product I'm talking about. So it's a big difference when you start seeing what kind of effect this technology could have. So in just this one row planter, the speed is wild. It's 30 seeds a second that it can pop out and blow that up to the full size machine, [00:05:00] which I have behind me here in this picture with 24 rows, that's 720 seeds a second. It's incredible how fast this goes. They're really planting the seeds of the future for seeding our planet. So why don't you plant your comment down below. Let me know what you think about all this cool tech. Thanks for watching. See you next time.