How John Deere's AI cuts herbicide use by 70% at 15 mph

A steel plow that could cut through thick Midwestern soil without clogging put John Deere on the map 188 years ago. Now the company is betting its next century on a different kind of tool: artificial intelligence that can tell a weed from a crop at highway speeds. Justin Rose, President of Lifecycle Solutions, Supply Management, and Customer Success, laid out how the equipment giant is embedding AI into everything from its sprayers to its subscription billing, framing the technology not as a novelty but as a necessity for global food production.

The sheer scale of modern farming makes a compelling case. U.S. growers plant roughly 12 trillion corn and soybean plants each year. The very best farms produce around 200 bushels an acre, but top experimental plots have hit over 600. Closing that gap means optimizing at the level of individual plants across millions of acres. John Deere’s See & Spray system tackles one piece of the puzzle by strapping 36 cameras to a sprayer and using machine learning to identify weeds in real time, hitting only the unwanted plants while the rig barrels through a field covering three football fields every minute. Rose says the result is up to a 70 percent reduction in herbicide use.

That kind of precision operation creates a data deluge, which John Deere is also using to reshape its relationship with customers. Rose pointed to AI-powered diagnostic tools that can instantly comb through thousands of pages of repair manuals and service records, a task that currently takes dealers hours. On the business side, the company is moving toward subscription-based licenses that let farmers pay for smart features only when they use them, rather than swallowing a massive upfront cost. The pitch is about more than convenience. With a planting window of roughly three weeks and no room for a catastrophic mistake, Rose frames AI as a hedge against the brutal math of farming. “They don’t have endless chances to get it right,” he said, “but with AI, we can turn their 40 harvests into 40,000 opportunities to learn.”