John Deere Practicing Agile Development in Design

Aug 23, 2012

An Innovative New Approach to Farm Equipment Design

John Deere is a world class leader in farm equipment technology and design, with more than 175 years of business experience making farm equipment and machinery designed for the everyday needs of farmers. For the first time in the company’s long standing history, John Deere engineers have started to take a different approach to innovation and design with a concept known as agile development, a term perhaps more familiar to those in the tech industry -companies such as Facebook or Google, says Aaron Senneff, development manager at John Deere Intelligent Solutions Group.

Prior to incorporating agile development, he explained, John Deere worked on long-range plans.

“We would design for a long time, consider those designs for a long time and then execute and test for a long time, so that we had confidence when we launched the product in the marketplace,” he said.

“Agile development is totally different — every two months, we re-plan,” he said. “It recognizes that technology and customer needs change rapidly, so we try to adjust for that.”

This recent change in their approach to development side is intended to increase the company’s ability to bring new products and solutions to the marketplace at a faster pace, while maintaining the highest quality workmanship and standards the John Deere brand in known for.

We call it release planning, and this happens every two months,” Senneff noted. ‘The engineers break into small design teams and after two months they demonstrate new product innovations and then the process starts over again.”

“Now we have a process to improve the speed to market by putting products quickly in the hands of customers and getting their feedback,” he explained. “So we can understand the market potential much faster.”

It will be interesting to see what types of results are yielded from this new approach, but one thing is for sure – we can always count on John Deere to be a leading innovator and champion for the future of farm technology and innovations.

Video: Evolution of Beef Cattle Farming

The Clear Conversations podcast took to the road for a special episode recorded in Nashville during CattleCon, bringing listeners straight into the heart of the cattle industry. Host Tracy Sellers welcomed rancher Steve Wooten of Beatty Canyon Ranch in Colorado for a wide-ranging discussion that blended family history and sustainability, particularly as it relates to the future of beef production.

Sustainability emerged as a central theme of the conversation, a word that Wooten acknowledges can mean very different things depending on who you ask. For him, sustainability starts with the soil. Healthy soil produces healthy grass, which supports efficient cattle capable of producing year after year with minimal external inputs. It’s an approach that equally considers vegetation, animal efficiency, and long-term profitability.

That philosophy aligned naturally with Wooten’s involvement in the U.S. Roundtable for Sustainable Beef, where he served as a representative for the Colorado Cattlemen’s Association. The roundtable brings together the entire beef supply chain—from producers to retailers—along with universities, NGOs, and allied industries. Its goal is not regulation, Wooten emphasized, but collaboration, shared learning, and continuous improvement.