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Electric Equipment: Helping Our Customers Overcome Their Biggest Challenges

By 2026, John Deere will offer electric Compact Utility Tractors, commercial and residential mowers, Gator utility vehicles, and more than 20 models of construction equipment.

Why? Because our customers demand more from their equipment. They want:

  • Performance and reliability
  • Quieter, easier, and intuitive operation
  • Total cost of ownership advantages, including government incentives, where applicable
  • Reduced complexity and simplified maintenance
  • Technology enablement and scaling
  • Reduced C02e emissions

“We’ve started this journey to solve customer pain points and deliver value,” said Derek Muller, product manager for electrification. “With zero emission products, there are new assumptions customers have on what products will be capable of. They want that next generation user experience that we plan to deliver.”

Muller said John Deere customers are facing more challenges and market pressures than ever before.

"Whether it's our customers in agriculture or construction, they face similar challenges such as the lack of skilled labor, rising input costs, and tight deadlines," Muller noted. "Through our electric lineup of products, we'll look to solve for those by reducing operational and maintenance costs, delivering powerful and reliable performance, and intuitive operation."

What revolutionary impact will this have?

“It fundamentally will change how producers look at job steps,” Muller said. “The more producers reduce the cost of their operations, the more flexibility it gives them to make more passes in the field, essentially doing more with less. They can manage yield and plant health on a more frequent basis; enabled by the cost of that pass being so low. They are no longer exposed to fuel costs. Producers can focus on the health of the plants/animals, and truly optimize the material inputs such as fertilizers, chemicals, and feeds.”

Early in 2022, John Deere acquired majority ownership in Kreisel Electric, an Austrian company pioneering in immersion-cooled battery technology, which provides extended battery life, efficiency in extreme climates, modular design, and mechanical stability.

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Trending Video

Wheat Yields in USA and China Threatened by Heat Waves Breaking Enzymes

Video: Wheat Yields in USA and China Threatened by Heat Waves Breaking Enzymes

A new peer reviewed study looks at the generally unrecognized risk of heat waves surpassing the threshold for enzyme damage in wheat.

Most studies that look at crop failure in the main food growing regions (breadbaskets of the planet) look at temperatures and droughts in the historical records to assess present day risk. Since the climate system has changed, these historical based risk analysis studies underestimate the present-day risks.

What this new research study does is generate an ensemble of plausible scenarios for the present climate in terms of temperatures and precipitation, and looks at how many of these plausible scenarios exceed the enzyme-breaking temperature of 32.8 C for wheat, and exceed the high stress yield reducing temperature of 27.8 C for wheat. Also, the study considers the possibility of a compounded failure with heat waves in both regions simultaneously, this greatly reducing global wheat supply and causing severe shortages.

Results show that the likelihood (risk) of wheat crop failure with a one-in-hundred likelihood in 1981 has in today’s climate become increased by 16x in the USA winter wheat crop (to one-in-six) and by 6x in northeast China (to one-in-sixteen).

The risks determined in this new paper are much greater than that obtained in previous work that determines risk by analyzing historical climate patterns.

Clearly, since the climate system is rapidly changing, we cannot assume stationarity and calculate risk probabilities like we did traditionally before.

We are essentially on a new planet, with a new climate regime, and have to understand that everything is different now.