John Deere Investor Day Highlights and Analysis

Index:

1. Introduction

2. Leap Ambitions Targets

   1. KPI Tracking

   2. Change in Recurring Revenue Target or “Solutions-as-a-Service”

   3. Digitally Engaged Acre Target

   4. Unique Monthly Active Digital User Metric

3. John Deere and Artificial Intelligence

4. Technology Product Uptake

   1. Combine Automation

   2. See & Spray

   3. Autonomy

5. Other Interesting Quotes and Insights

   1. John Deere Financial Stats

   2. Total Scale of Data Collection

   3. Brazilian Ag Stats

   4. GUSS Stats

   5. The value of vertical integration

Check out the full recording of John Deere’s 2025 Investor Day here.

Introduction

In 2022, John Deere shared held its “Leaps Unlocked” Event where executives shared details of desired “Leap Ambitions” surrounding multiple areas of the business, particularly around technology and the “Smart Industrial” Strategy.

Some of the numbers shared and targets from 2022 included:

• Deere positioning its tech stack and new products as a $150 billion value-creation opportunity for farmers, with a intent to capture a slice of that

• Targeting 10% of total revenue from recurring sources by 2030.

• Operations Centre as both the operational and agronomic command hub, targeting ~500 million acres and aiming for 1.5 million connected machines by 2026.

• See & Spray beyond herbicides, getting into fungicide (which was stated as launching in “2 years”), insecticide and fertilizer related offerings all on the road map afterwards.

• A fully autonomous corn cropping system by 2030.

This week, Deere held its Investor Day in New York. The emphasis was effectively a mid-decade report card on how their “ambitions” were tracking and how farmers were using their technology.

Leap Ambitions Targets

In 2022, John Deere emphasized that their efforts could unlock >$150 billion in economic value for farmers. They allude to this as their Incremental Addressable Market.

In 2025, they maintain that vision:

Deere does a great job of applying the concept of “Trapped Value” to the entire farm industry.

Trapped value is essentially economic potential sitting inside a system that isn’t being realized because of structural friction, outdated workflows, misaligned incentives, legacy infrastructure or simply inability to manage.

The idea is to bring solutions to the market where value is “trapped” to unlock it so that it can accrues to customers, or businesses within the system.

The “poster child” for this is Uber. Uber didn’t create demand out of thin air, it leveraged technology to unlock pools of trapped value in transportation by removing friction from the system and taking advantage of latent demand.

That’s what Deere is getting at, too.

They see their technology unlocking that trapped value — bringing novel products and technology to market that enables a farmer to take advantage of inefficiencies in the current system. Examples include broadcast herbicide spraying when the only place many herbicides need to be applied is directly to the weed, or with autonomy and attempting to remove labour from time to do higher value tasks as a couple examples.

On large mid-west US farm, Deere suggests that there is about $72/ac of unlocked profit across their entire tech line-up:

In order to deliver on the unlock, Deere is steadily increasing the foundational infrastructure in equipment, and on farm:

In order to track that progress, they set out targets in 2022, and have been giving updates regularly since, including metrics like engaged acres, connected machines, and recurring revenue. They provided an update, and a new target metric of Unique Monthly Active Digital Users:

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