Agricultural Drone Provider Inks Major Deal with John Deere

A major player in the agricultural drone industry just planted a bumper crop of new business with one of the world’s foremost farm equipment giants

Agribotix, a Colorado-based company specializing in “drone-enabled agricultural intelligence,” inked a deal last month to integrate its UAS platform with John Deere.

The company will deploy its FarmLens ag-drone platform to empower John Deere dealers to offer customers enhanced precision-ag tools – a move that will allow farmers to optimize crop yield and save money. FarmLens will help John Deere dealers access all data from one place.

“Agribotix is the resource needed for expanding and excelling in precision farming,” 4Rivers Equipment precision ag expert Andy Hansen said of the system. A key John Deere dealer/customer, 4Rivers deploys ag drones to survey fields, analyze crop health and process data with FarmLens.

“Gathering data from agricultural drones can be done any day of the year and with the rapid delivery of results, a precision plan can be adjusted efficiently and effectively, allowing timely decisions to be made about fertilizer application, seeding rates and water management,” Hansen added.

Using the platform, John Deere dealers will be able to send drone-data results to growers’ Deere Ops Center accounts.

“Our goal is to help Deere dealers show their growers the variability across fields with the results FarmLens delivers from drone surveys,” said Jason Barton, VP of Sales for Agribotix. “When growers see that variability in their fields, they understand the value of using the full capabilities of their Deere planter to vary their seeding rates and their Deere sprayer to vary input rates.”

Last year, Agribotix partnered with fixed-wing drone maker senseFly to release an enhanced drone/sensor/data package which offered “several times more coverage, per flight, than is possible with most quadcopter solutions.”

The agricultural drone market could be worth $4.2 billion value by 2022 — representing a growth rate of 30 percent, according to a 2017 report.

Well-known for its vivid green equipment (there’s even a song about it), Illinois-based John Deere recently forecasted net sales for 2018 to jump 19 percent – around $35 billion.