Autonomous driving functions aren't exclusive to just the automotive industry. Farm equipment manufacturer Deere & Company (DE) showcased its operation platform for inputting commands to driverless tractors CES 2024 (Consumer Electronics Show).

John Deere CFO Josh Jepsen joins Yahoo Finance's Akiko Fujita on the floor of CES to demonstrate its driverless machinery to aid aging farmers and reach autonomous crop production goals by 2030.

"There aren't more people necessarily moving into agriculture, which means our machines are going to have to do more and the ability to automate and move to autonomous is a huge unlock for our customers," Jepsen explains. "We feel like we're really well-positioned to do that given how we do all the jobs our customers do on the farm and our ability to manage all of that in a digital platform that makes this all very seamless."

Click here to see more of Yahoo Finance's CES coverage from this week, or you watch this full episode of Yahoo Finance Live here.

Editor's note: This article was written by Luke Carberry Mogan.

Video Transcript

[AUDIO LOGO]

AKIKO FUJITA: I'm Akiko Fujita, here in Las Vegas at CES 2024, where I'm inside the John Deere booth, joined by Josh Jepsen. He is the CFO of the company. We're talking about automated tractors. Not the first thing you think about with John Deere, but certainly, this is a company that's undergone incredible transition, especially with your tech investments.

JOSH JEPSEN: Yeah, it's significant opportunity for us to help our farmers do more with less and make their lives easier. There's a lot of challenges around having the access to skilled labor, and also just being able to execute jobs when they need to get them done. So in this example, an autonomous tractor doing tillage work, does just that.

AKIKO FUJITA: OK, so let's set things up here, because we've got an iPhone here, right? We're going to try to operate a tractor that is out in Austin, Texas. We're looking up here, because the monitors are there. How do we get started? This is an app, by the way, that every farmer uses, correct?

JOSH JEPSEN: Yeah. So this is a John Deere operations center.

AKIKO FUJITA: OK.

JOSH JEPSEN: It's really the digital platform for all of their ag information as it relates to machine health, agronomy, and the like. But you can control our autonomous tractor here. So we can see it, where it's running, you can see stats about it. But if you just push pause, it's running right now.

AKIKO FUJITA: OK. Can I go ahead and do that?

JOSH JEPSEN: Yeah. And we watch here. So we see it stopped.

AKIKO FUJITA: OK. Came to a halt here. And then we press resume.

JOSH JEPSEN: And then when you press resume, yeah, go ahead. It'll run through safety checks just to make sure there's nothing around it. And then we'll see the tractor take off and start going again.

So again, this is about getting jobs done when they need to be done, job quality, and really hard to quantify, but from our farmers that have been using this, it's a huge quality of life advantage. They can be two places at once.

So they can be with their family, they can be at sporting events they would have historically missed, or just having dinner with their family or doing other work around the farm that they wouldn't have had access to before.

AKIKO FUJITA: Talk to me a bit about the demand that's out there, because especially in farming, as we were talking off camera, you've got a lot of people that are aging, you've got not a lot of people that are getting in, right? I mean, there's going to be an increasing shortage in this space. The robotics increasingly important.

JOSH JEPSEN: Yeah, that's right. I mean, you think about the work that our farmers do, and it's really critical. We're talking about food and fiber, which is really, really important. There aren't more people necessarily moving into agriculture, which means our machines are going to have to do more.

And the ability to automate and move to autonomous is a huge unlock for our customers. And we feel like we're really well positioned to do that, given how we do all the jobs that our customers do on the farm, and our ability to manage all of that in a digital platform that makes this all very seamless.

AKIKO FUJITA: So, so far, we've pressed pause, we've resumed it again. But really, we talk so much about autonomous driving on regular roads, you're trying to accomplish a whole other thing here, because farming is not that easy. What other functions can you do remotely?

JOSH JEPSEN: Yeah, certainly. So there's opportunities. We can adjust settings. We can adjust speed, for example, on this right now. In other machines, like in a combine and harvesting time of the year, you can actually adjust the key settings to drive better yield through that process.

And those are all the things we need to do to help our farmers be in more places at once, and to be able to adjust and make changes to ultimately deliver the best outcomes that they can have.

AKIKO FUJITA: OK. So let's try-- can we try to adjust the speed here?

JOSH JEPSEN: Yeah, so right there, in field speed. You can go up or down.

AKIKO FUJITA: OK, we're at 5.1 miles an hour. Let's try to increase it a little. Can we go up to like 6?

JOSH JEPSEN: Yeah, probably there. Yeah, yeah, that seems reasonable.

AKIKO FUJITA: So it pauses once.

JOSH JEPSEN: And now we're going, yeah.

AKIKO FUJITA: OK. Is 5 miles kind of where you would usually want to keep it?

JOSH JEPSEN: In that range, really depending on soil conditions, how wet or dry is it. And you can see down on the display that we're seeing here, we're looking at the remote display, but you can see it's going 5.8, 5.9 miles per hour, like you-- like you adjusted it.

AKIKO FUJITA: OK. Now I'm watching the screen here. It looks like the tractor is going out of the square, essentially. But-- but you have created the parameters, right?

JOSH JEPSEN: That's right. So when you see that purple, or excuse me, the red or pink line is, the field is geofenced. So it will not go outside of those boundaries.

AKIKO FUJITA: OK.

JOSH JEPSEN: And what you can see, like the white line is actually the path. So it's going to enter a turn, and then we'll-- and then we'll carry on.

AKIKO FUJITA: What is-- OK, so let's bring it back down to where it was. Was it like 5.0, 5.1 miles an hour?

JOSH JEPSEN: I think so, yeah.

AKIKO FUJITA: And what about some of the other functions that we can use? The turn speed.

JOSH JEPSEN: Yeah, so this is preset, the turn speed, so it'll always slow down when it's going to do turns. Like I said, if we were in a combine, if we were out harvesting right now and you were the farm manager and I was an operator and you wanted to check to see how was I doing from a grain quality perspective, you can actually adjust key settings on the combine, as well.

So what we're seeing, is the operation center is becoming really the central platform to manage the operations. Not just looking backwards at results, but also in the moment, what adjustments do we want to be making in field.

AKIKO FUJITA: What can be done remotely right now? And what's the next step?

JOSH JEPSEN: Yeah, I think-- so a lot of adjustments on machines today. We also can do remote diagnostics. So when we think about, how do we provide better and better support to the machines. We're monitoring these machines. Our dealer network has access, if you so choose.

So we can actually identify problems before they create a failure. So doing predictive, proactive maintenance ahead of time to say, hey, here's an issue, we're seeing a code. We think in the next three hours, we may have an issue. We're going to send someone out and take care of that today.

So uptime is really important. So, meaning the machine's up and running when you want it to be running, we spend a lot of effort making sure customers are running when they need to be, because in agriculture, windows to execute jobs are really, really tight. You've got weather, you've got a lot of other things that are in play.

AKIKO FUJITA: And I'm no expert in farming, but obviously, this is just one step, correct? I mean, what is the thinking in terms of how John Deere wants to expand capability, given the multiple steps that are required to harvest crops?

JOSH JEPSEN: Certainly. So we have a goal by 2030 to have for corn and soybeans, a fully autonomous production system. So that means tillage, like you see here, like you've been controlling. But also moving to planting, to spraying, when we protect the crop, and then to harvest.

So our intent is, we would be fully autonomous for corn and soybeans across every job. So that means you're going to need to be able to manage each job and all of those settings across all of those things you're doing.

AKIKO FUJITA: And while we're talking about this specifically, being able to operate the tractor remotely, I mean, you're digitizing across the entire stack, correct?

JOSH JEPSEN: Correct. Yes, so the operations center, the John Deere operation center is really the digitized farm. You've taken that, so you can monitor, you can look at historical yields, you can look real time how you're executing in the field.

As we go through, we are actually, if we were planting, you could see that we're geospatially tagging each seed, so we know where every seed is. We've got technology over here that is furrow vision, that's actually putting a camera where a farmer has never been able to see before, to see in the furrow as you're planting to understand, are you getting the right seed depth, the right spacing between seeds.

So it's really about, how are we making these jobs easier for our farmers to execute on, and improved outcomes. And we think through the technology that we're delivering and the digital aspects, we can deliver better financial outcomes and better sustainable or environmental outcomes for our farmers.

AKIKO FUJITA: And finally, we were just talking that John Deere is not a name that used to be at CES, right? I mean, now you've become a regular here. The company's talked about being seen now as one of the largest robotics companies. Equipment manufacturers, too.

How much of that goal that you've talked about will involve being more acquisatory, given all the technology you need to bring in-house?

JOSH JEPSEN: Yeah, certainly. So we've historically been pretty vertically integrated. And we've augmented over the last five or six years in the technology side via acquisition. So we've made a number of acquisitions in the Bay Area, in Silicon Valley, bringing both technology, but also capabilities.

And I think the magic for us has been bringing those capabilities and integrating that with our experts in our machine forms, and with agronomy, which has really been helpful. So I think we'll continue to look to add to our portfolio organically, but also inorganically, where we can see step function changes in our ability to deliver solutions.

AKIKO FUJITA: Josh, thank you so much for talking to us.

JOSH JEPSEN: Yeah, thank you.