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Tony Kramer: Hi, I'm Tony Kramer, your host of the Agriculture Technology Podcast, and I'm sitting down with agriculture technology and equipment experts to help you enhance your operation for today, tomorrow and into the future.
In this episode, I sit down with Daryl Shelton as we discuss some of the things we've seen in 2025 and where we're headed into 2026. With that, Daryl, I would love to welcome you to the show. Thank you for taking the time to sit down and discuss some of the technologies and equipment that we've seen here this year with RDO in 2025 and where we might be headed in 2026. Before we get started, why don't you tell us a little bit about who you are, where you come from, what your background is and how you got to where you are today?
Daryl Shelton: Well, first, it's sure great to be with you and great to be on the podcast. So yeah, background, I've been with RDO Equipment Company for 15 years but I've been in the industry for 30 years. I started my career early on with John Deere. I actually started in a parts warehouse as a college student, so fun times to kind of grow up in the business. But I spent a good number of years with Deere and then another dealer group. And like I said, 15 years ago, I jumped over into the construction equipment side. So I left the ag side and operated our business in Irving and Fort Worth, Texas, on construction equipment. Later on, I climbed up in the organization on the construction side of the business. About 5 years ago, I was asked to jump back over into the agriculture side. My education is agriculture, so I'm an agriculture economist by education. And like I said, pretty much my whole career has been tied to the equipment business and the heavy equipment business.
Tony: And you bring kind of a unique perspective. Like you said, you kind of started your career in agriculture and that's where some or most of your background is. So you've gotten to see, and then spending time with John Deere as well, you've gotten to see where some of this technology started in the early or late 90s, mid to late 90s into 2000 and on, and now you're back in agriculture, spent some time in construction, now you're back in agriculture. So to get your perspective on where we've been and then where we're going, I'm sure you've got a lot of different insights and thoughts on all of that.
Daryl: Yeah, that makes me chuckle a little bit because you think about the time, you know, how fast it goes by. But yeah, when I was with Deere early on, I got to be a part of introducing the 8 Series tractors, so like the 8400 and what have you, and you think about the old command arm and what that all started to get set up for, and having CAN bus technology on tractors and then the old Green Star display, and you just made me reflect back. It kind of went way back in, going back when it all started, but wow, if you think about just where precision agriculture has taken us and the old early days with Deere of agriculture management solutions and now it's ISG and what have you and we're talking about autonomous tractors and running without an operator and all, and I'm sure we'll get into that and so much more, even UAVs in agriculture as well.
Tony: Yeah, and you bring up the old days of the AMS team, the AMS products, all of that, and the brown box with the original Green Star display. It just shows, and that, I mean, that's what, 30 years ago? And here we are today at the end of 2025, and we look at how much that has advanced over those years, the different generations of displays, and we've had multiple generations of receivers, papers and everything. It just keeps growing and I don't see it slowing down or stopping any time.
Daryl: No, the speed, it's definitely, it's just only going to accelerate. You know, which really makes me think, and you think about RDO Equipment and our investment and our precision team, our technology team, customer solution team, it's really about customer success. And, you know, if you think back, it's about being prepared and how many steps along the way have we talked about, are you prepared for the next step and how fast it's accelerating right now? We'll go back up a little bit here just in 2025. But a big objective for us is to make sure our growers are ready and they're ready for the next thing. Because if you try to jump a step or two, you're going to get way behind in precision agriculture.
Tony: Absolutely. And that's one thing I think a lot of people overlook is that if you don't prepare yourself and you think you're going to make that jump from zero to 100 overnight, it's really not, I mean, you could if you really wanted to, but you're going to cause yourself some headaches or some stress and anxiety just because there's all these different steps. There's all these different levels. So you're absolutely right in saying the best thing to do is have a road, have a path. Where are you today in that technology journey and where do you want to be tomorrow, five years, 10 years down the road? Because the technology is going to keep coming and if you want to be a part of that journey, you've got to start somewhere.
Daryl: I agree. One of the things that we're talking a lot about is you get our growers in utilization mode. Are they utilizing that technology? Have they set up their operation center? Have they set boundaries so they can be prepared? Everything has been a building block and it's all been foundational. We've sure talked about it over the years but right now, and even back in 2025, how much energy we put around utilization and optimization for our growers and making sure that we're getting ready for what's coming so they can take advantage of the input savings that are even coming beyond. We've got a lot of things that I'm sure are going to be announced ahead of us here in 2026, just year after year. If you think about the last few years of what our manufacturer partner in John Deere has introduced, there's been a lot of wow factors coming, right? And it's all been about reducing input costs.
Tony: Yes, absolutely. Now that kind of lays out what we've seen over the past, let's call it 30 years of precision agriculture and what we've seen. Now I want to dive in. Let's talk a little bit about what we here at RDO have seen and some of the successes we've had in the 2025 calendar year. The first one I want to talk about is we've been working with drones in agriculture, specifically in our southwest regions, California and Arizona, and we've seen some success there. Talk to our listeners or tell our listeners a little bit about what that business looks like, what that industry looks like and some of the successes we've seen with drones in agriculture.
Daryl: Yes, you know, drones first, I would say we've been working with UAV or drones within RDO Equipment Company for a good number of years. So we've been in the construction side. We've been able to do flying for stockpile measuring, et cetera. So we have vast experience with drones now. In recent years, it's changed more into agriculture for us. And you mentioned the Southwest. We have some experience with a handful of growers and a good number of units in the spraying side of it. It seems to be for agriculture, there are two areas that are taking off. Flicker is one with the spray technology and this has capacity to fly and size of drone and capacity of tank, holding tank or chemical, and it gets larger than that opens up. The Southwest is specifically intriguing because of the leafy greens, high-value crops, smaller plots of land. Some of it, you think about the urban sprawl around some of those areas too. So it really does a great service for both the grower and the community, but a lot of that field size helps out in that too. So I continue to see that adoption. And then you also have the recent communication or announcement with Sentera and John Deere. What that's going to land for is doing prescriptions for, for example, See & Spray. You're running your sprayer behind a drone or after you get the mapping of where opportunity is for spot spray, specifically just the weed, you know how See & Spray works, as you know, and a substantial savings that allows. It's going to be interesting to see how Sentera paired up with See & Spray, what kind of continual savings on herbicides our growers will get to experience.
Tony: Yeah, absolutely. It really adds a tool to the grower's toolbox, whether it be that spray drone itself or you mentioned the Sentera acquisition with John Deere and partnering with See & Spray. It really opens up the door for more opportunities, whether you're ground spraying or aerial spraying, it gives that extra tool to the toolbox. And you brought up a good point on the front of that, this isn't our, as RDO Equipment, this is not our opening door to drones in the business. We've had great success on the construction side and some of the use cases that you mentioned with stockpile and surveying areas and whatnot. So it's really exciting to see some of this stuff come into the agriculture side and how can we utilize UAVs in the line of business that we do and how can we offer more solutions to our customers and everybody that we work with.
Daryl: Yeah, I have no doubt. I mean, this is exciting times, right? So when we look at efficiency and where it's going to be most effective, I mean, that's going to be the key. And they sure look to have their place in the industry.
Tony: Absolutely. Now I want to shift gears a little bit here, Daryl. Let's talk RDO's Midwest region, Minnesota and the Dakotas. We've got the opportunity. We've gotten to see and utilize and partner with John Deere and customers on this autonomous tillage tractor, this mysterious thing that has a cab but there's no operator in that seat. It definitely makes people do a double-take. So it's really fun to be a part of those types of projects and partner with our manufacturer partners of John Deere, but also partnering with the customers that are ready for that autonomy. Let's get your take on where we're at today with autonomy, what that road to autonomy looks like for customers and maybe where you see this going.
Daryl: Yes, I think I'd have to go back to as we start thinking about autonomous and tractors and full autonomous tractors, right? So you have autonomy, which is one aspect, and then you have full autonomous being another, but it's that preparedness, right? So making sure we're working with our growers. And we sure have that opportunity. We can do that analysis and go through to make sure here again they're ready when the time comes. We've been operating in our Midwest region alone seven units and just got an update today. We have within the ‘25 season real quickly about 10,000 acres under autonomous tillage, which is impressive. We have dedicated resources, experts on staff to help our precision team in-field and help our customers make sure we're in along with John Deere, I should say, to make sure these machines are operating correctly and we're getting the correct data along the way and making sure the experience and the investment's going to be there. It's coming fast and it looks to be the order window could be opening pretty quick, you know, at least that's early communication, right? I mean, we're right on it, I guess.
Tony: Yeah, absolutely. Back in November, I think Deere opened up and they talked about opening orders. Now, of course, there's some specific criteria that goes along with that in terms of us as dealers and then the customer being ready. But yeah, it's fully autonomous tractors. I mean, it's here. It is a production-scale autonomy.
Daryl: Yeah, I just think back just a handful of years ago when Deere at the Consumer Electronics Show introduced that 8R autonomous tractor. Now we have the 8Rs, we have the 9Rs, we've got some larger production going, and it's been a journey for us because we've been right there kind of walking step with Deere and with our team, and so very excited.
Tony: Yeah, and that's one of the things I think we should mention is that up until now or back in November or the end of 2025 here when John Deere did open up orders, it was all testing, partnership with dealerships. There was a handful of dealer groups within the United States or Deere's space that they partnered with to test these machines, get them into the field, get hands-on, get acres under them, but now it is a true solution available for customers to purchase. We're very fortunate at RDO Equipment to be able to partner with Deere to do that type of stuff and bring those types of solutions to market. So we got to see it on the front side, now we're going to get to see it roll out and grow as more and more customers around the United States continue to add that to their portfolio and solution. So it's a crazy, crazy time in agriculture to be able to have full autonomous tractors in the field.
Daryl: I agree. And the thing to keep in mind is you don't have to buy a new tractor either, right? It has a retro to it. So Deere's been building that platform. It kind of goes back to what I was talking about very early, having the tractors ready and being autonomous ready. You know, when you look at 8Rs and 9Rs, you can go back and buy this kit and be able to utilize your late-model machinery.
Tony: That's one of the things I think often gets overlooked. People hear about autonomous tractors or nobody operating that machine and, of course, take it back 5, 10, 15, 20 years ago, people assumed that it would be this cab-less robot and it'd just be this science fiction futuristic thing. But Deere said no, this machine can be used in other scenarios that are not fully autonomous capable. So you can turn off autonomy, you can run the tiller tractor, or it could be a planter tractor, it could be a grain cart tractor, it could be doing whatever you need to on the farm. But when it's time to move into autonomy, hey, we can turn on autonomy mode and hook it up to that tillage tool and off it goes. So that I think is one thing that sets John Deere's fully autonomous solutions apart from some of the others in the industry because it's a production tractor today. You can take a model year 2023 and put this system on there and off you go with an autonomous tillage tool.
Daryl: Yeah, you said it best. It's still a cab tractor, cabin air tractor, still operational for multiple production systems. And yeah, when you're not autonomous, you have it as you always had to use. And you were talking earlier about how far back some of this goes. Some of the early prototypes you would see in the market were just a powertrain, right? I mean, the old John Deere, early, early on, I don't know, I think, gosh, it may be 20 years ago or 18 to 20 anyway, there were some of those things at product intro. You would see some things about what the future of farming was, but you said it best a while ago, we're here, we're at the future of farming.
Tony: Yeah, absolutely. It's here today. So that's kind of a unique perspective or look into autonomy. But now looking back again on 2025, we've seen some other successes within our areas of business. Let's talk a little bit about Monosem planters in our southwest region, California and Arizona, and some of the success we've been seeing there with that.
Daryl: Yeah, that's great. Yeah, Monosem, where we have specialty crops there, lettuce for example, seed placement, seed accuracy, partnering SeedStar, SeedStar 2. Monosem has provided great results and surely our team is excited about our future opportunities there to continue to grow that and work with our growers. It's so important in that business to have the seed placement just barely placed on top of the ground, right? I mean, I think it's half the seed that it's placed in is accuracy and then making sure we don't have skips. I mean, here again, it's a high-value crop, so getting the great stand that the Monosem planter coupled with SeedStar 2 gives you is definitely exciting for us and something that we're going to continue to build upon in that market.
Tony: Yeah, you said it there with getting SeedStar 2 onto these Monosem planters. This is technology that these high-value crop or these vegetable growers have never had before. It's always just been traditional, maybe it's a ground drive, little to no technology, and that's how they've done it. And it's worked. But now giving them that visibility of what's happening row by row. We've had that in broad-acre commodity crop in corn and soybeans for many years. We've had SeedStar for a good handful of years going back to the early 2000s, late 90s, early 2000s. But now we're bringing it back to the vegetable growers and the high-value crops with these MS planters that we deal with down in California and Arizona. So another great success that we've seen within RDO.
Daryl: And just having it on the monitor right there, you nailed it, right? They have visibility now, just like you mentioned, you know, we would in the Midwest with the commodities there. But yeah, having it, seeing a row problem, seeing a skip or seeing a row not planting. Well, it's caught immediately, and we're talking substantial financial return because of that, so that's good stuff.
Tony: That is exactly it. I was having a conversation with a customer in our California territory and they made that comment that, you know, prior to technologies like SeedStar being on vegetable planters, they had no idea what that stand was going to look like until that seed germinated and it emerged. Now, with putting SeedStar on these Monosem planters, it is giving them that real-time visibility. So they don't have to go back in and hand-plant a row or figure out what went wrong and when it went wrong. They don't have to wait for that seed to emerge to see the problems that happened at planting. So huge, huge benefit in adding that technology to these planters.
Daryl: Yeah, that's for sure. You're getting more yield per acre and the acreage is expensive. So that's great production and great production improvements.
Tony: Absolutely. The last one I want to talk about here that we have gotten to see some great success in both our Northwest region, Washington and Oregon, but then also in our Midwest of Minnesota and the Dakotas. Talk to us a little bit about our experiences with See & Spray.
Daryl: See & Spray, what a great technology. And we were early on in that adopter with John Deere, so that was great to be part of that. And it's kind of similar to that autonomous conversation we've had. But when you match up the See & Spray with that just highly productive sprayer and just the boom that stays constant to the ground and distance and the camera technology, the stereo camera technology on those machines, the savings that are provided because we're only spraying the weed, so we're identifying the weed. And metrics that our business and Deere's business have shared with us across the country is around 50% of savings. Some crops, we have upward of 60 plus percent, which has been great to see that as well. So you just put the pen to paper on the herbicide cost here again. Our investment and our technology, our precision ag team, is to help our growers minimize their input costs or reduce input costs. And See & Spray is definitely showing its worth.
Tony: Yeah, absolutely. It's kind of crazy, year-end here. We've seen some reports. We've seen the amount of savings, the amount of acres covered versus the amount of acres actually sprayed with some of these customers that have been running this. And it is so fun to see the customer, just a smile from ear to ear when they realize the amount of money that technology saved them. And they still saw good herbicide control, good weed control throughout the season. So it's one of those technologies that once you see it, and to your point, you put the pen to paper and you figure out what that ROI looks like, it's a, I mean, it's a real number. We're not talking dollars and cents here. We're putting some zeros behind those numbers.
Daryl: Yeah, well said. Definitely. And we're excited to be able to support the number of units we have out and what precision upgrades we're going to have in 2026 as you look forward. Yeah, it's going to be something, a platform we're going to continue to build upon. So, you know, the other thing there, you got to have agriculture sustainability there too. So we're all stewards of the land and it's a big part of that.
Tony: And you brought up another good point. You said that the precision upgrades, similar to these autonomous tractors being able to take something that you have today and turn it autonomous. Very similar with the See & Spray sprayer is that premium performance upgrade kit. You can take a sprayer today that's on your farm or maybe it's a used sprayer on the lot of RDO and we can add these technologies to these older pieces of equipment, these used pieces of equipment.
Daryl: Yeah, that's exactly right. You know, the technology stack is really so much a part of Deere strategy and trying to get the return on that investment and stretch that out over a longer period of time. Precision upgrade kits in general, I mean, I hope our growers are looking beyond just sprayers, but yeah, sprayers, planting, seeding, we have the opportunities to do some upgrades on combines. What a great way to get the maximum use out of your investment.
Tony: Absolutely, that's the precision upgrades. You brought up planters, air seeders, sprayers, combines, whatever it may be. It has opened that door to customers that may not have had access to some of that technology because prior to John Deere and precision upgrade kits, you had to buy that new piece of equipment or you had to shop that used market to find that technology. Now we open that door, we give accessibility to all growers and the ability to add that technology. It's really opened that door for people that may not have had that opportunity in the past.
Daryl: Yeah, I think you make a great point. When we're looking at how to spend our dollars wisely and where we need to make investment, we have a menu opportunity, a little bit of a la carte with the precision upgrade kits. That's how I look at it. So yes, I definitely encourage growers to be looking at that option as they're looking at how to maximize the benefit of their current fleet.
Tony: I just want to leave you with one last question here, Daryl. As we move into 2026, what are you most excited about in terms of the agriculture industry in general, but then also the technology that just continues to come? What is something that you're really looking forward to as we move into 2026?
Daryl: As a dealer group, we have a unique opportunity to be a key part of our grower success, our customer success, and we continue to make our investment within RDO to make sure we're staffed both on the ground, boots on the ground. And then we have precision experts like yourself on staff too, which is extremely exciting and with different production systems. And I'd have to say we also have the customer support or customer success group that's remote and allows growers to get a little more instant access as well. Being able to build upon that and build that out for our customers to me is very exciting. When we can provide a class experience and here again be a small part of the success of their operation because we've made those investments. So looking forward to continuing to position our agriculture and our agriculture precision teams the best way for the growers.
Tony: Daryl, I just want to thank you again for taking the time out of your day to sit down and chat with me a little bit about the things we've seen in 2025 and kind of looking forward into 2026. You just said it there. It's an honor for us to be a part of our customers' journeys, help support them in any way we can. And it's fun to be here and it's fun to be a part of this industry.
Daryl: Indeed. Thank you for having me.
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Tony Kramer
Tony Kramer is the Product Manager of Planting Technology and a Certified Crop Advisor at RDO Equipment Co. He is also the host of the Agriculture Technology podcast. If you have any questions for Tony or would like to be a guest on the podcast, email agtechpodcast@rdoequipment.com, or connect with him on LinkedIn.
