John Deere 2027 Precision Upgrade Kit Updates

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Tony Kramer: Hi, I'm Tony Kramer, your host of the Agriculture Technology Podcast. In this episode, I talk with Kyle Barry about the new 2027 precision upgrade offerings coming from John Deere. With that, let's dive into the show. John Deere just recently announced the new additions to the PUK lineup for model year 2027. So, before we dive into those, Kyle, I'm really excited to bring you on to the show. Tell our listeners a little bit about who you are, what you do, and how you got to where you are today.

Kyle Barry: Yeah, thanks, Tony. Happy to be here. I'm glad we could make this happen. As you said, my name's Kyle Barry. I'm the manager of Precision Upgrades and Marketing at John Deere. That means I spend most all of my time figuring out how we partner with our product family folks to bring the latest technology innovations from John Deere and put them onto existing machines that are already in the marketplace. So trying to increase the accessibility to the technology for more customers, not just those that buy brand new machines.

Tony: When did Deere start this PUK journey and why did John Deere decide to go down this path?

Kyle: The journey started, we actually called them Performance Upgrade Kits when it began. And I think it was in the 2016-17 timeframe. And it was specifically on planters. We started retrofitting older planters with new row unit technology. So when the ExactEmerge™ came out, we were increasing the amount of ExactEmerge row units in the marketplace, not just through new planners from the factory, but through our Performance Upgrade Kit brand at the time that we've since changed to Precision Upgrade Kits. We did that in the 2023 timeframe where we rebranded to Precision Upgrade Kits, still use the term PUK. The change was really a shift in our focus in what we were doing. So the business has grown to to become a whole lot more than just planters. Still do a lot of planter upgrades, but we've got a full portfolio of offerings from planters, sprayers, combines, air seeding, tractors, you name it, nearly every piece of equipment that John Deere sells in the large X space, retrofitting new technology on older machines. And so that's kind of how we started and how we got to where we are.

Tony: Let's dive into this new or these additional 2027 portfolio adds to the PUK lineup. This stuff got released or launched at Commodity Classic down in San Antonio a few months back. What is John Deere bringing to the PUK portfolio for Harvest in 2027?

Kyle: We're really excited about bringing a new harvest automation technology package to 2025 and newer combines. When those machines came out for model year 25 for combines, they had a harvest automation technology packages that you could spec the machine from the factory with. Obviously not every machine came with that. And so we're bringing the ability to retrofit that existing machine population up to either the premium or the ultimate technology packages.

Tony: This gives that customer, so they may have bought a brand new combine last year, and maybe they only spec'd it with premium technology package or a select technology package. Now they've got the opportunity to go all the way up to ultimate, not having to go back in and buy a brand new combine to get to what you want.

Kyle: Not everybody's in the market for a new machine. And so they might be looking for a used machine, and they're starting to think about how they find specifics of what they need in that used machine are not so stringent anymore. If they wanted harvest automation on a combine, they could find a model or 25 combine that doesn't have harvest automation on it and still upgrade it. So they can still get what they want. And I think that that's a win-win for a lot of people to be able to find used equipment that doesn't specifically fit their need exactly how it sits today, but then add technology that they want onto it through the precision upgrades business.

Tony: You can use any precision upgrade kit to shop the used market. find something that kind of fits your operation and then utilize PUKs to get it to that level of technology that you're looking to be running at. So I'm really glad you brought that up because that is something that I often talk about. Let's move into autonomy. Let our listeners know what we've got coming for 2027 autonomy PUKs.

Kyle: Probably the one that I'm most excited to talk about is the 2730 combination ripper. This will be the first time that we've had compatibility with those tools. but we're also bringing 2430 five section chisel plows and two section 2680Hs. So 3 new tools that we're adding compatibility for autonomous tillage for 2027. We now have that full season solution being able to run that 2730 in the fall and maybe a 2660 or 2680H there in the spring.

Tony: It definitely opens the door a bit more for customers looking to get into autonomy. It gives them more options, more opportunity with their current tillage practices to be able to potentially move into autonomy. Now the next lineup of equipment I am very excited to talk about, and it's a little bit more robust than harvest and autonomy, but let's talk about all of the new exciting things coming out for planting.

Kyle: Planters is where we started, and it's definitely the biggest part of the portfolio, but it's also one of the most configurable products that we sell at John Deere. It means we have to have a lot of products in our portfolio to help meet the needs of a lot of different customers when you think about retrofitting. From a planter perspective, what's new for model year 27, we're excited to announce that you can now, if you have a model year 15 or newer John Deere planter and you're running precision planting components on that planter and you want to convert that back to ExactEmerge, we have a precision planting to ExactEmerge meter upgrade kit that will bring you back into the John Deere ecosystem. You'll pair that with whatever downforce you would like to run, whether that be Active Pneumatic or IRHD. If you're familiar with ExactShot™, our dosing fertilizer technology, we're bringing compatibility to the MaxEmerge™ 5e metering system with that technology. So that's really exciting, gonna open up the opportunity for even more customers to save 66% or so on their starter fertilizer. Finally, adding easy adjust row cleaners and closing wheels as a standalone upgrade. This is a request we've had for a really long time. We've offered it as a part of broader kits, but never alone. So you'll be able to order those easy adjust row cleaners or pneumatic closing wheels as a standalone upgrade. And then lastly, FurrowVision™ and downforce automation powered by FurrowVision. So FurrowVision is not new for model year 27. What is new is our ability to automate the downforce across your planner by utilizing those 3 furrow vision cameras. So some customers bought Furrow Vision and are going to use it here in 2026 for the first time. But those that are interested or have been sitting on the fence are thinking, you know, it's great to see in the furrow, but I really wanted to make the adjustments for me. The time has come. So we're going to be able to adjust your downforce on the fly. as you go through the field. We know a lot of times customers do that maybe once a field or maybe not even that often. And so as conditions change across the field, downforce settings should be changing, but they're not. And that's leaving yield on the table. And we're really excited about what downforce automation is going to do for our customers.

Tony: I'm really excited about the easy adjust row cleaners and the pneumatic closing wheels. A lot of customers wanted to add that, but it had to be paired with a meter upgrade or a full row unit upgrade. So having that ability to do those standalone upgrades is great. And then you talk about ExactShot on MaxEmerge 5e planters. That's going to be huge too for all of the guys that want that technology, but they didn't have ExactEmerge or they didn't want to move to ExactEmerge. So very excited to hear about all these new offerings with the planters.

Kyle: That's one of the cool things about the upgrades business is, you know, every year it's not always a new technology that we're able to bring, but it's additional compatibility to where we're able to unlock that technology for people who previously couldn't adopt it because of the machine form that they had or, you know, whatever it might be. We're always looking to try to improve or increase the amount of compatibility that our products have as far as retrofitting back in the marketplace.

Tony: Always adding, always changing, very exciting for the planter lineup. What are you guys bringing to market with seeding PUKs?

Kyle: Hopefully a lot of people are familiar with our AccuRate™ stainless steel metering system that came with the launch of the new C-series carts in model year 25. But we're now adding relative flow blockage monitoring as a precision upgrade kit. So you’re going to be able to get that on N500 and N500F tools, P500s and H500 and N500F John Deere tools. So being able to see in real time row-level flow with MCAB Alert is going to just give that operator more insights to what's happening on the tool. This is another product that people have been asking for from us for a long time. We're excited to finally be bringing this to market here for 2027.

Tony: Let's round this one out, Kyle. We've got one last production step that you guys have some exciting new things coming. Let's talk a little bit about the new application PUKs coming next year.

Kyle: First, I’ll talk a little bit about what we call ink modular. So ink modular is the individual nozzle control system for 4730 and 4830 sprayers. And we're now bringing compatibility to that for 80 foot and 90 foot booms. So previously it was just a hundred foot booms and now we're going back to 80 and 90 foot. So you can upgrade a sprayer all the way back to 2008. With this nozzle technology, it gives you individual nozzle control, so your section widths across the boom are only as wide as your nozzle spacing is. The next two things I'll talk about is from a See & Spray™ perspective. So we have a front-mounted camera precision upgrade kit for 2027. So you can take your existing See & Spray Premium or See & Spray Ultimate machine and take those four cameras that are mounted on the thinner section of the rear of the machine and relocate those to the front. And the main reason we're doing that is for dust fallback situations from the tires and driving through the field. Moving those cameras to the front allows us to mitigate a lot of that dust fallback. So that'll be a precision upgrade kit, but it's also, you'll get those front mounted cameras if you buy a model year or 27 or newer, See & Spray premium upgrade kit for your model year 18 to 26 machine. Before commodity back in January, we launched the See & Spray Gen 2 system, but we're also excited about some updates to Gen 1 and we're committed to our Gen. 1 customers. We're bringing 4 new compatible crops to the See & Spray Gen 1 portfolio. So the premium and ultimate machines that you're familiar with today. We're adding peanuts, sugar beets, milo, and wheat as compatible in season crops. Now that's going to be for spray season 27. So not for this upcoming spray season, but next year is when we'll bring those compatibilities and have some other things in the works, but we're really excited about the ability to add those four crop compatibilities as well as the See & Spray variable rate to where you can adjust the rate that you're spraying out of each one of those nozzles. Those are two of the big things from a See & Spray perspective. We know we've had a lot of requests from customers that are outside of corn, soybean, and cotton country, or maybe they're in corn and soybean and cotton country, but they also grow some other crops that they could get some value out of if they could use their See & Spray system in those other crops and continuing to add to the portfolio from a crop perspective.

Tony: We're talking about all of this, model year 2027. Now here we are in not just getting fired up, just getting rolling in 2026. You guys at John Deere, we launched the product and I believe here in June, we will open up the early order programs for these PUKs and whatnot. So everything we're talking about here is looking at the 2027 growing season, correct?

Kyle: Everything that we're talking about would be things that would hit the field, you know, starting in 2027.

Tony: Tell us a little bit from Deere's perspective why it makes sense to purchase a precision upgrade kit on the equipment you already have versus going out and buying something new with that technology on it?

Kyle: Ultimately, we're after a solution for customers to where they could adopt new technology at a much faster rate than what they could through just purchasing new machines. We know that the purchase history or the trade cycle by customers varies all over the board. It's unlikely that every year when John Deere continues to innovate and we bring out a new technology, that everyone's going to be able to just go trade in what they have for something new in order to acquire that on their farm. And so the Precision Upgrades business really opens up that opportunity for customers to take the machines that they already own that are in their sheds today, and when John Deere comes out with a new technology, depending on compatibility, can adopt that on their farm and start to see the benefit of using that technology much quicker than what they could if we only offered these technologies from the factory.

Tony: Oftentimes when we as a dealer or our customers think about these precision upgrades, they're thinking big precision upgrade, whether it's a full planter upgrade or we're putting See & Spray Premium on a sprayer. But you mentioned something there about when John Deere comes out with a new technology, they don't have to sell what they have or trade in what they have to go buy something new. And depending on compatibility and availability of these kits, you can just, in a modular sense, you can add technology to whatever combine, sprayer, planter, whatever piece of equipment you're working on. So you can do it little by little.

Kyle: Exactly. As the portfolio has grown beyond the row unit upgrades on planters, it has really opened up the ability to put small as an adjustable spout on your S-series combine all the way up to a full planter, you know, a planter rebuild on a 2005 or whatever toolbar you might have, the variance and what that upgrade could be is huge. And there's everything in the middle from that adjustable spout up to LED lighting kits and fertilizer systems on planters. You know, you think about buying a planter, especially if you're buying a used planter, it might not be exactly how you want that planter to be, but we can get it to where you want it to be through the upgrades portfolio.

Tony: Is there anything you want to mention or leave off with our listeners when it comes to, maybe they're thinking about PUKs, maybe they've never thought about PUKs before. What are some things that customers can leave this episode with and say, hey, maybe I should go talk to my dealer about a PUK?

Kyle: First and foremost, don't be intimidated by the complexity of what you have and what you want to go to. That's what our dealers are for. We have some resources on deere.com that can help walk you through all of the different compatibilities. And we also have a customs team that will review requests and fulfill some requests for configurations that we don't meet that need with what we call our standard kits. So that's a whole separate part of the business. If you have something and you don't know if you can get a John Deere solution, talk to your dealer, visit us on deere.com/upgrade. We have compatibility tools out there for both planters and sprayers where you can put your frame serial number in for either of those machines, and it'll spit you out a list of all the different upgrades that your machine is compatible with. There's never been a better time to consider how you become more productive, more efficient, and more profitable with utilizing technology than right now. We know commodity prices are tough. We know the market is tough, but there's a lot of benefits to be had, and the upfront cost isn't always as much as what people would expect. And so talk to your dealer if you're interested or you've been thinking about it and you're sitting on the sidelines, get off the sidelines, get into your John Deere dealer and talk to them about what upgrades are available for the machines you have, especially if there's anything specifically that we've talked about today or you've heard from Deere in the past to figure out if you can acquire that on your own farm and what that will mean for you and how it can impact your bottom line.

Tony: I don't think I could put it any better. Like Kyle said, talk to your dealer. Start thinking about how you could upgrade your equipment today, whether it be your combine, your sprayer, your planter, whatever piece of equipment is out there. Kyle, I want to thank you for taking the time out of your day to sit down and chat with me about these new offerings that are going to be coming for model year 2027 PUKs. Great to see these additional portfolio ads coming year after year. So thank you again for doing this, Kyle.

Kyle: Yeah, thanks for having me, Tony.

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