John Deere FurrowVision: Real-Time Planter Insights

Follow the Agriculture Technology Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and YouTube.   

You can find past podcast episodes and view show notes by visiting our podcast website.  

Have precision ag questions? We have the answers. Find a specific channel dedicated to answering your precision technology questions: Precision Ag Answers.       

Read the entire transcript from the latest episode.

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 talk with Stephen Schwartz and Jeff Spencer about John Deere FurrowVision. With that, let's dive into it. Like I said, we are going to be talking FurrowVision in this episode. I'm really excited to bring on these two gentlemen, Stephen and Jeff, with John Deere. But before we get started, why don't you guys introduce yourselves, tell us a little bit about who you are, where you come from, and how you got to where you are today. So Stephen, why don't you go first?

Stephen Schwartz: Thanks so much, Tony, for having us on. My name is Stephen Schwartz. I'm an agronomist and the product marketing manager for planters here at John Deere. Originally from Indiana, got my degrees from Purdue and then a master's degree from the University of Illinois in plant physiology and have been at Deere for several years now, working on our agronomy team, working to understand the agronomic outcomes that can provide the most value for farmers. And now I get the opportunity to work on some of the cutting edge planter technology we have. And FurrowVision is one of those awesome things that I'm excited to talk about.

Tony: Great. And Jeff, why don't you introduce yourself?

Jeff Spencer: Hey, Tony. Pleasure to be here. Like Stephen said, Jeff Spencer, technology product manager in our planting team. Been in the agricultural industry for about 20 years. Different roles, but I would say always kind of focused within technology. Grew up in the Midwest, kind of bouncing between Kansas and Missouri. Probably call home, maybe close to the St. Louis area. When I say I work as As a technology product manager with Deere, I would say my core focus is on automating certain components of the planter. And so using technology to make the life of our customers, operators, and planters a little bit easier and hope that we deliver a better quality job from the job of planting with that technology and with that automation.

Tony: It's awesome to hear both of your backgrounds and where you guys are working within the John Deere organization. Got the technology focus, we got the agronomy, we bring it all together and John Deere brings us products like FurrowVision. This is a product I'm very excited about being in the planter space myself. I've had the opportunity to get my hands or be around a couple of these systems and testing. So I'm really excited to hear what you guys have to say and where this is going to go into the future. But before we do that, why don't we just start out telling our listeners a little bit about, you know, what is FurrowVision? What is this system going to do for me?

Jeff: Yeah, when we think about products, we actually really like to start with the customer problem or the customer pain point. Because I think in our view, That's ultimately what delivering great products is about, is solving some really tough customer problems, in this case in the space of planting. And I would say when Stephen and I go out and talk with customers and dealers about the job of planting and ask about things where they need help, where they want to see John Deere bring a new innovation, three things tend to kind of surface to the top of the list. And that would be more consistently achieving seed depth or target seed depth, more consistently achieving high-quality furrows, and more consistently sort of getting clean furrows and doing that on each and every acre within their operation. And that's not to say that the modern planter is loaded with technology, but I would say being really close to this technology space and in particular in planting, in this particular area of depth and quality furrows and clean furrows, it's probably an area not just with Deere, but with an industry we probably underinvested in. So I think that's why it's an exciting space to hear from customers that those are some of the key challenges they face is this consistency within those areas and gives us a really cool problem to go after and solve. I mean, obviously today, the customer can go out and they can stop the planter, they can go dig, they can inspect furrows and look to see if they've hit the depth they're looking for, if they've got a good quality furrow and if they've cleaned it up well, if they're rope cleaners or trash workers. And so always kind of starting with that perspective of the problem and what we're trying to go after to solve. FurrowVision is actually our solution to that problem. And so we like to say we're literally shining a flashlight into the furrow.

And so what FurrowVision actually is from a hardware point of view, is it's a camera, an LED or a light in a laser. And this system is kind of positioned between gauge wheels and the closing wheels. And it lets us see the furrow forming in real time. With that camera, with that LED and that laser, we can characterize things like the quality of the furrow and see the depth of the furrow and really get a good picture for how we're operating the planter and how well we're achieving those three goals or those three problems that our customers are asking us to help them solve. So am I getting consistent depth, am I getting a good furrow, and am I getting a clean furrow?

Tony: There's a couple components to that. You talked about putting that in between the closing wheels and the gauge wheels. Does this go on every single row across the planter?

Jeff: When we've kind of done some analysis to look at, let's say, the variability across the planter and trying to optimize for the rate, cost, and value of this system, what we saw was an opportunity to basically break the planter into sections. So we do three per planter, left, middle, and right. And there's a specific row we would be assigned to based on the size of the planter that the customer is operating.

Tony: So when we do that, we put those three cameras across the planter, regardless of the size. What are the outcomes that the customer is going to see when utilizing it? You talked about consistent depth and some things around the furrow. How are they able to utilize FurrowVision in order to see those outcomes?

Stephen: FurrowVision is 3 cameras, right, spread across your planter, but there's more than that. And a lot of it comes down to the experience you have when you're sitting in the seat and looking at your display. So with FurrowVision, you will get residue detection, you will be able to look at your furrow and get depth readings, and you'll be able to see some differences in how your furrow forms as you plant a field or as you start the season or go throughout the rest of your planting season. So as we think about getting to more consistent depth, right, if you have the ability to monitor and look at your depth on every single acre, you're able to notice, hey, my opener blades are wearing down, and I may have lost a quarter inch of depth over the course of a long planting season. And you can make a depth adjustment so that you're actually getting to the right depth instead of shallowing up over time. That also happens on things like wear parts, or if you maybe have an older planter, we can put FurrowVision as a precision upgrade on older planters. And what we've found in working with customers is We've actually been able to identify some of those wear parts on planters through using FurrowVision and picking up the variability in depth that we wouldn't even have thought to check for maybe on that planter yet. So as we think about not just depth, but also residue, as you're planting, you're able to identify residue with FurrowVision and you can see where that residue might be getting hairpinned in the furrow, where it might be slowing too much past your row cleaners and getting into the trench, and those are going to cause negative outcomes for your seed. You can make adjustments proactively with your row cleaners to solve those problems, or we can do other things like understanding how management choices around your tillage practices or around even combine settings might be affecting the residue that's going to impact our planter the next year.

Tony: So now that we kind of have a general idea of the depth, monitoring depth, and one of the things you mentioned that I didn't even think of in the little bit I've been around FurrowVision is the wear parts. So over a long planting season, your discs wearing down, your gauge wheel arms getting wore out a little bit or whatever it may be, that can all affect the optimization or performance of the planter. And now what you're saying is we potentially have the ability to monitor some of that stuff with FurrowVision?

Stephen: Whenever we get more data on how our planter is performing, whether that's from SeedStar 5 taking us to better documentation of data or things like FurrowVision, giving you eyes in the furrow while you're sitting in the cab of your tractor, it's going to help us make better informed decisions all across the planting job step. And it really just comes back to better emergence. Better emergence, more uniform emergence is what's going to help us grow more bushels that are going to help our farmers' bottom lines.

Tony: So let's take all of that, the metrics we're able to bring in, the information we're able to see real time in the furrow. Today, the only way to monitor some of this stuff is to get out, dig, measure, all of that stuff. So we're bringing that into the cab. Let's talk about what capabilities this gives the operator today. Is it going to do anything for me or am I making the decisions? Talk about today's experience with FurrowVision.

Jeff: In cab, Tony, we'll produce is, we call it a depth metric and a residue metric. So when we say depth, we're going to measure, you know, the true V trench that gets created. Steven and I have referred it to as a furrow a couple times here. The true V trench, we're going to be able to measure from the bottom of the trench to what we call the shoulder. And that gives us the depth of the seed, how deep I'm placing the seed as I'm going across, going across the field and planting every acre in my operation. That gets reported on each of the three rows. So you'll get 3 depth metrics, one for each of the three rows. Then we create an average. So for simplicity, if we just want to be able to see the average depth across the planter, across those 3 rows, there's one number that's then provided, but you can see the individual rows for the three that we have on the planter. And then residue gets reported as a percent of residue in the furrow. So we kind of create, you know, much like you might see on a grain quality camera, for those that are familiar with our combines, you get these kind of highlights in purple as we're trying to highlight certain attributes of the grain as it's passing through the camera. With FurrowVision, we do that same thing, but we're highlighting the the residue. So we're highlighting in purple, being able to clearly demark where the residue is in the furrow. And that's used to then basically calculate the percent of residue in the furrow. Again, getting a number for each of the three rows and then an average across the planter.

And then we have a couple other really cool things. So what we call dirty lens detection. So one of the questions we always get asked as people hear about this product is, doesn't this thing get dirty? We're in the dirt, we're planting, right? And so actually, it's an interesting answer to start before I go to what that dirty limbs detection is. I'm wearing glasses, audience can't see me, but I wear glasses, right? And when I have little specks on my glasses, it actually doesn't impact my vision at all, right? I almost like see right through them. It's kind of that first part of isn't FurrowVision affected by dirt on the limbs? The answer is sort of. So like when I look through my glasses, I don't see that dust or that dirt or those smudges on my glasses. FurrowVision works in much the same way. It's able to kind of go through that and it is not impacted by it. But certainly if we go across a low spot in a field that's wet and there's a bunch of mud and it coats the camera and the lens. that's going to impact the ability of the system to see. So we're able to actually automatically detect that and alert the operator to a condition that they might need to stop and kind of wipe that lens off to get their readings and their metrics back.

And then the fourth thing, this might be, you know, one of the highlights that we've heard from customers as we've run it with customers probably the last three years doing some testing and some piloting of the product. We've actually covered about 250,000 acres in those three years. So it's a really impressive number that this product has been tested on already. But it's a real-time video feed in the cab. You're actually being able to see any of those three rows, pull up a video and actually watch the furrows forming in real time and being able to kind of see how the furrows being formed and structured based on how you have your row cleaner set, how you have your downforce set and all the things that are going to impact quality of your furrow.

The last piece, so you asked for the in-cab experience. The other piece of this is all those metrics are being off boarded, we call it, and showing up in ops center. So you can review this data after the fact, after you planting or after the season to kind of go and do some correlation between what kind of depth did I achieve that have more variability in my depth that impact my yield at the end of the season and kind of do some of these, some of these correlations. Is the system doing anything? And I think we'll get there a little bit later, but the first version of FurrowVision is really a detection system, a sensing system that we want to kind of create a foundation to be able to start to build some automation off of. But in this first iteration, we want to surround the operator with insights and information to be able to more intelligently adjust the planter on the go. So we, you know, we said the The state-of-the-art, at least for understanding how my furrow is and the depth of my furrow is to stop and dig. We're trying to change that state-of-the-art to be able to keep our operators in the cab, make these adjustments on the fly, and this powerful information we'll have access to will help them do that.

Tony: I think a couple things that really stood out to me there, Jeff, is 1, not only is this an in-cab operator experience of being able to watch, see how your planter's performing, see what that furrow looks like in real time, but you made the comment that we are sending some of these agronomic layers into the operations center, which to me, that allows us to go back and review and analyze maybe next year we can make adjustments or changes to what we're doing in certain areas of the field. So the capabilities of what we have today, bringing in that information and data, the operator making those adjustments, but we also have the ability to review that after post-season or when that field is done being planted. I think those are some really big things that key in on what the capabilities are today.

Jeff: We have actually a really great example of that, Tony, working with a customer over the last couple of seasons. The first year they ran FurrowVision, we went and reviewed some of their data in Ops Center, and we found something actually really, really interesting and really insightful. And that was, we're able to look at their depth map, and we're able to see in certain parts of the field, they're a little more shallow than they wanted to be. And so what we're able to do is go and overlay, do a comparison between depth and downforce. And what we saw was in these areas of the field where they were a little shallower than they wanted to be, so not achieving depth where they had set the planter at to be, they were downforce limited. And so they needed to increase the downforce in that particular spot on the field. Doing so the next year brought a much more consistent depth profile to that field. Just a spot in the field that was a little harder, they needed a little bit more force to get the planter to depth. So it's a great indication of what we're trying to do here, which is drive better outcomes with these kind of ground engaging components of the planter, getting the depth, getting the rate downpour settings on the go without having to stop and dig.

Stephen: I'll maybe share another example that we got from working with a customer this year. around residue. We see a lot of customers who are interested in cover crops. We're working with them a lot. One of their big challenges and a problem to solve is how do I get that residue out of the furrow so that I can have even emergence of corn and keep the seeds that I planted, right? And so this customer wanted to try different row cleaner blades to see which would work best in his green cover because he was planting green. And we were able to use FurrowVision to look at how much residue was in the furrow behind different types of row cleaners to help him make the choice for which one would be best for his farm operation. And it turns out the standard row cleaner that he was using actually was not the best choice for his farm, and he found a better option that removed 50% more residue out of the furrow as compared to what he was doing in the past. And so even though the system isn't taking an action today, the data insights that are coming off FurrowVision are really valuable to customers, making decisions, like Jeff said, for downforce and depth, as well as residue. And those, again, come back to better emergence, better stands, and better yields for farmers.

Tony: So both of you have already kind of mentioned this as we've talked through here in this episode. Let's kind of lay it out there. In the work that you guys have done and the customers that you've been testing with, what is FurrowVision allowing these customers to do that they weren't able to do prior to adding FurrowVision on their planter?

Stephen: I think about this from the lens of an agronomist, right? Every year we go out to the field and we start planting and we check behind the planter, maybe even the first field that we plant, and we make adjustments and we set the planter a certain way. And then we go because productivity is really important. And we got a plant, we got a lot of acres to cover. With FurrowVision, you have an agronomist with you in the furrow at all times. And so this gives customers the ability to make changes to those key planter settings of all those ground engaging components, like Jeff talked about, without having to get out of the cab, because you can see how much residue is in the furrow, how your depth is being set, how your furrow is being created. And that's going to give our customers better furrows in every field, and it's going to give them the confidence that what they're doing is right for those field conditions. I ride in the cab with a lot of customers in the spring, and Tony, I'm sure you do as well. And customers think they're doing the right thing. They're always wanting to make sure that they're giving their crop the best chance to succeed. And a lot of times that might take stopping and getting out and digging and evaluating. And we think FurrowVision can help give customers more access to the information that helps them make the best decisions to get better yields. I think that really is game-changing for a lot of customers who want to make better decisions, want to get better yields, and have better emergence, but there's more data that they need, and it's an eye in the furrow that customers have never seen before.

Tony: Having that confidence, that's one of the things that always gets me. Come the spring of the year, it's always the age-old question of, how much downforce do you think I should be running? Or where, what, to the point you made, Steven, about the customer testing different types of row cleaners, it's always a, where should I run those? Or how aggressive should they be? So I really like the take on, FurrowVision is giving that, giving us that eye in the furrow. It's giving us something that we have never been able to see without stopping the planter getting out and looking. And to me, there, we still, we still need to be ground truthing. We still need to be getting out looking and making sure everything's doing a good job. But one of the things that one of the customers that I got to work with testing FurrowVision, he had gained so much confidence in the system that he would get out and ground truth, maybe once throughout the morning, but then he would utilize FurrowVision to make adjustments on downforce and row cleaners throughout the rest of the day. So that speaks volumes to productivity and keeping that operator in the cab to make those adjustments. So it's really interesting to watch this evolve and grow into how we can utilize a technology like FurrowVision.

Stephen: I completely agree with that example you gave, Tony. We don't want to be telling customers, hey, you don't need to get out and dig ever again, because setting a plan to right is really, really important. And it's one of the core things that we do every spring. There is an opportunity to give customers confidence in the settings they're running, help them make those micro adjustments that we need to make because there are differences field to field, right? Every field is not the same. And as you progress from the first field you plant to the last field, there's going to be things that need to be set differently. And we're not saying that FurrowVision is here to remove all your planter settings, but it's giving you more information and confidence to make better decisions and helping you stay productive. And sometimes those things are in tension with one another, productivity and quality, but we're really trying to increase them both, improve your productivity and your quality for customers using FurrowVision.

Tony: And let's be honest here, I don't know about you guys, but when I'm in the planter and I see that rain cloud off in the distance, I'm probably not going to stop to get out, dig, and check. But if I've got FurrowVision on my planter, I can still make those adjustments without getting out of the cab and still get done before that rain cloud hits.

So when it comes to FurrowVision and all of the data, the information, the visualization that we get, I can't help but think this is opening the door to automation or moving forward into that world. What is FurrowVision going to deliver to us in the future that is going to make planter operation simplified?

Jeff: And this is where it gets really, really exciting, Tony. When we think about automation as John Deere, we tend to think in two distinct components we need. We need a sensing component and an acting component. So you often hear sense and act. But the great part about John Deere planters is we have the acting component mostly solved, right? So if we think about easy adjust row cleaners, I can adjust those from cab. If we think about IRHD and being able to make very precise adjustments to how I'm managing the downforce of my planter and how I'm operating the planter or being able to adjust closing system, the closing system from the cab. So you've got these great actuation or acting devices that we just needed to pair a sensor with. And so FurrowVision is our sensor to now go down this automation pathway where we're combining great sensing technology with great acting technology. And it's our goal with FurrowVision to effectively automate all of the ground engaging components of the planter and bring sort of continuous adjustment to the settings that we've been talking about here today, whether it be row cleaners, whether it be IRHD or our downpour system or closing. We see an opportunity here that FurrowVision can drive automation of those particular systems and subsystems within planting.

Tony: So let's go a little deeper on that. So you talk about that being able to make adjustments from in the cab. Now we have sensors. Let's talk about downforce automation and what that can potentially deliver us when that comes to market.

Stephen: Downforce automation is going to be something that we're launching from out of year 27. So all FurrowVision enabled planters starting in spring of 2027 will be able to run downforce automation. And I'll let Jeff maybe speak to a little bit more of what downforce automation is and how it works.

Jeff: Yeah, so Stephen and I spend a ton of time looking at planting data in particular, in this case, downforce data. And one of the interesting observations we see as we see kind of a mass of customer data and how customers are managing this within their operations is Customers, generally speaking, aren't changing downforce or what we know today as margin, as often as we think there's an opportunity to do. So Stephen talked a little bit earlier about the field to field variability, but there's even a ton of variability within a field, right? And so as we think about downforce and the ideal downforce setting within a field, there could be, for a highly variable field, there might be upwards of 10 to 20 different ideal settings. So what that would mean, as a planting customer today, I would have to know within a given field where a margin or downforce target might change for me to kind of go actively try and hit those numbers. That's exactly what we're trying to solve with automation. FurrowVision can help us detect where we might need a different amount of force applied into the ground, different downforce setting, a different margin. And we can see that and then actively adjust the IRHD system to achieve different downpour settings throughout the field. Ultimately optimizing the good seed to soil contact as we're putting the seed into the ground and making sure we're achieving consistent depth.

Tony: So that's one piece of the in-cab adjustments, adjustments that could be made by a sensor like FurrowVision. And Stephen, you kind of said it, you know, in 2027, FurrowVision planters will have the ability to do the downforce automation. What does the future look like in terms of, Jeff, you had mentioned row cleaners, the closing wheel assembly, things like that. From John Deere's eyes, what does that future look like continuing down this path of automation on a planter?

Stephen: Yeah, I think our goal is that customers can adjust their planter hands-free by 2030. And so that includes, like Jeff said, all of those ground engaging components, closing, downforce, depth, and our closing wheels all by 2030. We'd like to have those automated. There's a lot of opportunity in automating each of those different components of the planter to get better outcomes, better emergence, more uniformity to create yield. And that's what this all comes back to, again, I've said it multiple times today, is we want to take every opportunity we can to help our farmers get the best outcomes possible. And that's yield and that's emergence. And so by automating road cleaners, our downforce system, depth, and our closing wheels, we think we can create more uniform stands that lead to better results.

Tony: So now that we kind of know what FurrowVision is, what the capabilities are today, and what those capabilities will look like, 2027 and beyond, with the work you guys have done with this product, I want to know, I want each of you to tell me what is the one thing you are most excited about when it comes to the future of FurrowVision? Stephen, why don't you go first?

Stephen: For me, it's about simplifying all the complicated things when it comes to setting a planter and making that easy for farmers. I go around with a lot of customers in the spring and plant and help them plant, and there is so much consternation and confusion and heartache and headache when it comes to setting a planter right. We do a lot of education about it. All the universities do education about it, and we're all trying to learn and get better, right? That's what we want as farmers is to do the best that we can, and everyone is trying their best. And I think with automation and FurrowVision, I'm really, really excited to make it easy. I have seen a lot of people set planters and try to set planters or even I'll walk a field after a planter's gone through and you can tell something went wrong. And farmers don't have unlimited opportunities, right? We only have maybe 30 or 40 planting seasons to get it right. And so I'm just excited to try to optimize every single season that our farmers have to grow the best crops possible and be as profitable as they can be. And I think we can do that with FurrowVision and automation.

Tony: Yeah, that said, I really like that answer because it takes a lot of the guesswork out of it. We utilize the data. We utilize the sensors and we can simplify some of these operations. And the other thing is, you come across an issue with a planter, you don’t know it until emergence or until it's too late. So if we can take away some of that unknown or some of the worry and stress on operating those planters, it's going to be a huge thing. Jeff, what about you? What are you most excited about when it comes to the future of FurrowVision?

Jeff: Yeah, I think I'm excited about bringing, you know, all these components that we've talked about here today, we call them the ground engaging components, to almost a level of parity to the way I think about our seed delivery system, right? So if you think about our seed delivery system, we are so precisely metering and delivering a seed to the furrow. John Deere has the, you know, best planter in the world with our high-speed exact emerge planter. And bringing that same level of precision to row cleaning and into downforce, into depth and into closing, I think that's super exciting. We're starting to think about treating each seed, giving it the environment it needs to be successful, giving it the right depth, cleaning the furrow, giving it the right furrow structure, the right furrow density. And to me, that's the exciting piece is we're now bringing these two really important pieces of the planter, get the seed there and get the seed in the environment that's going to make it successful to kind of that same level of parity of being able to bring precision and drive better outcomes for our customers.

Tony: Yeah, I would have to agree and I will echo your statement on the fact that John Deere has the best planter on the market with the ExactEmerge planter. So now to fine tune the downforce, the row cleaners, everything else and get it to that high performance application like the placement of the seed with that brush belt delivery system, that is an awesome thing to look forward to. So very, very excited to get FurrowVision out there into the hands of customers. Looking forward to 2027, getting downforce automation in the cabs of those tractors and on those planters. So very excited to get to that point. Now, if somebody is interested, they want to learn more about FurrowVision or some of the capabilities for, 2026 here, the crop season that we are nearing, where can they go? Who can they talk to learn more about these products?

Stephen: The best place to go first is Deere.com. There's going to be a lot of materials on Deere.com about FurrowVision and downforce automation as we start to talk about it more this year. And the other great place to go is your local John Deere dealer. They will be outfitted with all of the data and local trial results and resources that we've been working on for the last several years to help understand what's the value of each of these things in your backyard. So go to Deere.com, learn more about FurrowVision and Downforce Automation. And also go talk to your local John Deere dealer to hear how the local results can impact your farm directly.

Tony: I just want to thank you guys for taking the time out of your day to sit down and chat with me. Like I said at the beginning of the show here, I am very excited about this product. This is truly going to open the door to automation and a higher performing planter all around. So it's a very exciting topic and I appreciate your guys' time to chat with me here today.

Stephen: Thanks, Tony, and really appreciate your passion for planters and hopefully we'll get to spend some time with you this spring. Seeing FurrowVision run in the field.

Jeff: Likewise, Tony. It was a lot of fun.

Tony: Please take a moment to subscribe to this podcast if you haven’t already. You can find the show on many podcasting platforms like Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube and many others.   

While you’re there, drop us a review — we’d love to hear what you think about the show.   

And finally, make sure to follow John Deere and RDO Equipment Co. on Facebook, Instagram and X (formerly Twitter), and catch all of our latest videos on YouTube.