Company takes a retrofit-first approach when developing autonomous equipment for the agricultural sector
JCA is best known for the engineering services it offers OEM companies to help develop unique agricultural machine applications, including machine control systems, smartphone and tablet apps, data management and communications, as well as autonomous machine systems.
Seth Crawford, general manager of the precision agriculture and digital division at Agco, he said the company is taking a retrofit-first approach when developing their precision ag and autonomous products.
“Farmers tell us they don’t want to have to buy a completely new fleet in order to enjoy the benefits of investing in precision ag. They want to be able to apply technology to their existing products,” Crawford said.
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He said about five percent of farmers buy new equipment each year, but a hundred percent of farmers want to make improvements to their operation.
“So, we think serving both the new equipment market with our traditional equipment brands and the retrofit market with our retrofit brand being Precision Planting that we have a tremendous opportunity to capture a large share of the total addressable market,” Crawford said.
He said roughly a year ago Agco began a series of acquisitions, starting with the Headsight that brought in harvesting capabilities and automation with front end equipment.
Agco then acquired Appareo Systems based in Fargo, North Dakota, and Creative Sites Media (CSM), which is a software and application house in Bloomington, Illinois.
Agco also made some minority investments in GreenEye Technology that has developed a see-and-spray system that can treat individual weeds in crop, and in Apex AI to help it build autonomous systems and equipment.
“All of this builds upon the Agco common electronics architecture, the Precision Planting acquisition and our deep dive into being the leader in the retrofit space,” Crawford said.
Agco embeds this foundational architecture in its own brands, including Challenger, Fendt, Massey Ferguson, and Valtra, but it is also working to have the electronics architecture compatible with other OEM equipment.
“The Apex AI investment really helps us create the foundational functional safety level and operating system that we need to take the next steps forward overall. In the guidance area, we believe that the JCA’s capabilities will greatly enhance where we are and where we’re going based on their experience in machine control with many OEMs,” Crawford said.
He said the JCA acquisition will help Agco advance its remote sensing and with data management capabilities.
“It’s not simply collecting data. It’s driving action down at the field level. JCA and Appareo are a big part of this,” Crawford said.
“We can’t get to autonomy without automating every task that a human does today in the machine and we’re well on that journey. Being able to drive autonomous tractors and autonomous operations in the field will be key over the long run. We believe JCA significantly enhances our capabilities.”
Darcy Cook is general manager of JCA Technologies, and he said JCA started 20 years ago with a focus on manufacturing wire harness and electronics, but over the past decade it enhanced its engineering capability and began to focus on working with OEM customers to build sophisticated information and control systems.
“We work with them right from the concept phase all the way through development, and then into mature production and support them through the life cycle of the product. We have a large number of different OEM customers focused on agriculture,” Cook said.
He said JCA uses an approach of engaging through the development cycle with platform technologies, that perform common functions, features and systems.
“We’ve refined and proven our technology stack to work across all these different applications and ultimately resulted in what I believe to be leading offering in autonomy in the market that’s focused on agriculture, for robust and scalable autonomy,” Cook said.
JCA will continue to serve its OEM customers, but with the acquisition by Agco it will also expand its focus to the retrofit market.
Cook said autonomy is very complex and JCA looks at it from a system point of view, and that a key part of its technology goes beyond the technology that goes into machines.
It also includes simulation systems that help to exercise use cases at a very fast rate, to prove out the technology and the integration of it all together.
“The mindset of the digital twin is really about simulation systems and exercising systems both in simulation and in the real world,” Cook said.
“That’s a key part of our workflow and a key part of our technology. So that’s only going to grow in a much more significant way, and we’ve already been working with the group in Marktoberdorf (Germany) on building out more of those advanced simulation systems as well.”
