John Deere has acquired GUSS Automation, a high-value crop autonomy company. John Deere and GUSS have collaborated on a joint venture since 2022.
GUSS, founded by Dave Crinklaw in 2018, manufactures autonomous sprayers. These sprayers, supervised by a single operator, use GPS, LiDAR and proprietary software to navigate through orchards and vineyards to precisely spray the crops. A single operator can manage up to eight machines at once.
John Deere says more than 250 GUSS machines are deployed globally and have sprayed up to 2.6 million acres for more than 500,000 hours.
Julien Le Vely, director of production systems in high-value and small-acre crops at John Deere, says that while the company has its initial roots in almond orchards, GUSS has been deployed in pistachio, apple and citrus orchards as well as vineyards.
“It’s an opportunity for us to grow further going forward, whether it’s in North America or in Europe or in Australia or in Argentina,” he says of the acquisition. “One of the things that the deal does is it allows us to provide access to our channel globally to GUSS and to distribute the product in an efficient way.”
Future plans
Le Vely says John Deere plans to expand GUSS into additional global markets, building on its presence in Europe, Australia and North America. He identifies fast-growing regions such as South America and Latin America as priorities for future expansion.
An example, Le Vely says, is in citrus. While GUSS currently runs in the largest citrus grower in the U.S., with year-round production in Brazil, he sees a strong opportunity for expansion within that country.
“If you look at an orchard here in North America, you’re looking at seven, eight or nine passes a year [of a sprayer in an orchard],” he says, noting even that can be a struggle for growers to find labor for. “If you look at a citrus orchard in Brazil, you look at 50 passes a year.”
Another crop of note, Le Vely says, for the future of GUSS is high-density olive orchards in Europe. He says European olive growers have expressed interest in the GUSS autonomous sprayer.
“Fundamentally, we still believe that there’s a ton of potential in the crops we currently do,” he says. “Just do it broader, bigger, with higher penetration as a complementary solution to the other tractor sprayers — solutions that they may have on the farm already, but also new crops that we believe we have the ability to master and help farmers with their labor challenges.”
GUSS Name Stays
Le Vely says this will help GUSS — which will retain its brand, employees and manufacturing facility in Kingsburg, Calif. — access more capital and continue to fuel innovation.
“We very much want to maintain the name, the spirit and what GUSS has meant to the people who have trusted it and developed it,” he says. “We don’t intend to change any of that, but we do intend to bring some of the things that John Deere has had a good ability to do: scaling on the manufacturing side, the supply base, the product support.”
Le Vely says that while the GUSS name is well known in California, being distributed through John Deere will help boost the sprayer’s profile in other parts of the country and world.
“I think us coming in and now having GUSS as part of John Deere, they understand that when John Deere says something and commits to something, we usually deliver,” he says. “And if they’re not satisfied, we’ll continue to work with them until we get there. It gives them a lot of confidence to adopt that technology, because they know that we will stand by it.”
Le Vely says technology in general has faced some struggles to achieve broad adoption, stemming from growers’ reluctance to adopt new practices and technology. But, again, he says he’s optimistic that connecting the John Deere name with GUSS will help growers gain more confidence in making the leap to integrating new technology with John Deere’s other integrations.
“We have a lot of other things in the portfolio and technology that can give them more confidence, like connecting machines — them knowing where their machines might be in the field and having the ability to document, ‘Have I sprayed this row or have I not?’” he says. “For their tractor and sprayer combos, us being able to give them that confidence. For the people that may not be quite ready to jump to autonomy, but then they can start seeing and learning and getting into a comfort zone that will, over time, translate to them being more ready for autonomy on a faster pace.”
