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John Deere’s acquisition of Sentera will allow more interconnectivity between the two companies’ systems for customers.
In late May, John Deere announced that it had acquired Sentera, a leading provider of remote imagery solutions for agriculture headquartered in St. Paul, MN. According to the company, this acquisition advances the capabilities of John Deere’s existing technology offerings, providing farmers and ag service providers with a more comprehensive set of tools to generate and use data to make decisions.
“We’re excited to add Sentera’s talented team to our organization and integrate their advanced solutions into the suite of John Deere tools that help farmers do more with less,” said Chris Winkler, Director of Digital Software and Solutions at John Deere. “Combining Sentera’s imagery capabilities with the John Deere Operations Center will enable farmers and trusted advisors to seamlessly gather and integrate agronomic data, understand real-time conditions, and turn data into insights that drive decisions in the field throughout the growing season.”
One component of this acquisition is SMARTSCRIPT Weeds, the company’s customized herbicide prescription. In operation, SMARTSCRIPT drones equipped with Sentera technology fly over fields at high speeds and generate high-resolution images. These images are processed with Sentera’s FieldAgent application to identify the exact location of specific weeds and generate a weed map. This map becomes a targeted prescription for how much product a customer needs to load into their sprayer. Once the prescription is generated, it can be wirelessly sent to compatible equipment through the John Deere Operations Center. This offers new precision capabilities to a broad range of customers while also complementing more advanced precision ag technologies, including See & Spray.
Technology Advancements
According to Joe Liefer, Global Technology Marketing Lead at John Deere, the two companies have worked together since 2016. However, recent advances in the technology – particularly the aerial imaging hardware and accompanying software – made the acquisition of Sentera timely.
“Sentara’s drones now have the capability to fly higher with higher resolution imagery that provides a millimeter to a millimeter and a half accuracy on the ground,” says Liefer. “Also, instead of uploading gigabytes of data to the cloud, SMARTSCRIPT can use an industrial laptop to process the information on the edge of a field. Utilizing John Deere Operations Center, customers can create a Work Plan, send it to their existing fleet of sprayers and execute whatever job they are recommending needs to be done.”
Read more at CropLife.
