Deere taps tractor-hailing tech in bid in Africa
February, 26th 2020
Kenya/JOHANNESBURG: It's ride-hailing, farm style. Deere & Co. is teaming up with the "Uber of tractors" in Africa and betting on a future where farmers summon machines with the touch of a button.
The world's leading farm equipment maker is outfitting its tractors with startup Hello Tractor's technology, which allows farmers to hail the machines via an app, monitors the vehicles' movements and transmits usage information such as fuel levels.
The aim is to help the U.S. company boost sales of it famous green and yellow John Deere tractors, a tough task in a continent with the world's highest poverty rate and the least mechanised agricultural sector.
Deere is currently testing the technology - a small black box fitted beneath dashboards - on around 400 tractors in Ghana and Kenya. It told Reuters it plans to roll out the devices across Africa in the second half of this year, offering it to all contractors who buy its equipment on the continent.
"We would like to see that every farmer has access to mechanisation," he told Reuters. "The gap that we've identified is, how do we connect small farmers with tractor owners?"
Deere declined to comment on the investment costs for the rollout. The risks are clear; there is no certainty of any measure of success in Africa, which accounts for a tiny fraction of its global sales at present.
Held back by low incomes, tiny landholdings as well as a lack of bank financing, tractor numbers have long been stagnant on the continent, even as much of the developing world has experienced a boom in mechanisation.
Deere thinks it can help on the financing front: it told Reuters it could pull data from the Hello Tractor platform that showed in precise detail how farmers were using its equipment. That information, it said, could be used by the farmers - who typically lack credit histories - to help secure bank loans.
Source: auto.economictimes.indiatimes.com