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Case IH and Raven Industries debuted an autonomous spreader Aug. 30 at the 2022 Farm Progress Show. The Case IH Trident 5550 applicator with Raven Autonomy combines driverless technology with an agronomically designed spreading platform.

In this episode of the podcast, you’ll hear leaders at Case IH and Raven talk about the potential of the autonomous spreader and get a customer perspective on the new technology from a Canadian farmer who’s currently using it.

Watch a video of the spreader demo at Farm Progress.

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Autonomy, Precision Ag Everywhere at Farm Progress Show

Full Transcript

Michaela Paukner:

Welcome to the Precision Farming Dealer podcast. I'm Michaela Paukner, managing editor at Precision Farming Dealer. Case IH and Raven Industries debuted an autonomous spreader at the 2022 Farm Progress Show at the end of August.

In today's episode of the podcast, you'll hear leaders at Case IH and Raven talk about the potential of the driverless Trident 5550 applicator and get a customer perspective from a Canadian farmer who's currently using it in his operation. Here's Case IH's Chris Dempsey to introduce us to the new technology.

Chris Dempsey:

I'm Chris Dempsey, I'm the Global Director of Case IH Precision Technology. So what we introduce today is the Trident 5550 applicator with Raven Autonomy, which is the industry's first autonomous applicator spreader. Number one, I have to mention the fact that what the team did here post-acquisition of Raven, the collaboration of the two teams, to deliver a product in eight months is incredible. So, Raven and Case IH have worked together in some capacity for the better part of two decades. So what farmers need to know here is what they see with Trident is just the beginning. We're building a foundational base that's going to allow us to scale autonomy across all of our platforms.

Michaela Paukner:

And why did you guys decide to automate a spreader?

Chris Dempsey:

If you look at the core competency of Raven and Case IH, with Raven being application control tech and Case IH being proven iron, it was an obvious place for us to start to leverage the two companies' individual core competencies and get something in the market quick and get customer feedback based on how they feel about it.

Michaela Paukner:

What is your timeline for rolling this out?

Chris Dempsey:

Yeah, so this is a unveiling. We are going to spend the rest of 2022 and '23 doing some testing with some targeted customers. Based on testing, based on feedback, we'll make some decisions in '23 about what a commercial available option looks like.

So the focus right now with the spreader, at least at this point, has been from an agronomic practices standpoint, broadacre. Just because there's a lot of spreading applications in broadacre markets that use the Trident or the combo unit. From a scalability perspective, we can apply it to multiple markets, but again, right now we're focusing on the Western United States, Western Canada broadacre applications, and pre- and post-emergence row crop applications.

Michaela Paukner:

Okay. And then at this point, what would you want dealers to know about the new spreader?

Chris Dempsey:

One of the really, really important, often overlooked elements of autonomy is the impact that it has on our dealers. Another reason we chose to automate the Trident first is because from a volume standpoint, we don't see as many Tridents as we see tractors and combines, right? So it allows us to learn a little bit with autonomy, help our dealers understand the changes that they need to make, where we collectively need to partner and make some changes, to ultimately scale to a point of large scale autonomy adoption across multiple platforms.

Michaela Paukner:

Next up is Ben Voss, Raven's Director of Sales, to talk about why the companies decided to tackle autonomous spreading.

Ben Voss:

My name is Ben Voss. I'm the director of sales at Raven, based in Sioux Falls, but I'm a farmer as well. And I can tell you I'm incredibly excited about this. I work here because autonomy is going to change farming, for me. We're literally just a few months into this partnership between our brands, Case IH and Raven. We've been able to bring a product out in front of you today and that, just to see the crowd and see all the excitement building is outstanding, so [inaudible 00:03:47].

One of the things that makes us special is that we listen to the customer very, very carefully and we engage with them, and we do a lot of research into deciding what we're going to do and how we're going to bring the products out. We talked to 400 or 500 customers and they told us spreading was very important. They also said that they're struggling with labor and they're trying to find more efficiency with the machines. And I can tell you even, as a farmer myself, it is hard to find labor. So we know that this is a front and center issue for all of our partners in agriculture. So we're looking forward to sharing this with you today to see how this is going to really change farming.

Speaker 4:

When CNH acquired Raven back in November of 2021, we knew it was going to be a game changer for Case IH and CNH as a whole. We have the potential with co-creating autonomous solutions that's never been higher. We also have the opportunity to make a global impact, no greater. When CNH and Case IH came together and really with Raven's autonomy, we had one mission in mind. It's really the rapid integration of this technology, of autonomous solutions, and to bring to the marketplace.

We really spent a lot of time with one thing in mind, is our customer and our customers' focus. So, we pride ourselves as Case IH and Raven to really breathe customer-centric. We want to understand our customer needs, their wants, their challenges, as been alluded to. And you're going to hear first hand from a customer that had experience operating this machine on their own farm operation. That's what at Case IH and Raven Autonomy... We believe it's grounded for the farmer and customer-centric focus.

Ben Voss:

I'm just building up on what he said. The Trident is, for us, the next opportunity to put autonomy in the hands of customers, and we've been doing that. Until today, nobody knew about it. But ultimately, most of our partners in both ag retail and custom applicators and growers, they've been helping us develop this product very, very quickly. Trident is a very universal platform that offers a lot of advantages. Being able to drive it manned or unmanned is a huge step for us and the economy. We can also operate it field-side, you can operate it as supervised autonomy. All of that you can... For me though, being able to get something moving and in the market very quickly.

Michaela Paukner:

Before you hear from the customer Ben mentioned, I just want to give you a quick reminder to nominate a dealer for the Precision Farming Dealer 2023 Most Valuable Dealership award. Dealers, manufacturers and others are invited to participate by nominating top precision farming dealers from across North America. Go to precisionfarmingdealer.com/mvd to nominate a dealer for our 2023 MVD award. Now, here's Brady Fahlman talking about his experience using the autonomous Trident spreader.

Brady Fahlman:

My name is Brady Fahlman. I am the fifth generation of my family farm located up in Saskatchewan, Canada. We farm about 10,000 acres. We grow mostly canola, spring wheat, yellow peas, red lentils. We've run Case equipment forever, everything from quadtracs to [inaudible 00:07:15] to combines. So we've always been red. We had a great deal of support from Davidson.

So between dad and I, we have two full-time hired guys. Nolan, who's been with us for nine years and Kelly, who started with us this summer. And then during seeding and harvest we bring in two operators during the busy times. One of them is my brother and one of them is my uncle Ted. That's how we get through those months.

Speaker 6:

Great. And so you're taking your 10,000 acre farm and you want to expand to 13,000 and that's fantastic, but you want to try to do that with the existing labor force. So why did you reach out to us when you were interested in autonomy? What was driving that?

Brady Fahlman:

So we've talked about autonomy, sitting around the shop, for a long time and excited for when it got here, what it could do for us and how we can use it to make our farm more efficient and better. So for us, working in tight time windows, weather dictates everything. Labor's not the easiest to find. So we want to do the best job that we can every pass, every operation that we do, and autonomy is one thing that's going to allow us to do that. More often than not, in those tight time windows, we don't get all the tasks done that we want to get done. Some stuff gets pushed off. So if we can get guys out [inaudible 00:08:36], multitasking, that's really going to help our efficiency, and help us improve our farm.

Speaker 6:

You got a Trident this year and you hadn't had a Trident before but you got the Trident, and tell us a little bit about what you got done with it. How did it go?

Brady Fahlman:

Yeah, so we got the Trident. It showed up the end of May. We used it for 2000 acres of in crop fertilizing, doing some top dressing. It went fairly smooth. We had a few hiccups off the start, it's a learning curve. It's the first time we had gotten into that technology and our first try at it. So by the end of the 2000 acres, we did have a day where we got up to 400 acres. So we started to see that we can do it, it's just a learning curve and takes a little bit to get used to, so... I'm excited to get into our full spreading and really [inaudible 00:09:31].

Speaker 6:

Maybe explain a little bit how your whole farm is going to have to evolve now if you want to implement autonomy.

Brady Fahlman:

So our farm? Yeah. Well, we're going to have to change operationally, logistically, stuff is going to have to be adjusted to make this work for us. There's a lot more technology, there's a lot more field mapping, a lot more data to handle. So, one thing we... I touched on Kelly starting with us this summer. His background is in precision A and more about passion for technology. So he brings that side of it for us and I think that's going to be really important to handle everything, and not only from the autonomy side, but all the data that we have as farmers. We need to get that into a place so we can actually use it to make management decisions. So having a full-time precision A guy on our staff, I think is really important for us going forward.

Michaela Paukner:

I had more questions for Ben and Brady after their presentations and they gave me a couple minutes of time to elaborate on the learning curve in dealership impact of the new technology. Here they are, once again.

In terms of the learning curve, what did you have to get used to?

Brady Fahlman:

So there's just new software. The Raven Viper 4 monitors that are in there, we're already used to. We run those in our other equipment. So mostly the GCS and the new software there. And then just how it's going to fit into our operation. We're going to have to change a few things logistically, how we load it, stuff like that. But that's kind of the biggest learning curve for us, so...

Ben Voss:

We have an onboarding program that helps farmers and other operators learn all the software tools. And it comes down to even a lot of logistics, like getting your boundaries of your field set and learning how to initiate a mission, maintain connectivity. You have all those things have to be tested and you have to be pretty knowledgeable on technology to get that set up.

Michaela Paukner:

And as a farmer, what would say is some of your biggest pain points when it comes to precision technology?

Brady Fahlman:

Probably our biggest is just there's so much data, there's so much stuff that we get constantly to us. To get it all organized and actually use it to make a real management decision, I think that's, just getting it organized is our biggest pain point. So I tried to solve that. We're working on that by hiring a precision guy and hopefully that'll help us really focus on precision ag in the future.

Speaker 4:

And then from Raven's perspective and for Raven dealers, what can they be doing to help address that organizationally?

Ben Voss:

Today, a lot of Raven dealers are very proficient in Raven technology, and the good news is that a lot of the autonomy technology is based upon Raven's core offering, where there's a lot of new features that go with it. So, our encouragement to our dealers is to engage with us just like they always have. Take the training, be involved in all the demos, get a full understanding of what's happening with this as the product is evolving.

The other thing we talk a lot about is that everybody, in terms of customers, has a different need. So it's not like everybody wants the exact same autonomy solution. So we talk about something called the path to autonomy, which is where there are different stages of readiness and abilities, and we encourage dealers and customers to assess themselves and see what stage are they at and are they ready for advanced or intermediate or beginner, like that's sort of how to think of it. And that layering in of the new, more and more technology, comes with time and comfort. When Brady contacted us and we went through an evaluation, we'll assess the customer circumstances and make a determination whether or not they're going to be qualified or are the right partner to work with on a situation like this. So, it's a development partnership with customers. We want to make these machines available to them.

Michaela Paukner:

When it's case by case and you're working with individual customers, are they going directly to you or are they going through dealers?

Ben Voss:

Both. So we get contacted by... So like in Brady's case, he reached out directly to us through our website, actually, which is a great way to engage with us. So I encourage all customers to do that. But then we involved the dealer. So we always involve our dealers, they're partners in the whole process. So the dealer was involved in not only understanding Brady's needs, because they support the technology that he's using on the rest of his farming operations. So the dealers are learning this just as much as the end users are learning this, right? So it's a full collaboration, but for a lot of the support and a lot of the in-field training, we're doing that directly until we do a full commercial launch.

Michaela Paukner:

And then I know you mentioned that you're hiring on someone for the time to do precision stuff. How was that going to impact your operation?

Brady Fahlman:

I think for us, that was a hole that needed to be filled. I think every individual farm is going to be a little bit different, but I do think there's only so much time, and to do all the precision and handle all that data properly, it takes a lot of time. So I think it's really going to be a big asset going forward and really help us continue to improve or progress our farms.

Michaela Paukner:

Thanks to Chris Dempsey, Ben Voss and Brady Fahlman for today's conversation. We have a link to a video of the autonomous applicator demo from the Farm Progress Show, along with more info about the technology, in the web article for this podcast. You'll also find the full transcript of this episode there too. From all of us here at Precision Farming Dealer, I'm Michaela Paukner. Thanks for listening.