YouSaid · the spoken record

Jahmy Hindman

lines on the record: 76
first: 2021-06-15
most recent: 2021-06-15
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“It's a great question. I think it's most efficient when we think of it collectively as a system. It doesn't have to be that way. And one of the differences I would say to an Apple comparison would be the life of the product, the iron product in our case, the tractor or the combine is measured in decades, right? It may be in service for a very long time. And so we have to take that into account as we think about the technology apps that we put on top of it, right? Which have a much shorter shelf life. They're two, three, four, five years, and then they're obsolete and the next best thing has come along. And so we have to think about the discontinuity that occurs between product life cycles as a consequence of that. I do think it's most efficient to think of it all together. It isn't always necessarily that way. There are lots of farmers that run multicolored fleets. It's not deer only, right?”
2021-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · John Deere CTO Jahmy Hindman on farming, data, and fixing the tractors of the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's got to run 14, 15, 16 hours per day. It's got a very short window to run in. You can't take all day to charge it, those sorts of problems are not insurmountable. They're just not solved by anything that's on the roadmap today from a lithium ion perspective anyway.”
2021-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · John Deere CTO Jahmy Hindman on farming, data, and fixing the tractors of the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You got to be interested in EVs right now. And the answer is yes, like whether it's a tractor, whether it's some other product in our product line, alternative forms of propulsion forms of power are definitely something that we're thinking about. We've done it in the past with, I would say, hybrid solutions like a diesel engine driving an electric generator and then the rest of the machine being electrified from a propulsion perspective. But we're just getting to the point now where battery technology, lithium-ion technology is powered dense enough for us to see it starting to creep in to our portfolio, probably from the bottom up, you know, lower power density applications first before it gets into some of the very large production ag equipment that we've talked about today.”
2021-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · John Deere CTO Jahmy Hindman on farming, data, and fixing the tractors of the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think the data will eventually couldn't predict when, but I think that the data will eventually be rich enough for insights to be drawn from it. It's just not there yet.”
2021-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · John Deere CTO Jahmy Hindman on farming, data, and fixing the tractors of the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But it's not rich enough across the global agricultural footprint for us to be able to make any sort of statements about how climate change is impacting it right now.”
2021-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · John Deere CTO Jahmy Hindman on farming, data, and fixing the tractors of the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's a great question. The reality is for us that we're sort of hindered in answering that question by the recency of the data. So we have broad scale data acquisition from production agriculture has really only a five to 10 year old phenomenon, right? And so the data sets are getting richer. They're getting better. We have the opportunity to see trends in that data across the data sets that exist today. But I think it's too early. I don't think the data is mature enough yet for us to be able to draw any conclusions from a climate change perspective with respect to the data that we have. The other thing that I'll add is that the data intensity is not universal across the globe, right? So if you think of climate change and global perspective, we've got a lot of data for North America, a fair amount of data that gets taken by growers in Europe, a little bit in South America.”
2021-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · John Deere CTO Jahmy Hindman on farming, data, and fixing the tractors of the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The data from our perspective, it's the farmer's data, right? They're the ones who are controlling the access to it. So if they want to share their data with someone, they have that ability to do it. And they do today, right? They'll share their yield map with whoever their local seed salesman is, right? And try to optimize the seed variety for the next planting season in the spring. And so that data exists. It's not ours, so we're not at liberty to share it with seed companies, and we don't. It has to come through the grower because it's their productivity data that they're the ones that have the opportunity to share it. We don't.”
2021-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · John Deere CTO Jahmy Hindman on farming, data, and fixing the tractors of the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Time different sensors are being applied. We can measure different things. You know, there's unique pieces of information that are coming in and routinely building to this overall ecosystems of data that they have at their disposal.”
2021-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · John Deere CTO Jahmy Hindman on farming, data, and fixing the tractors of the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, they certainly can export the data in form factors that are convenient for them. And they do. They'll spreadsheet math is still routinely done on the farm and they can utilize a spreadsheet to do some basic data analytics if they want. I would tell you, though, that what's happening is that the amount of data that is being collected and curated and made available to them to draw insights from is so massive. While you can still use spreadsheets to manipulate some of it, it's just not tractable in all cases. And so that's why we're building functionality into things like the operations center to help do data analytics and serve up insights to growers. It's their data. They can choose to look at the insights or not. But we can serve those insights up to them because the data and analysis part of this problem is becoming significantly larger because the data sets are so complex and large. Not to mention the fact that you've got more data coming in all the time.”
2021-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · John Deere CTO Jahmy Hindman on farming, data, and fixing the tractors of the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Certainly, in terms of service agreement, our position is pretty simple. It's the farmers' data, they control it. So if they want to share it through an API with somebody that is a trusted advisor from their perspective, they have the right to do that.”
2021-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · John Deere CTO Jahmy Hindman on farming, data, and fixing the tractors of the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Piece of equipment. And so it's happening seamlessly for that operator. And that's a benefit because they can act on it then in more near real time as opposed to having to wait for somebody to upload data at some point in the future.”
2021-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · John Deere CTO Jahmy Hindman on farming, data, and fixing the tractors of the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, great question. So I would say a significant amount of that data is collected on the fly while the machines are in the field and it's collected in the case of deer machines by deer equipment running through the field. There are other companies that create the data and they can be imported into things like the deer operations center so that you have the data from whatever source that you wanted to collect it. I think the important thing there is historically it's been more difficult to get the data off the machine because of connectivity limitations into a database that you can actually do something with it. Today the disproportionate number of machines in large agriculture are connected. They're connected through terrestrial cell networks, they're streaming data bidirectionally to the cloud and back from the cloud. And so that data connectivity infrastructure that's been built out over the last decade has really enabled two-way communication and has taken sort of the friction out of getting the data off of a mobile.”
2021-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · John Deere CTO Jahmy Hindman on farming, data, and fixing the tractors of the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“From the yield map and the data in real time that they're collecting with the tractor to modify things like seeding rate and modify things like fertilizer rate and all of those things in order to make sure that they're minimizing the inputs to the operation while at the same time working to maximize the output. And that data then is going into the cloud and they're referencing it, that track, for example, that the tractor and the planter took through the field is being used to inform the sprayer when the sprayer goes into the field after emergence and the crops come out of the ground. It's being used to inform that sprayer what the optimal path is to drive through the field in order to spray only what needs to be sprayed and no more to damage the crop, the least amount possible, all in an effort to optimize that productivity at the end of the year to make that yield map that is the scorecard, the report card at the end of the year for the farmer to make that turn out to have a better grade.”
2021-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · John Deere CTO Jahmy Hindman on farming, data, and fixing the tractors of the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And understand what changes they should make in the next season that might optimize that yield even further, right? They might have areas within the field that they go into and know they need to change seeding density or they need to change crop type or they need to change how much nutrients they provide in the next season. And all of those decisions are going through their head because they got to order seed in December. They have to order their nutrients in late winter. They're making those plans based upon that initial data set of harvest information. And then they get into the field in the spring, you know, to your point with a tractor and a planter. And that tractor and planter are taking the prescription that the farmer developed with the yield data that they took from the previous harvest. And they're using that prescription to apply changes to that field in real time as they're going through the field with the existing data.”
2021-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · John Deere CTO Jahmy Hindman on farming, data, and fixing the tractors of the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I love this question. I'm going to spin it a little bit and not start with planting. I'm going to tell you that the next season for a farmer actually starts at harvest of the previous season, right? And that's where the data thread for the next season actually starts. And it starts when that combine is in the field harvesting whatever it is, corn, soybeans, cotton, you know, whatever. And the farmer is creating while they're running the combine through the field, a data set that we call a yield map. It is a geospatially referenced because these combines are running through the field on satellite guidance, right? We know where they're at any point in time, latitude, longitude, and we know how much they're harvesting at that point in time. And so we create this three-dimensional map that is the yield across whatever field they happen to be in. That data is the inception for a winter's worth of work in the northern hemisphere that a farmer goes through to assess their yield.”
2021-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · John Deere CTO Jahmy Hindman on farming, data, and fixing the tractors of the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, you know, it's a different set of problems for sure and more complicated for geopolitical reasons in the case of China, as you mentioned. Our effort has been, let's take security as an example. We have gone through, I would say, the change that many technology companies have had to go through in the space of security where it's no longer bolted on at the end. It's built in from the ground up. So it's the security by design approach. We've got folks embedded in development organizations across the company that do nothing every day other than get up and think about how to make the product more secure, make the data sets more secure, make sure that the data is being used for its intended purposes and only those. And that's a new skill, right? That's a skill that we didn't have in the organization 20 years ago necessarily that we've had to create and hire the necessary talent in order to develop that skill set within the company.”
2021-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · John Deere CTO Jahmy Hindman on farming, data, and fixing the tractors of the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's no doubt. We're having to think about things like security of data as an example that previously 30 years ago was not necessarily a topic of conversation. We didn't have competency in it. We had to become competent in areas like that because of exactly the point you're making, that the product has become more computer-like than conventional tractor-like over time.”
2021-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · John Deere CTO Jahmy Hindman on farming, data, and fixing the tractors of the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the reasons we're always debating what a computer is and isn't is that once you describe something as a computer, you inherit a bunch of expectations about how computers work, you inherit a bunch of problems about how computers work and don't work. You inherit a bunch of control, right? API access is a way of exercising control over an ecosystem or an economy. Have you shifted the way that John Deere thinks about its products in terms of, okay, we've got a bunch of new abilities now because we've computerized so much of a tractor, but we've also got a bunch more responsibility because we have a bunch more control.”
2021-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · John Deere CTO Jahmy Hindman on farming, data, and fixing the tractors of the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so we do a significant amount of that work internally. It might surprise you. We have more software development engineers today with Indir than we have mechanical design engineers. That's kind of mind-blowing for a company that's 184 years old and has been steeped in mechanical product development. But that's the case. We do nearly all of our own internal app development.”
2021-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · John Deere CTO Jahmy Hindman on farming, data, and fixing the tractors of the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How much of that is in house at John Deere? How big is the team that is building your mobile apps? Is that something outsourced? Is that something you have internally? How have you structured the company to enable this kind of work?”
2021-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · John Deere CTO Jahmy Hindman on farming, data, and fixing the tractors of the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They absolutely are. I mean, that's what they've become over time is, you know, I would call them mobile sensor suites that have computational capability, not only on board, but to your point, off board as well. So they're continuously streaming data from whatever it is. Let's say the tractor and the planter to the cloud. We're doing computational work on that data in the cloud and then serving that information, those insights up to farmers, for example, either on their desktop computer or on a mobile handheld device or something like that. As much as they are doing productive work in the field, planting is an example, there are also data acquisition and computational devices.”
2021-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · John Deere CTO Jahmy Hindman on farming, data, and fixing the tractors of the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For sure. We've got a centrally organized technology stack organization. We call it the intelligence solutions group. And its job is really to do exactly that. It's to make sure that we're developing technologies that can scale across the complete organization, across those combines you referenced and the tractors and the sprayers and the construction products, et cetera, and deploy that technology as quickly as possible.”
2021-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · John Deere CTO Jahmy Hindman on farming, data, and fixing the tractors of the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You say technology solutions, I think one of the reasons I was very excited to have you on Decoder is there's a lot of computer solutions in there. There's a lot of hardware, software services that I think of as sort of traditional computer company problems. Do you also oversee the portfolio of technologies that just make combines more efficient at being combines that make tractor wheels move faster?”
2021-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · John Deere CTO Jahmy Hindman on farming, data, and fixing the tractors of the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's a great question. I'll try to keep it short. So the chief technology officer, my role right now in Eli is really to try to set the strategic direction from a technology perspective for the company across both our agricultural products as well as our construction forestry and road building products. So it's a cool job. I get to look out five, 10, 15, 20 years into the future and try to make sure that we're putting into place the pieces that we need in order to have the technology solutions that are going to be important for our customers in the future.”
2021-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · John Deere CTO Jahmy Hindman on farming, data, and fixing the tractors of the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“John Deere is famously a tractor company. I think everybody knows the logo, they know the green. You make a lot of equipment for farmers, for construction sites, that sort of thing. Give me the short version of what the chief technology officer at John Deere does all day long.”
2021-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · John Deere CTO Jahmy Hindman on farming, data, and fixing the tractors of the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And welcome to Decoder. I'm Neil Lipatel, editor-in-chief of the Verge. And Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. My guest this week is Jamie Hinman, Chief Technology Officer at John Deere, the world's biggest manufacturer of farming machinery. And I think this episode is really going to surprise you. One of our themes here on Decoder is that basically everything is a computer now, and farming equipment like tractors and combines are no different. In fact, Jamie told me that John Deere employs more software engineers than mechanical engineers now, which completely surprised me. But the entire business of farming is moving towards something called precision agriculture, which means farmers are closely tracking where seeds are planted, how well they're growing, what those plants need, and how much they yield in the end. The idea, Jamie says, is to have each plant on a massive commercial farm tended to with individual care, a process which requires collective”
2021-06-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · John Deere CTO Jahmy Hindman on farming, data, and fixing the tractors of the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT