Back With a John Deere Tour

I'm back! It's been 1 whole year (+ a month or so), but I'm back and I'm blogging again. Hopefully, fairly regularly. There is just too much happening in agriculture right now and I have too many opinions and ideas to not voice them somewhere. The challenge, as always, will be to find the time. I tend to be a perfectionist, needing all posts to be perfect. So, I am going to strive to post more and edit less (I hear all you editor-types gasping).

To get back into it, I thought I'd share some pictures from the past week. I had the privilege to tour some of our John Deere factories with a group of fantastic customers from Southwestern Ontario and one of my dealers. 80 farmers, 14 hours on a bus, 2 factories, a few steak dinners and some barley-beverages later and  everyone was thoroughly exhausted, yet more knowledgeable about the goings-on behind the green & yellow.

While I can't share all the inside details, here are a few interesting tidbits:

• Approximately 1 gallon of paint is needed for a large tractor but a combine uses 12
• Both the combine and tractor factories build everything to order, so you can actually see your unit on the line being built
• 3 shifts work 24 hours to keep equipment coming off the line
• The Harvester Works combine factory is 91 acres under one roof
• The combine factory has its own power plant, which has supplied power to area communities when weather has caused major, delayed outages 

Walking 'the bridge' at Deere & Co World Headquarters from the display floor to the main building.

The show floor at Deere & Co. makes this combine & 8R look like kid's toys.

John Deere Harvester Works

Building combines to help harvest food for the world

John Deere Harvester Works built airplane wings and engine mounts during WWII

Visiting the Chicago Board of Trade