Farmers Review Africa March/April 2020 Farmers Review Africa March - April 2020 digital ( | Page 22

FEATURE
John Deere taps tractor-hailing
tech for farmers in Africa
I
t’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. 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. Jacques Taylor, who heads John
Deere’s sub-Saharan Africa business, said that
the continent badly needs more machinery to
develop its farming industry but most farmers
don’t have the scale to justify a large investment.
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 mechanized
agricultural sector. “We would like to see that every farmer has
access to mechanization,” he told Reuters. “The
gap that we’ve identified is, how do we connect
small farmers with tractor owners?”
Deere is currently testing the technology — a
small black box fitted beneath dashboards — on
20 | March - April 2020
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 mechanization.
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.
This would mean they could buy more tractors.