Deere's Big Green Profit Machine

On a scorching afternoon in the savanna of eastern Brazil, Wilson Horita is 8 feet above the ground, bouncing on the driver’s seat of the new green-and-yellow tractor parked on his family’s farm. “It’s totally pneumatic,” he tells a visitor. Horita doesn’t drive tractors, he buys them. “Let’s talk about comfort,” he says, speaking in Portuguese as another Brazilian, perched on the ladder to the cab, translates. “There’s totally acoustic insulation,” Horita says, meaning the cab dulls the roar of the 270 horsepower engine and the clank of row-crop planters slicing through soil. “And,” he continues, sounding more like a car salesman than the farmer he is, “there’s air conditioning.”

The cab’s interior could pass for a BMW’s, only with storefront-size windows and a console crowded with buttons, knobs, and levers that control hands-free steering, a rear hitch, and the planter or grain cart being towed. A color touchscreen tracks hourly fuel use, area covered, engine oil pressure, and a bunch of other measures. Another screen linked to a yellow-domed GPS receiver on the roof lets the driver watch a digital version of his tractor trundle through digital fields. The GPS keeps the tractor from rolling over more than 2½ centimeters of the same ground twice. Horita taps an orange pedal with his right foot. “The accelerator,” he says. “You don’t use that.” That’s because the tractor can drive itself, controlling its own speed and direction.