John Deere Goes Green(er)

John Deere is making good on their promise to start working towards the production of electric tractor parts and supporting infrastructure - something the company is hoping to achieve by 2026.

The original announcement of the new direction was made in August of 2023 - in which the company talked about their acquisition of Kreisel Electric the year before - a move which would allow them to take over an established maker of batteries and charging equipment by taking over their production facilities - and immediately planning some new ones.

First, an expansion in Europe to add a battery production facility at their existing location in Austria, and to their factory in Saran, France - where the majority of John Deere engines are manufactured in the EU - then onto North America, where a whole new battery assembly plant is in the works for Kernersville, North Carolina.

The new facility is planned to be 115,000 square feet, and support production of 2 GWh of battery capacity. It will also require hiring about 50 new personnel - which is a good-sized production team for a new location that will hopefully have some more experienced Kreisel staff on hand to guide the new team while it starts producing Kreisel-designed battery packs and CHIMERO chargers.

But it looks like work still hasn’t started on the site itself - which was apparently purchased barely a month ago. Local news reports that the lot stands 35 acres north of the company’s existing Kernersville campus, and covers 5 parcels of that land.

So it looks like work is progressing - just a bit slower than John Deere might have wanted. And that’s fair - they are in the beginning stages of adapting their heavy agricultural equipment to electric for the first time, while trying to make that switch attractive to farmers who are used to fossil-fuel powered vehicles.

However, between this electric initiative, and recent deals with SpaceX for the use of their Starlink systems to help bring more stable internet to farming work - it’s clear that John Deere isn’t going to let the future outpace them.