John Deere Features Automated Cotton Picking at CES 2024

John Deere goes big at every CES.

At one CES, Deere featured its totally self-driving tractor. It was so big, Deere erected a home for it in a parking lot outside the Las Vegas Convention Center.

At the last CES, Deere showed its expansive Exact Shot and See and Spray technologies on a massive farm machine.

Those technologies are aimed at helping feed the world, as anyone who works at Deere will say.

At CES this year, Deere showed how it is helping in cotton picking and road work, two totally unrelated fields but both requiring sophisticated technology to get the job done better.

Deere brought its cotton-picking mechanism, a series of connected cotton-picking machines that sit in front of a large Deere cotton picking machine.

As the device drives down the field at 4 mph, the front-loaded technology picks the cotton and feeds it through rotating drums operating at 5,000 revolutions per minute, ultimately creating very large cylinders of cotton that emerge from the back of the moving device.

When another comes out, the resting one on the back of the machine can be offloaded in place, and it has RFID tracking devices in it for location identification.

The cotton eventually is sent to a cotton gin where it is processed. That cotton is then used for clothing.

Related:CES 2022: John Deere Intros Self-Driving Tractor

In a different section of the very large Deere display area, sat the Dozer 360, a machine that grades roads before paving, since the ground needs to be at a certain grade for it to be paved. 

While experts who have been doing grading work for many years may have mastered the skill, not everyone is at that level.

So Deere created driver-assist technology that makes the process somewhat foolproof.

Drones survey the land and transmit that data to Deere systems, which process it into the knowledge needed within the cab.

As a result, sensors in the machine track the areas being graded and align it with the drone data, essentially automating the grading process for the driver.

Rather than replacing people with technology, Deere tends to enhance and make more efficient what people already do.