So CES kicked off in Vegas this week (the show floor doesn't fully open till tomorrow, but the big keynotes started Thursday), and I'll be honest, I wasn't expecting the one I'd actually want to write about to come from a tractor company.
John Deere gave the opening keynote. Not Samsung, not some chip maker, not a car company teasing another concept EV nobody will ever buy — a farm equipment manufacturer, up on the main CES stage for what I think is the first time in the show's history. CEO John May spent his slot talking about autonomous tractors and something called "See & Spray," which is basically a boom sprayer rigged with cameras and machine learning that can tell a weed apart from a soybean plant in real time and only hit the weed. Deere's been showing pieces of this for a couple years now (they had a fully autonomous tractor at CES last January too), but seeing the whole pitch laid out again, with actual farmers in the room nodding along, hit different than another folding phone demo.
I'll admit I clapped for this one, more than I would for a new TV.
Here's the thing that makes it interesting to me and not just a cute headline though. Deere has spent years locked in this ugly fight with farmers over the right to repair their own equipment. If a sensor goes bad on a modern Deere combine, you can't just swap it yourself with a socket wrench and move on with your harvest — a lot of the diagnostic and calibration software is locked behind dealer tools, so you wait for a technician, sometimes for days, during a window where every day matters. There've been stories floating around for a couple years now about farmers, including some in Eastern Europe, running cracked firmware just to get their own machines working again. Whole forums dedicated to it. It's basically the John Deere version of jailbreaking an iPhone, except the stakes are a field of grain going bad instead of a wallpaper you can't change.
So watching the same company stand on stage and sell "autonomy" and "precision" while that fight is still simmering in the background is a weird thing to sit with. The tech itself is genuinely impressive. I don't think you can watch the See & Spray footage and not be a little amazed at how fast the vision model has to run to hit a weed at tractor speed without missing or double-dosing a crop row. But impressive tech from a company that still wants to own every bolt on the machine you paid six figures for is a different flavor of impressive than, say, a scrappy startup doing the same thing. It's the kind of progress that makes me want to ask "okay, but who actually gets to fix this thing in six years."
Anyway, the rest of the CES news so far is the usual grab bag you'd expect. LG had a transparent OLED panel on the floor during press days that looks like something out of a bad sci-fi movie in the best way, and BMW brought back that color-changing car wrap thing (E Ink panels on the body, so you can cycle the paint job through different patterns with a button press) that got everyone's phones out two years ago and will probably never ship on an actual car you can buy. I always forget how much of CES is stuff that gets shown once, gets its viral moment, and then just quietly vanishes. Feels like half the show every year.
Still, tractors stealing the keynote slot from the phone and TV crowd is the kind of thing I'll remember from this CES specifically. Not because farming needs to be flashy, but because it's a reminder that the actual hard problems in tech, the ones that touch food supply and real labor shortages, aren't usually the ones getting the flashy lighting rig and the dry ice. Most years they don't even get a keynote.
More CES stuff worth digging into as the week goes on, I'm sure, once the actual show floor opens and I can see what smaller companies are sneaking in around the giants.