AGCO, Deere Make Ag Deals

AGCO and The Climate Corp., a subsidiary of Monsanto Co., announced that a definitive agreement has been signed for AGCO to acquire the Precision Planting LLC equipment business.

Precision Planting, based in Tremont, Ill., provides products and technology to help growers achieve better seed spacing and depth control when planting row crops. The company offers metering components and monitoring systems such as 20/20 SeedSense, a color-coded touchscreen display for planters.

In 2015, AGCO entered into an agreement to factory integrate Precision Planting’s components into products from White Planters. The agreement also enabled farmers to integrate their on-farm data into Climate’s digital platform, FieldView, which combines field data collection, advanced agronomic modeling and local weather monitoring into mobile and web software solutions.

AGCO said the Climate platform will retain connectivity with 20/20 SeedSense monitor.

Interestingly, Deere & Co. had been working to buy Precision Planting, a deal that was stopped by Monsanto on May 1 of this year.  First announced in November 2015, the closing of the acquisition had been delayed by the Department of Justice.

At the time of the termination, Climate said it still intended to sell Precision Planting and was discussing an acquisition with other interested parties.

The terms of the agreement were not disclosed. The transaction is subject to regulatory approvals.

Also in agriculture, today John Deere and Granular, San Francisco, announced a product development and co-marketing agreement that gives John Deere customers more tools to measure and improve their financial performance.

Under the terms of this agreement, the two companies will work to further integrate Granular’s Farm Management Software (FMS) product and the John Deere Operations Center. Certain Granular FMS functionality will be offered free-of-charge to Operations Center users in the U.S., Canada, Australia and New Zealand, so that producers who choose to share their machine data with Granular can measure their profitability at the field and sub-field levels.

In addition, the companies will launch a program that rewards John Deere Dealers who work with Granular to serve common customers.