Hello,

Below is a quick case with a question, hoping you can assist?

Looking at cotton growing on a farm, one could be forgiven for thinking that other than fertilizers, pesticides, and the practical deployment of the modern cotton picker in the 1950s, the picture seems frozen in time. However, at Deere & Company (www.johndeere.com), a second revolution is brewing, and this one is definitely adding cutting-edge technology to an old-economy business.

Founded in 1837 as a one-man blacksmith operation, John Deere is currently a $US43.6-billion corporation that employs more than 56 750 people worldwide and is one of the oldest publicly traded industrial companies in the United States. But rather than the brutality and razor-thin margins that usually accompany price competition, market leader Deere has staked out a bold differentiation strategy that incorporates technology to compete on innovation.

John Deeres machines still pluck cotton fibres with hundreds of finger-like spindles and then vacuum the cotton into a huge bin, but this is where the similarities with its old machines end. The company has used advanced computer-aided design (CAD) to reshape the intake ducts, allowing the cotton to travel 20 percent faster and reducing horsepower requirements by 5 percent, thus saving on fuel consumption while maintaining speed. Inside the new cotton pickers is the computing power of eight personal computers and a communications system that beams wireless information to a base station, which can automatically monitor and signal when service is needed. At the same time, microwave sensors and the global positioning system (GPS) technology allow the farmer to map the fields exact yield while harvesting the cotton. And by overlaying this information with other enabled systems, fertilizers, pesticides, and water can be applied with precision instead of indiscriminately distributing them across the entire field. Finally, in an industry first, Deeres latest generation of picker spools the cotton into cylindrical bales that are wrapped and gently placed on the field without the machine having to stop every 10 to 15 minutes.

The cost of the new technology has not yet been determined, but the two-storey harvester has replaced four to six pieces of support equipment and has enabled a single operator to harvest nonstop until the 1100-litre fuel tank is depleted.

1.Are there any other advantages to using this technology? What adaptation and extensions would increase the advantage? (Hint: Radio-frequency tags can be inserted into each bundle to track harvesting information and pinpoint where the cotton came from, identifying, for example, whether the cotton qualifies as organic.)