1 Company in Moline, Illinois

John Deere's origin is a blacksmith's fix: in 1837, Vermont-born blacksmith John Deere moved to Illinois, where the sticky prairie soil clogged the cast-iron plows of the day. He forged a polished steel plow that cut clean through the sod — and farmers came from miles around for one. That single invention made Deere a fortune and launched the company that would mechanize agriculture worldwide. The modern Deere is the world's largest agricultural equipment maker: tractors, combines, sprayers, and planters bearing the distinctive green-and-yellow livery, plus construction equipment (excavators, loaders) under the Deere brand. Its recent transformation is technological: Deere has turned its equipment into data platforms — self-driving tractors that till fields with centimeter accuracy, AI-powered weed detection that sprays individual plants, and the John Deere Operations Center that analyzes field data to optimize planting. Headquartered in Moline, Illinois, with about 80,000 employees and annual revenue near US$43 billion, Deere is betting that farmers will buy software subscriptions as readily as tractors — its precision agriculture services are among the fastest-growing parts of the business. For global agriculture, Deere is the standard: the green tractors that feed the world, now equipped with the sensors that make farming a data science.