As vice president of product development, John Preheim oversees a team responsible for all precision technology within CNH Industrial and its agriculture brands, including Raven, Case IH, New Holland Agriculture and others.
While there’s a large presence within CNH’s Sioux Falls office — where the Raven legacy continues to thrive — other colleagues span the globe, from India to multiple sites in Europe, altogether encompassing a dozen time zones.
“There’s a large degree of cooperation and understanding when we schedule meetings,” Preheim acknowledges. “Depending on geography, your day might shift a bit.”
Fittingly, since becoming part of CNH a few years ago, the opportunities for Raven’s precision agriculture business also have shifted to a broader geography.
For Preheim, who joined the company in 2005 when it was based in Sioux Falls, the acquisition has given “the opportunity to impact a much larger world than we previously had access to,” he said. “If you look at the number of customers we can touch and the impact we can have on the ag industry, to me that’s been the biggest change.”
CNH continues to employ about 500 people in Sioux Falls between the downtown office and industrial space near the Sioux Falls Regional Airport.
Its products, while still focused on spraying and spreading technology for farmers, have expanded to serve beyond the U.S. and into “every area of the ag cycle and every different crop there,” Preheim explained.
“It’s everything from permanent planted crops like orchards and vineyards to European dairies and cash crops. We get to take the technology we’ve developed and learn how ag works in different parts of the world and how we can support customers’ needs.”
Just as teams integrate after an acquisition, technologies developed across teams have gone through an integration to align across the organization.
“As we work on things like autonomy solutions, we now can build them out across the organization,” Preheim explained. “That will then unlock the next level of innovation, whether it’s new combine automation or a new level of autonomy.”
Preheim’s team also is working through an integration of Augmenta, a machine vision company based in Greece that CNH acquired in 2023. New products were launched in March at the industry event Commodity Classic, unveiled through the company’s global ag brands: Case IH and New Holland Agriculture.
“It’s a multispectral camera system with an Nividia CPU processor that scans the field as you drive,” Preheim said.
“It can distinguish between green and brown areas, so if the environment is supposed to be brown and it sees green, it sprays for weeds. This method conserves a lot of chemicals. It also looks for quality of plant health in real time, so as you drive the field and do fertilizer application, it adjusts and optimizes the output depending on the needs it determines.”
As the applications for artificial intelligence expand, there are multiple developments underway within CNH.
“We’ve developed an AI chat bot for dealers, essentially like having the owner’s manual with you but you don’t have to read it,” Preheim said. “It will answer questions and solve problems.”
There’s also technology being developed to further automate harvest, optimize equipment settings and help farmers establish and identify property boundaries, which is necessary for precision ag equipment working in the field.
Much of that product development continues to undergo testing at property CNH owns and has expanded north of Sioux Falls at its innovation campus.
“That is overwhelming in a good way,” Preheim said. “We’ve hosted many dealers and industry events and brought teams together for face-to-face meetings because it’s such a great location to do so many activities.”
Supporting CNH’s growing need for talent in Sioux Falls requires a multifaceted strategy.
“We still have corporate support roles, like human resources and communications, in Sioux Falls, and then much of our hiring has been in the technical space with various types of engineering as well as in manufacturing,” said Bridget Sea, global candidate experience talent acquisition manager.
CNH starts reaching students as young as elementary school, providing support in STEM camps, and then continues outreach in middle school.
By high school, “we’re hosting engineering career days at the innovation campus where we partner with the schools to get invites out and are really intentional with our outreach,” Sea said.
“We’re in the classrooms in high school, and then at the undergrad level, we’re at the career fairs and heavily invested in our internships.”
Preheim’s engineering team counts almost 80 of the 181 CNH interns across North America, and most are in Sioux Falls. Several return for multiple summers.
Sea serves on the Sioux Falls Development Foundation’s Recruitment Council Advisory Committee and the Talent Development Advisory Board, which comprise a diverse group of education and human resources leaders who provide input and strategic guidance for the Foundation’s talent and workforce programming to ensure alignment with the latest workforce trends and best practices.
She’s also engaged heavily in programs offered through the Foundation and supported by Forward Sioux Falls.
“The Sioux Falls Development Foundation’s Career Connections program has been very helpful for us to expose students to careers in manufacturing. We just had a group on-site touring, and the program’s assistance in planning and coordinating the visit was incredibly valuable,” she said. “We’ve also had featured panelists at the annual WIN in Workforce Summit, which has a big reach in the community and always is well attended. I was recently part of a panel about working with interns, and I always find it helpful to learn what other businesses are doing, as well as getting to brainstorm and collaborate with my peers in the community.”
From Preheim’s perspective, “we look for three things in talent – competency in a domain, writing software and designing hardware – and that can be transferable across industry,” he said. “It’s a learning curve though to learn our products specifically and how they interact, as well as our industry and what brings value to customers.”
That said, CNH doesn’t want to pull solely from ag-related backgrounds “because bringing someone in from Microsoft or Amazon who has no idea about ag might bring other ideas we can leverage, and we’re able to cross-train,” he said. “Typically, local universities have good ag and domain competency, but for the global view it’s useful to pull in people from other backgrounds.”
There have been many successful relocations to Sioux Falls, Sea said.
“For the most part, we’ve been able to find the talent we need here or encourage people to relocate,” she said. “We’ve had some really positive feedback from people who have moved to Sioux Falls to work at CNH and have gotten involved in the community.”
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