Company tests tractor tech, equipment there

By Brent Wistrom – Editor, Austin Inno, Austin Business Journal

Oct 9, 2025

As you drive northeast of Austin, the city gives way to suburban and industrial developments. Then, things open up.

This is the heart of Central Texas farm country.

Out here, cotton, corn and hay fields stretch for miles. And atop one of the many rolling hills near the small town of Coupland sits a newly built structure where an old, white farmhouse with an aluminum roof used to be.

This is farming giant Deere & Co.’s latest foray into the Texas market.

The company, which does business as John Deere, bought a relatively small plot, about 40 acres, around the same time it opened its tech hub on South Congress Avenue among a series of trendy shops and restaurants.

Soon, Kyle Leinaar, the company’s Austin test farm leader, and a small team of Deere employees were working out of the old farmhouse. Now, that house has been relocated and the farm has expanded to 285 acres. The site includes a two-story research and development center with 32 desks where local and visiting employees can work when they’re not working in one of the nearby garages or out in the fields.

“We like to think that we built this site to be a natural place for teams to collaborate and have some collision of minds, where you have people from different divisions having lunch together, or just general conversation,” Leinaar said. “They start to talk and they start to work together.”

Austin’s strong pipeline of tech talent helped drive the company’s decision to set up a tech hub just south of downtown Austin in 2022. That’s also one of the reasons it set up its new R&D center and test farm in Coupland. But it’s Texas’ year-round growing seasons, topographical characteristics and proximity to local farmers that were perhaps the biggest factors in setting up a facility outside of Austin.

The test farm includes equipment across all production systems, from tillage to harvesting, for multiple crop systems. The company started selling its autonomous tractors a few years ago. Meanwhile, its See & Spray technology is perhaps one of its biggest recent breakthroughs. It uses cameras and software installed on tractors and planters to spot non-agriculture weeds and plants and spray them. That reduces cost, because farmers use less chemicals, and cuts down on the amount of product released in the environment.

Deere’s R&D teams work closely with local dealers, who, in turn, are in touch with farmers across the region. Deere (NYSE: DE) has met with dozens of local farmers through those relationships and has since mapped over 20,000 acres with local farmers. It has also set up a variety of partnerships that allow Deere’s tech team to learn about the problems farmers encounter and give farmers access to tech tools that make their work easier.

“It’s pretty unique in the fact that we’re building a relationship almost from ground zero, and that’s just as important as the building that we have here,” Leinaar said. “Deere has a lot of values, a lot of community connection in other parts, and we want to start to grow those here as well.”

The company is also working with universities in the region to both attract talent and collaborate with research departments, especially those with engineering or data science programs.

Farming seems to be the focus at the new facility, but the company also develops construction equipment and technology at the site. Among its latest products are its SmartGrade 3D grade control system, which uses GPS navigation and automated blade control for precise grading on work sites and roads.

While the new R&D center and test farm isn’t an equipment dealership or repair location, there’s plenty of curiosity from folks driving by.

“We have already had a few folks that stopped by and said, ‘Hey, do you sell parts? Do you do this? Do you do that?,” Leinaar said. “We don’t sell parts. We don’t sell tractors. But sometimes they want to talk to someone. And I’m willing to listen to them tell you about their grandfather’s old tractor.”

He said there’s a group of Deere retirees in Texas that gets together a couple of times a year.

“A couple of them came out here. They wanted to see the site. They talk about having their group out here. I said ‘absolutely.’ I mean, just the three hours they spent here, you know, talking about nothing was pretty cool,” he said.

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