John Deere is doubling down on its support of agtech incubator Reservoir Farms, investing $10 million over the course of three years, as revealed during the first annual Ruggedize agricultural AI conference in Salinas, California, Aug. 26-27.
Last year, Reservoir Farms welcomed John Deere as its official original equipment manufacturer (OEM) partner, providing start-ups with ag equipment and technical support and expertise. This partnership is designed to further accelerate the development and commercialization of physical AI (rugged AI) technologies for specialty crops by providing additional support.
Currently, Reservoir Farms houses 22 start-ups that pay from $3,000-6,000 to rent farmland in one or more of its locations, including Salinas and Sonoma, California, to develop and test their agtech solutions, Danny Bernstein, Reservoir CEO, told AgNavigator. Reservoir Farms also has plans to expand into Central Valley, California, and Yuma, Arizona.
John Deere’s funding goes directly towards supporting farm operations and expenses, including farm rentals, equipment expenses, technical expertise, etc. Earlier this year, Reservoir entered a similar partnership with Western Growers, where the specialty association invested $1.5 million across three years.
As part of initial partnership, John Deere laid out a series of goals for Reservoir to meet to secure additional funding, with the agtech incubator surpassing all of them, Sean Sundberg, business integration manager at John Deere, told AgNavigator.
“It’s not like we are here every-day policing everything or anything like that. We have goals that we’ve aligned to, and then it’s really hands off where we say, ‘Danny, go do the work that you need to do,’ and it’s been fantastic to see the growth of from opening up Salinas to also having a site in Sonoma County, and now looking at Yuma, Arizona,” Sundberg said.
Through a combination of revenues from the start-ups and industry partnerships, “Reservoir Farms is profitable,” with the John Deere partnership pushing the agtech incubator into the green, Bernstein noted. The agtech incubator is looking to expand its presence further, including exploring locations in Washington state.
“We have two primary sources of core operating revenue. One is from the startups to participate in our community, and the others from corporate partners like John Deere and Western Growers to support and lift the community, and so we think that we can do a bunch more of these. But for us in the agricultural space, having Western Growers and John Deere as the foundational partners, … it really does support our core offerings,” he elaborated.
John Deere gains a front-row seat to emerging agtech trends
John Deere has not only been active in developing agtech offerings internally, like See & Spray or hands-free baling, but the company has been acquisitive, buying agtech companies like GUSS Automation in Aug. 2025, remote imaging company Sentera in June 2025, and Blue River Technology in 2017
While not ruling out the potential of the Reservoir deal producing acquisitions, Sundberg views the partnership more as an opportunity to learn from start-ups on how they are developing solutions that deliver on a gap in the market.
Additionally, start-ups that find success mean that growers are using the start-up tech to save money and run more efficiently, which means more resources to invest in ag machinery, Sundberg added.
“We kind of underestimated the breadth of work that would be ongoing here, and the different means in which [start-ups are] doing it — the different avenues that they’re pursuing to address some of the gaps in marketplace has really been eye opening to us. I think that we’re interested just to watch startups grow from their infancy to crawling to walking to having a product in place that’s refined enough that whether it’s a paid pilot or a real paying for the service that the product is actually being used,” Sundberg said.
Is agtech on the verge of a turn-around?
The John Deere partnership comes as Reservoir’s venture capital (VC) arm, launched in Oct. 2025, has been actively investing, including in TerraBlaster’s seed round, and its acquisition of Contain in June to add finance and indoor ag expertise to the fund.
Reservoir operates these two businesses as separate entities that complement each other. The venture capital firm is raising a second fund to invest in agtech start-ups, with progress “going really well,” Bernstein said
“Our pitch to an investor is we’re operating what we think is the most compelling early-stage venture capital fund in agtech, and it’s complemented by an operating business that is off the books of the fund, and now with the John Deere deal, is connected to the highest impact OEM in agriculture,” he elaborated.
The broader agtech ecosystem — which continues to face a constrained exit environment and low levels of VC funding — could be entering a new era, where the technology matures to a point where more farmer problems are being solved, Bernstein noted.
“We do anticipate with the technology improving and going from one crop/one task to multi-crop, multi-task, multi-machine, multi-industry, that we’re entering into an era of significant value creation and trust building coming from agtech that will lead to more exits. There’s just no question, and Deere and others will end up being acquisitive because you have robotic form factors with dozens of degrees of freedom that are able to address new opportunities in precision ag that are complementary to the existing form factors in the market,” he added.
