★ THE ASSEMBLY LINE
1
Deere Beats Estimates by 15%. Q2 earnings hit $6.55 per share, well above the $5.70 Wall Street expected. Revenue rose 5% to $13.4 billion. Construction & Forestry was the standout, surging 29%.
2
Farm Equipment Market at Cycle Bottom. Deere management says 2026 marks the trough for large agriculture. U.S. farm income sits at $153 billion — flat from 2025 and well below the 2022 peak of $182 billion.
3
Deere Goes Full Tech. The company’s See & Spray AI system uses cameras to target weeds and skip crops — cutting herbicide use by up to two-thirds. Autonomous tractors are now running in commercial fields. This isn’t your grandfather’s tractor company.

Do This Before Elon Posts On X Tomorrow

The world’s richest man… is about to get a lot richer.

Elon Musk just signed a contract…

That could make him the world’s first trillionaire.

But he has to do one thing…

Or he doesn’t get paid a dime.

You see, Elon just created a device he believes will be “the biggest product ever.”

He thinks it could 70X investors’ money.

By the end of this month.

Maybe even tomorrow on X.

He’s going to make this game-changing device available to the public.

He has to sell 1 million to become a trillionaire.

Would you bet against him?

★  Wednesday — Stock Edition
189 Years Old. Building Autonomous Tractors. And Quietly Winning the Reshoring Boom.
Deere just beat estimates by 15%. But the real story isn’t farming — it’s construction.

In 1837, a blacksmith named John Deere made a steel plow that could cut through the thick prairie soil of Illinois. Farmers couldn’t keep their hands off it.

That was 189 years ago. Today, Deere makes tractors that drive themselves. Sprayers that use cameras to tell weeds from crops. Excavators that grade a site to the millimeter using GPS. The company is part farmer, part contractor, and part tech company.

And right now, it’s telling you something about where American manufacturing is headed. Let me explain.

There are two stories inside Deere right now. One is struggling. The other is surging.

The struggle: big ag. U.S. farm income is sitting at about $153 billion — flat from last year and 16% below the 2022 peak. Grain prices are soft. Interest rates are high. Farmers aren’t buying new combines right now. Deere’s Production & Precision Ag segment fell 14% in Q2, and operating profit dropped 39%.

The surge: construction. Deere’s Construction & Forestry segment exploded — revenue up 29%, operating profit up 48%. Every chip fab, data center, and reshored factory we’ve covered in this newsletter starts with earthmoving equipment. Deere makes it.

Small Ag & Turf grew 16% too. So two out of three segments are booming. The overall company still beat estimates by 15%, posting $6.55 per share against a $5.70 consensus. A $272 million tariff refund helped — the Supreme Court invalidated certain emergency trade levies — but even without it, the beat was solid.

Here’s what most people miss. Deere isn’t just selling iron anymore. It’s selling software.

Its See & Spray technology uses cameras and AI to spot weeds in real time. The sprayer hits the weed and skips the crop. That can cut herbicide use by up to two-thirds. Autonomous tractors are now running in commercial fields without a driver in the cab.

Deere also just bought Tenna — a construction tech company — for $439 million. Tenna tracks equipment on job sites. Pair that with Deere’s GPS grading and autonomous earthmoving, and you start to see the play. Deere wants to be the operating system for every field and every job site in America.

★ Made In Moline

Deere operates roughly 30 factories across the United States. Its headquarters has been in Moline, Illinois since 1848. Key plants include Waterloo, Iowa (tractors), East Moline (planters), and Dubuque, Iowa (construction equipment). The company employs about 73,000 people worldwide.

Deere also has the most recognized brand in agriculture. The leaping deer logo is on equipment in 160 countries. But the brains — the engineering, the software, the R&D — stay in the Midwest.

★ THE INVESTOR ANGLE — DEERE (NYSE: DE)
Market Cap
~$146B
P/E ~31x
Q2 EPS
$6.55
Beat Est. by 15%
C&F Growth
+29%
Op. Profit +48%

The bull case comes down to timing. Management says 2026 is the bottom of the ag cycle. If big ag recovers in 2027, Deere gets a revenue tailwind on top of the construction boom that’s already running. Two engines firing instead of one.

The bear case: at ~$542 and a P/E near 31, Deere isn’t cheap. The stock is 20% off its all-time high. Tariffs are a $1.2 billion headwind this year. And if the ag recovery stalls, the story gets harder to sell. Large ag demand is projected to drop another 15–20% this fiscal year.

But the average analyst target is $642 — 18% above the current price. The dividend yields 1.2%. And the tech transformation is real. Deere isn’t just riding the reshoring wave. It’s building the machines that make reshoring possible. Every factory site starts with a Deere excavator. Every American farm that feeds the workers runs on Deere iron.