Reservoir Farms Announces $10M Multi-Year R&D Partnership with John Deere
Danny Bernstein, Reservoir, and Sean Sundberg, John Deere, at Reservoir Farms.
A new deal removes one of agtech's biggest costs: proving your machine works before you've even raised a round.
Reservoir Farms has announced a new multi-year, $10 million R&D partnership with John Deere, a major American company that manufactures agricultural, construction, and forestry machinery, things like tractors, combines, and harvesters, aimed at accelerating deep tech for high-value crop agriculture.
The partnership targets what Reservoir describes as the single biggest barrier facing AgTech and rugged AI founders: getting a machine into a real field, in a real crop, in front of a real grower who will give them honest feedback. That barrier keeps early-stage teams stuck in labs and simulations long before they know whether their technology actually works on working ground.
With this deal, Reservoir is subsidizing startup access to its farms, pricing participation below cost. The goal is to let a two-person founding team get onto real farmland before they've raised a round, with direct access to growers and farm operations across the American West, and soon, in additional regions.
What's Purposely Not in the Deal
Reservoir is emphasizing the terms it did not agree to. There are no data rights, no claim on startup IP, no claim on equity, and no first right of refusal. The only requirement is that where John Deere makes a machine for a given task, that machine gets used on site.
Reservoir's framing: Deere builds strong equipment, so that's an easy condition to accept.
Who Made It Happen
Reservoir credited the John Deere team for helping take the project from concept to a working community, along with support from Western Growers, Sonoma County Winegrowers, and its strategic grower partners.
For founders building in agtech or rugged AI, this partnership lowers one of the highest costs in the industry: real-world validation.
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