Sorry for the late start, everyone. I'm Tim Thein. Just a little new territory for me here at the Tech Conference, but very apropos, I think, just for where AGCO and the ag equipment space has kind of evolved and evolving towards in terms of just how much the technology has become more and more widespread and adopted across the really across a lot of the major row crop markets. But maybe and with the company today, we have right to my left, Eric Hansotia, who is the Chairman and CEO; Damon Audia, as the CFO for, what? A year and a half now, roughly?
Mm-hmm.
And then, Greg Peterson in the audience, from IR. So, just, just given this is a little bit, you know, not, not your, your standard forum in terms of where you guys are presenting at a, at a tech conference, maybe Eric, you can just start with a little bit of an intro in terms of what AGCO is, where you guys are going, and ultimately, why you're here at a tech conference.
You bet. So thank you for inviting us. AGCO is the largest global pure-play ag equipment company. Our biggest focus is not, is not only on the machinery, but all the technology that goes in the machinery and the technology that goes on actually other brands of machinery. We'll talk about that more later, but we not only are innovating to make our machines smarter, with sensors on them that can sense the difference in soil properties or crop properties, do onboard calculations, and have the machine optimize itself. Our vision is to become the trusted partner for industry-leading smart farming solutions. So that's what that's all about. But then we also take some of those modules and sell them as a retrofit kit onto other people's equipment, all brands of equipment in the marketplace, and it's a big differentiator for the company.
We've grown significantly. We're only a little over 30 years old, and this year our forecast is to be about $14.7 billion in sales. About half our business is in Europe, 25% in North America, and the rest between South America and Asia. A little heavier focus on the production ag customer, so larger farmers that are thirsty for technology. And the reason they're thirsty is they're in a squeeze. They're being pressured to significantly increase their productivity, generate more crops off the land, and we can talk about those drivers later, with a lot less inputs, for societal benefits. So they essentially have to grow 50% productivity and use about 25% of the inputs over the next 15 or 20 years.
So that's the challenge we're trying to help them with, and technology is our avenue to get there. Since I've been leading the company, we've been, we've increased our engineering spend by about 60% and, invested in several tech companies to accelerate our, our, progress.
Good. And so precision ag, just as a, you know, it encompasses a wide area in terms of what all that means, but talk a bit about AGCO's strategy and how your geographic, as well as your kind of product line, has influenced your strategy in terms of where you go within that precision ag bucket.
Our biggest focus is to automate features on the machine. So you can kind of think of, like, automated cruise control on your car. It's got a sensor on the car. It can identify when there's a car in front of you, and it'll modulate your speed to keep you a certain safe distance in front of the car. That's a smart feature on a car to make it more safe and easier to drive. Those are the kinds of things we look for in agriculture, where we wanna automate something that's difficult to do and just have the machine be able to sense its environment, sense changes, make onboard calculations, and then make the adjustments so that it's always running optimally. So essentially like it's in autopilot mode. So just as an example, there's a feature we call SmartFirmer.
It's a sensor that runs in the seed trench during planting season. That sensor is looking at the soil characteristics, and it can tell temperature and moisture, but it can also tell organic matter and residue amount. So organic matter is a really good correlation to fertility in the soil. As you get into higher fertility areas in the field, if you have this turned on in autopilot mode, the sensor will... It takes 780,000 measurements a minute, so very, very high-frequency measurements. It will start saying, "Okay, I'm gonna plant more seeds in this higher fertility area." It'll adjust the planter for that, or it'll change to a different hybrid. Say I want to put a racehorse hybrid with really high yield potential in the high-yielding areas and then more defensive planting strategy in the low-yielding areas.
All that's done automatically. Got another system on the planter that can automatically manage the amount of pressure for depth control, so that every seed is placed at exactly the right depth, no matter if you're in heavy clay soil, where you have a lot of down pressure, or in sandier soil, where it needs less down pressure. And why is that important? 2, 2 corn plants planted side by side, if one plant comes up 2 days after its adjacent plant, it will have essentially zero yield. It will be treated like a weed. So emergence is really, really critical from an agronomy standpoint and in turn, economics. All of this technology helps make sure the agronomy is done just right. So that's our primary focus, is automating features. It's on the way to automation, full automation. We're gonna be coming to market with...
You know, essentially, once you start taking away all the tasks that the operator has to do in the cab, you can ultimately pull the operator out of the cab. And so we've shown this summer to so many investors and media our automated baler operation. Nobody in the cab. The vision system is looking at the windrow, following the windrow automatically, making a perfectly sized bale, and modulating speed automatically to make sure that the machine is running at peak performance. We also showed the autonomous grain cart married up with a combine. So the combine is what harvests the crop. It's harvesting at full speed, and you never wanna have that slow down. That's essentially your factory.
It's harvesting the crop, and, alongside when the grain bin is full on the combine, they hit the summon button, a driverless tractor comes up, runs right alongside the combine, and follows its path in a parallel offset. You can unload while you're still harvesting into the cart that's pulled by the tractor. When the combine is empty, he says, "Release," and the tractor drives off to the side of the road and unloads into a semi standing by the side of the road, all with no driver in it. So those are the types of features. We'll have a retrofit kit that will go on any brand of equipment starting in 2025 with that. And, and then the last one would be clean energy, which isn't so much precision ag, but it's, it's kind of our other third big investment area.
Automated features on the road to autonomy and clean energy are where our big focus is.
Ultimately, what the grower gets for... So they pay for all that. Is there a way, and how are you able to document that and prove that in terms of, "Okay, well, your yield improved," or, "You took out X cents of cost per bushel?" And ultimately, how do you prove that versus, "Hey, the weather was good," and so-
Right.
You know, how do I, how do I delineate those two?
Our mission is to improve net farmer income by 20% over the next 4 or 5 years. So we, on the front end, as we're doing development projects, we're always looking for: What's the payback for the farmer, such that we can make them more profitable? Our objective is that the purchase price they pay needs to have an ROI in the 1-2-year timeframe. Farming is a bit of a big bet, in that you plant once a year, and you harvest once a year. So farmers are a little bit risk-averse, so we need. We found that you have much greater success if you can have a very short payback.
Our whole Precision Ag business is aimed around that kind of a return for the farmer on the path to generating more net farm income. How we prove it for them is a couple things. One, we have model farms in each of the major regions, and on that model farm, there's one in Illinois, where we do about 400 test plot trials every year, mimicking how farmers do things in different ways around the country. They can see if you did it the standard way, here's how your yield would be, and there'd be a test plot like that. Well, right adjacent to it, here's a new approach, either a new piece of technology or a new farming practice, side by side in the same field under the same climate.
That's a real good laboratory, and we funnel a few thousand customers through that operation every year to be able to show them the data and the science behind it and the, and the net actual results. But then we take that same approach, and we go out to the field, and we do that in farmers' fields all around the world. Where we'll go into a farm field and say, "Give us a, a small test area here, where we're going to try a new, new approach," again, new technology or new farming practice. And then take that crop to yield and show the net benefits. Here's what was different on the inputs. Here's what was different on the yields. Here's the economics behind that approach. So that's how we, that's how we prove it for the farmers.
Yeah, how do you think about the, you know, the ultimate, the willingness of the growers to pay for all this? When... and you think about, okay, well, 'cause there's one school of thought that says, "Okay, well, if my income is under pressure, I need to... I, I'm more apt to try and take more costs out or, and/or improve my yields." Whereas, you know, an argument can be made, well, if their bottom line is under pressure, they just curtail spending across the board. Where do you think the precision dollars end up in that? I know it's not an easy answer, but how do you think about the ultimate-
Yeah
... sensitivity?
Well, the farmer's always under... What we're seeing is that the farmer's steadily under this constant pressure. You know, the population is gonna grow. You can say, "What are the macro tailwinds?" The population's grow from 8 billion to 10 billion people over the next 20 years. Secondly, the diets are maturing around the world. There's more meat being eaten, and as that happens, it's a multiplier on the demand for grain. So meat is, like, 2-3 to 1 for chicken, but 10 or 12 to one for beef. Like, it consumes more grain. And then the third one is renewable fuels. So we've already seen ethanol in corn for the U.S. and sugar for South America, but the next one is gonna be renewable diesel.
You know, as the world pushes different industries to go clean, conversion to clean energy, certain machine forms can adopt batteries, especially low horsepower, like below 150 horsepower. But high horsepower applications don't work well for batteries. So airplanes, big, heavy applications are gonna have to use probably renewable diesel for the foreseeable future. They're not gonna run on batteries. But where's that renewable diesel gonna come from? One of the biggest sources is vegetable oil. So canola, soybean, oils turned into renewable diesel is a huge demand driver. So that's the demand side, and yet the world wants them to produce with lower, less inputs, less fertilizer, less pesticide and herbicide, even being regulated in Europe first, probably North America come following, and then less carbon emissions. So that's the squeeze they're under.
And then, as they're making their equation, they say, "Well, how do I somehow increase yields and reduce inputs?" They can either buy a new piece of machinery, and we've got a... Our premium brand is called Fendt. It's essentially like the Mercedes of the equipment industry. It's the best product in any market, North America, Europe, South America. We've got a very strong business in Europe. We're now expanding it to cover North America and South America. So you can get a feature-rich solution from the factory through Fendt, or you can buy just the technology module as a retrofit solution.
This is the opportunity for some farmers to say, "Instead of buying a whole brand-new solution, I can buy just the technology module and put it on my John Deere planter or my Case planter or my Case sprayer." We can allow a retrofit solution. So the farmer can buy the new equipment, or they can buy a retrofit solution for a different price point.
So the precision story well told here in North America, or increasingly well told, but as you said earlier, that's, you know, roughly a quarter of your sales. Can you talk about precision in your other key geographies, South America, Europe, especially?
North America is often the first adopter for precision ag technologies, but Europe is close behind in, especially because of regulatory pressures. I think the spraying environment of putting down pesticide, herbicide, and fertilizer is gonna come under the most pressure in Europe over the next several years, and so there'll be an additional. The reason why Europe is not quite as early adopter as North America is, in general, the farms are smaller, so than in North America. So, but now this push on regulatory pressure, I think, is going to, is gonna accelerate what's happening in Europe. In South America, it's kind of the opposite. Huge farms down there. Very sophisticated data measurement-minded farmers. They can tell you exactly...
I spent a lot of time on different farms there, and they can tell you exactly per hectare, per bushel, what all their input costs are, what all their yields were, differences between operators, and so on. And so they're actually a rapid adapter of a lot of the precision ag technology as well. And in Australia, no subsidies. So in Australia and New Zealand, they have to be productive. They are exposed to the raw market. So we see Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, South America, North America, and Europe all very strong adapters of precision ag.
Got it. If anyone has any questions as I go along, just raise your hand. I got one over here.
Thank you. Could you talk a little bit about some of the differences between the first-fit solution with Fendt and then the retrofit? Maybe just, talk about the kind of adoption rates you've seen of the first fit versus retrofit, and maybe the, the customer demographic as well.
Yeah. So the retrofit area is where we put our cutting-edge technology. When we first come out with a new feature, we actually start it in the retrofit market and apply it to an entire marketplace through all brands. Now, these are probably, if you had to describe or stereotype that customer, it's the innovator customer that wants the absolute peak performance, and is willing to go through the steps of retrofitting their equipment. So they're getting it at a lower cost, but they need to take off some modules of their existing machine and put these new technology modules on. So there's a kind of an extra step there. That's what that marketplace looks like, and we have an entire channel that's focused on retrofit.
We are unlike any other OEM in the marketplace, where we have a secondary, when I say channel, a set of dealers all around the world that only focus on this all-makes retrofit business. So that's kind of what that customer's like. Sorry. I'm not sure what... So that's what that customer looks like.
After it's been in the market 2 or 3 years, you then have the maturity, you know, that feature is stable, it's kind of well known, well recognized, and says, "Okay, I can count on that kind of outcome from that feature." Then, we start offering it through the OEM channel, where someone can get it from the factory turnkey and say, "I just want the whole thing to come to me, like the whole planter, the whole sprayer, from the factory, ready to go." That customer is usually one that just wants their fleet. They want more of a turnkey solution, and maybe are willing to not be on the bleeding edge of the latest and greatest technology, but they get more convenience. So that's how we see the two differences.
Those go through our regular machinery OEM channel. Two different dealer networks, serving two different marketplaces.
Can you maybe talk about the bottom line implications for AGCO in terms of, you know, precision? I'm sure that it's not just one size fits all, but in aggregate, your precision offerings, and just to level set everyone, we're talking, what, $850-$900 million of revenue. Where are we in terms of, to the level you wanna disclose, how the profitability of your precision offering stacks up versus, say, your, your-
Mm
... enterprise-level margin?
If you look at just our Precision Ag module business, that's our combination of Precision Planting and some of the companies we bought, plus our internal brand, just the modules we call Fuse. That's grown, and we're targeting $800 million-$850 million this year. We've committed to about $1 billion by 2025. I think we'll probably get there even earlier than that. And that's just on the module development on technology. This has been a fast-growing. We bought Precision Planting in 2017. The year before we bought it, it was at $95 million in sales, and our Fuse business was kind of similar. So we've grown from, you know, sub $200 million to now $850 million in 5 or 6 years, and so it's on a very high growth rate.
20+% , you know, 15%-20% growth rate, and strong margins. It's, you know, our, our service parts business is probably our highest margin business. This one's in that—it's in that similar basket, where service parts is about twice the average margin of our company. This is also quite high-margin business because you're adding a lot of value to farmers. We still want to develop a 1-2-year payback for the farmer, but we end up capturing a lot, a lot of that value, too. Rule of thumb, if we generate a, a value of 100, we'd like to split that 100, 50 to customer, 50 to us, and generate a 1-2-year payback for the customer. That's the projects we like. But that's only one piece.
The other piece is if you wanna buy that, that high-tech equipment on our own machinery, and when you combine the two, it's 35%-40% of our business in total. And especially as we've been taking Fendt to North and South America, it's been growing steadily. We've doubled our business in North America in a couple of years. We expect to double it again in about the next three or four. We've grown from, you know, about, well, 5 years ago, when we started this, we had about 40% market coverage for Fendt, and now we're up to about 70% or 75% market coverage. We've been turning on one dealer at a time when they've earned the right to sell Fendt in North America. Like I said, it's the absolute premium brand in terms of product, but we're insisting that it's the absolute premium dealer experience.
The overall Fendt experience has to be protected, and so every dealer has to come in and pitch to us why they have all of our criteria, which is a very high bar, to be able to become a Fendt dealer. Even a dealer ownership group that maybe has 25 stores, they don't get qualification on all 25. They get store-by-store qualification that says: "You have all the ingredients here to deliver on the Fendt experience," which is like nothing else in the marketplace. We have three-year bumper-to-bumper maintenance and warranty, so we remotely monitor the machine. We can say, "We're coming up on a service interval, 500 hours on your machine. We see next Tuesday it's gonna rain. How about we come out and service it?" Great! It's just handled.
It's a completely different experience than what the industry is used to. If you go more than a day or two without being able to repair, we have a guaranteed loaner that comes in. So it's a high-performance machine, high support, high connectivity to the customer. That's what Fendt's all about, and both of them, high margin, high growth.
I was at a precision dealer conference some years ago, and I remember one of the dealers that gave a presentation said, "Okay, I'm gonna do a poll. What do the dealers— How much of the technology do you think your average customer actually uses?
Mm.
He went around, and I think it was, like, 35%.
Yep, that's the number I would've said, yeah.
And I think, as you think what we've you know, what they were getting to is the equipment costs of... And this was before all this COVID and all, you know, not COVID, but all the, you know, dramatic price increases we've had the coupl epast few years, so that equation is even further increased. How do you assure, How, how do you get to the point where you raise that number so the grower actually says, "Okay, I'm getting the value here," versus it like you buying a computer, paying a lot of money, and then using Excel, you know?
Right
... as an example?
Yeah, you know that if you look at that channel that I talked about, this retrofit channel that's really focused on selling the precision ag technology gear, where the background of those people is typically an agronomist or a seed expert, somebody that, somebody who knows how a plant grows and how farmer economics work. And so, when we talk about what is their job, their primary job is to teach. It's not to sell. It's to teach. It's to teach farmers about what is their inherent problem, so they can go out into the field, what they typically do, 'cause the farmer, more often than not, is actually not saying, "I've got a depth management problem." They don't even realize they have a depth management problem.
But our channel will go out and say, "Let's look at your crop here. And I can see, look at the symptoms that we're seeing here, either poor spacing, poor height management, and things like that. Let's understand why. What's going on here?" And they'll dig up the plant, and they'll say, "Look what's happening here." They'll go right to the root cause, and they'll say, "Here's your issue. Now, let's talk about what we can do to solve it." So it's their probably 80% of their job is education. Education on the problem at the farm level, and then education on how to get the most out of their equipment to be able to solve that problem fundamentally, automatically. And the other thing is, that's why we're doing so much...
Many of these precision ag features weren't being used because they were complicated. That's what I started off with. Our whole mission is to automate them, put it in autopilot and say, "Just manage my plant population, manage my depth, manage my spray volume, my targeted spraying." 'Cause one of the other solutions we haven't talked about is our artificial intelligence solution to through vision systems, identify the difference between a plant and a weed and only spray the weed. Farmers today, all around the world, spray the entire field at max dose, regardless of where the weeds are. Same thing with pesticides, same thing with fertilizer. It's a, it's a broad-based application. It is the opposite of precision. It is just-
Imprecise.
Yeah, imprecise. It's just, it's covering everything to make sure you've got the areas that you want it. With our targeted spraying, we can do that automatically with the vision system. So the more you can automate it, the more you can make sure that the farmer just can't get it right, and it's super easy for them to do it.
Mm. Let's talk about just your position from a competitive standpoint within precision. I think there is a narrative that says, well, some of your larger competitors, one of which you spent some time at-
Yeah
... are you know further along, maybe have a more advanced offering. What's your response to that in terms of echoes?
The only thing I would grant is they spend more.
Hmm.
They spend a lot more, but if you... That's the input to the system. The output is what does the customer get? And if you take a look, you know, in neutral ways, we look at this thing in North America. There's one in every region, but in North America, there's called this AE50 Awards. It's the top ag innovations of the year. They look at every competitor, and they say, "What were the really good things that made a difference for customers?" They give out 50 of them every year. Last year, again, for the fourth or fifth year in a row, we got the most. Not only did we get the most, we had more than twice as much as any competitor, and we got more than four times as much as the one that you're referring to.
So it's not so much what you spend, it's are you innovative, and are you adding solutions? And I, I'm really super proud. I'm an engineer by training, and, so I love this intersection of innovation and farmer problems. I think we've got an absolute winner in terms of our innovation engine within the company, how we're extremely farmer-focused. Our statement is: If you don't have mud on your boots, you're not doing your job. You gotta be out with the customer. You gotta really understand their pain points. We've mapped all the pain points on the farm and prioritized them based on the impact to the customer and where we can improve farmer profitability.
That's the order we work them, not in the order of return to AGCO at first, because we know that when you start generating volume or value like that, not only do you start... You know, you get a profitable business, which we've shown we have, but you get a reputation in the market of, "Hey, they know me, they care about me, they solve my problems, and they make it easy." And that's the reputation we're creating. So whether you look at the awards that we're achieving or the reputation we're building, the growth rates we're having, you know, 15%-20% growth rates on our business, nothing else is growing like that. So, you know, I'm very, very proud of our innovation engine, and we're just getting going.
We've bought six companies in the last 2 or 3 years to accelerate. Like I said, we've increased our engineering budget by 60% since I was able to take the leadership role, and we're just getting going.
So that's what you bring to the table. What incentives or requirements are out there from the standpoint of the dealers? They are on the front line. They obviously play a key part in this as well. What sort of metrics are you holding them to in terms of making sure that they're continuing to invest? Because it requires a lot on the dealer's part as well.
Yeah. So on this, on the precision ag technology, we do a lot to help train them. So I've talked about the precision farms that we have around the world, where we have a laboratory that we'll bring customers through. So we help the dealers educate the dealers, and then we help the dealers. We co-educate the farmers. We have something called Winter Conference, where the farmers can come into central sites. We simulcast it all around. And you know, I go to it every year myself. There's something like 7,000 farmers, the best of the best farmers from all around the world. Last year, I was sitting next to some from Kazakhstan, and on my...
You know, on the other side was somebody from Australia, and in front of me was from family from Illinois. So farmers from all around the world are coming to learn the very best. So we spend a lot on helping educate on agronomy, on farmer economics, and how technology can solve those problems. We hold them accountable to standards, much like we do with the Fendt conversation about you have to go through your training, you have to be doing your job on making sure you've got the parts available and those types of things. But largely, we try and create a partner mindset that we're in this together with you to help educate the farming community.
Talk a little bit about how you ultimately what all you're talking about, how do you monetize this? Is it an upfront payment? Are you working towards more of like a SaaS-type model, where it's a recurring some combination of that? How would you characterize that?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Historically, farmers have not liked subscriptions. Some years they'll have a better crop, they'll have more profitability, and so they'll say, "You know what? I'd like to buy up, you know, more equipment this year, and get it all paid for, so that if I do have a bad crop year, then, you know, I'm covered a little bit." That's historically the behavior. I think that that's softening over time, and they're willing to take a look at more recurring revenue models.
Certainly for some of our newer technologies, like this targeted spraying, where we've got this artificial intelligence library that identifies what weed it is and how that's different from the crop, and then sends the signal to the sprayer that says, "Only spray the weed." That library will continue to get more and more mature every year, and so we'll offer a subscription model upgrade that says, you know, "Here's your price every year to have the latest and greatest." It'll continue to expand into more crops and more precision on weed-type identification, things like that. So that's a good example. Another example is we're the only ones that looked at soil science. We last year announced an automation of soil testing. Soil testing's been the same way for 100 years.
You take a probe out, and you shove it in the ground, put it in a bag, and you send it off to a lab. Depending on what lab you send it to, you may get 20%-30% variation in the crop, in the results you get back 2-3 weeks later. And, I'm not sure why that's doing that. It's turned off. So that whole process has been about the same for 100 years. We've created an entire soil lab automation system that we sell now, and it... We essentially, it's a recurring revenue model in that we sell the little cartridges. It's automatically. You know, you take the soil probe, automatically geo-stamped from where it was.
It goes to the your own lab, automatically processes through the 27 steps that are required to do the soil sampling, and a few hours later, you've got a result. That's gonna help with farming today, as well as this move into more and more focus on carbon sequestration. We wanna make understanding the soil properties more of a science than an art, and so that would be another example of recurring revenue that we see.
Got it. Maybe we'll let you catch your breath a little bit. Damon, one for you. I think at the Analyst Day back in December last year, you outlined a target from at mid-cycle volume, you know, targeting 9% margins-
Mm-hmm.
- and getting that up to 12, and there was a bunch of components that you expect, you know, you expect to enable that. Where do you think, as we sit here today, are there initiatives or buckets within that that you think maybe you're ahead of schedule, or conversely, are areas where it may maybe take longer to realize? How would you frame that?
Yeah. So I think we're doing very well relative to that mid-cycle target that we mentioned. Tim, as you said, last year we finished the year at 10.3% margin, and you come down to mid-cycle, that was around 9% that you alluded to. We're taking that up. Our plan is to take that up to 2% to 3% by 2026. What I said at the conference was about half of that was coming from our three growth drivers. So that's the Fendt market share expansion that Eric was alluding to in North America and South America, and having the full line portfolio in Europe. That's the continued growth of our precision ag business. So again, as Eric said, that's growing 15%-20% per annum.
We're up about 23% year to date in that business, high margin growth. And then the third one is our parts business. Parts have been growing sort of high single digits, around 8% the last couple of years, as we continue to increase the penetration rate to the dealer and the dealer to the farmer, you know, we see continued opportunities to improve that. So those big three growth engines are driving margin and top-line growth. That's about half of that. The other half of that's coming from more what I'll call our optimization areas. So areas like Massey Ferguson, which is a global brand that we have around the world, you know, we've looked at trying to commonize platforms, reduce the number of platforms for efficiencies, you know, improve the dealer network there for better pricing and better market share opportunity.
Our Grain and Protein business, which sells the silos and other parts in the protein channel, that has been going through some restructuring over the last couple of years. It's been dealt with some challenging market conditions, steel prices last year. China's been a big challenge for them. So as those two markets start to improve, coupled with restructuring, we see good momentum improving the profitability there. And then the third part in this optimization bucket is what I'll call manufacturing efficiency. So for the last couple of years with supply chain, we've been really inefficient in our factories, making a tractor or a combine, not having all the products, having to go into the yard, put the pieces back together, running the line at suboptimal speeds.
So as we start to see supply chain improving, which it has been improving, we expect to see that productivity and then get more into the continuous improvement mindset of operational efficiency. So those three are driving the other 50%. If I say what's been doing really well, Fendt, Precision. The growth engines have been doing great, and I would tell you, Massey Ferguson, of those optimizations, has performed really well since our December investor meeting in capturing share and driving productivity. Manufacturing efficiency, good. Still not perfect with the supply chain. And then I'd say Grain and Protein has gotten better this year, but maybe not as the speed as what we'd like, mainly because China. Again, we expected as China was coming out of the COVID lockdown a year and a half ago, we expected to see an improvement in there.
That economy still is challenged, and we're seeing that with some of the protein growers really not investing as quickly as we'd like.
So with the remaining time, maybe let's just talk about the state of affairs.
Mm-hmm.
Some markets where you have a little bit more, you know, there's a little bit more early order activity-
Mm.
A little bit more that you can glean from kind of lead indicators. Maybe talk through your key markets and what you're seeing and here, as you've, in some cases, opened up order boards into 2024.
Sure. Yeah. So just as a reminder to the team, what we said on our second quarter call is for North America, we were booked into the early part of 2024. We have opened some of the early order programs for the larger equipment and implements. So if we look at it today, what we would tell you is our sprayer business in North America, our track tractor business in North America, and our planter business, we are effectively sold out for model year 2024. So that sort of goes back half of this year into the, you know, middle, later half of next year. So we're effectively sold out there. In Europe, what we said on our third quarter call was that we had orders into early 2024, and I would say we're still sort of in that time frame.
We have sort of a continuous ordering program for, for tractors over there, so sort of continued momentum there. And then South America, the group may remember, we usually have been opening that one quarter in advance to make sure that we're getting the right pricing out there. Since our second quarter call, we have opened the order book for the Massey Ferguson brand in South America, mainly in Brazil. I would tell you, we opened it for 2 days, and we had over 90% of the orders filled. So again, very strong momentum still in South America. Maybe not as strong as it was a year ago, but again, if we look at that, within 2 days to get over 90% of the order is very strong. We have not opened Fendt or Valtra yet.
That'll happen still this month, but again, all indications are with the new crop plan, information out there, that financing sort of flowing through the system, we're seeing Brazil continue to be relatively strong.
Good. Thanks for the time-
Thank you.
Timothy.
Thank you.