The 1992 release of Yield Monitor 2000 — the first commercially successful on-the-go yield monitor — was a historic moment in the emerging world of precision agriculture. It was the brainchild of Al Myers, Ag Leader founder and president, who never imagined the company would become what it is today when he spent years tinkering with the prototype in his basement.

“I was just plain dumb lucky,” Myers said during an interview with Mike Lessiter for Farm Equipment’s How We Did It podcast. “In 1992, I did not recognize how big precision farming would be, or the advancements that were coming.”

Based in Ames, Iowa, Ag Leader is now the largest privately- owned supplier of precision farming technology in the world, with nearly 400 employees, offices in The Netherlands, Australia and Brazil, and an expansive dealer network. 

Myers’ background in agriculture and engineering uniquely positioned him to recognize the untapped potential of technology in crop production. A tenacity to continually raise the bar in product development and a talent for hiring like-minded employees eventually catapulted the company to new heights in the precision ag landscape.  

Origin Story

Myers grew up in Watseka, Ill., about 90 miles south of Chicago. He worked on his father’s diversified crop and livestock farm and was mechanically inclined. This caught the eye of his vocational agriculture teacher, who then suggested a career path in engineering. A senior trip to the University of Illinois provided a spark.  

“I was fascinated with the things I saw there, walking through the different engineering departments, so I enrolled in engineering and never looked back,” Myers says. “I got my Bachelor of Science degree in 1970 and later a Master of Science in Agricultural Engineering.”

Myers hoped for a job with John Deere or Caterpillar, both headquartered close to his hometown, but the economy had other plans. The year he graduated, there was a recession in the off-road machinery market, and those dream job offers never came. 

“I ended up working at Sundstrand Corp. in Rockford, Ill.,” Myers says. “They focused primarily on aerospace, but I worked in a division that was trying to develop some high-pressure hydraulics. It merged into the hydro-transmission plant in Ames, Iowa, now called Danfoss.”

Myers worked in Rockford for less than a year before transferring to Ames. The economic problems soon expanded to other industries and eventually nudged him down a different path.

“Once 1981 hit and the big slide started, sales of their products were down 6 years in a row, which led to research and development cuts,” Myers says. “I like to develop new products and wasn't happy with my job, but had a young family then, so I couldn't do something different.

“Going out on my own was a big step,” Myers recalls. “I'd never been laid off like many people who I knew in those recession years. I had a secure job with a good salary and benefits, so it was like stepping off a cliff. I had young children when I started the company: one was 13 years old, and the other was 11. My wife didn't say so, but kind of wondered, ‘Is this guy crazy?’ I was obsessed with being successful and finally took the big step.”

The Yield Monitor 2000 was introduced in 1992 and paved the way for Ag Leader’s continued success. Ag Leader

Myers often dreamed of starting a company and developing products on his own. He remembers countless brainstorming sessions in his free time, one of which lead to a light bulb moment in the mid-80s. 

“I thought a combine yield monitor would be useful to farmers,” Myers says. “My dad was still farming, and I put a crude prototype on his combine in the fall of 1986 and kept refining it.”

Early Days

Myers spent roughly 6 years developing and testing the yield monitors, working alongside 3 field testers. It wasn’t until 1992 that he was satisfied with the product, and Ag Leader was born. 

“The first year the product was out, in June of 1992, I thought I could sell 30-40 units,” Myers says. “I sold 10, and at least half of them were to people who I had personal connections with. With less than $30,000 in total sales, I didn't make money that year, but it was just me, so my expenses were pretty low.”

What Myers lacked in sales he made up for in business lessons, like cash flow 101. 

“You have to keep cash flowing — that’s the lifeblood of the business,” Myers says. “It’s different than with startups today because there are a bunch of them that go out and collect venture capital. When I started, venture capital was unknown in this part of the country. I wouldn't have gone after that even if it were, though, because I wanted to be in control of the company. It was very important to manage expenses in the beginning. I had nothing other than the money that I could spare from my full-time job, with two kids and a mortgage.”

Myers worked alone at home during the first 6 months of the company, but as winter approached, he realized the need for expansion. He rented a small office space for his employees, who at the time were mostly part-time university students. A little over a year later, Myers hired his first full-time employee.

“If you ask Al if he thought he’d have this kind of impact on precision ag when he started the company, he’d say no,” says Russ Morman, who has been with Ag Leader since 1997 and currently works in the marketing department. “If memory serves me correctly, the first yield monitor he came out with didn’t even have a GPS port on it because he thought nobody’s going to want a map.” 

Retail price on the first yield monitor was $2,250 — almost 10 times what farmers were paying at the time for any technology add-on. A moisture sensor, added the second year, increased the price to $2,750. Farmers were slow to buy in. First-year sales were nothing to write home about, but early customers were astonished by what the new tool could accomplish.  

“I know a local farmer who bought one of the first 10 monitors I sold,” Myers says. “He had one field that was having poor soybean yields and eventually figured out that he had cyst nematode moving into his soil and he wouldn’t have known that otherwise. He also found that drift from fungicide he was spraying on seed corn was improving bean yields in certain areas.”

Gaining Traction

Myers racked up the mileage during his second selling season, visiting John Deere dealers within an 80-mile radius of Ames. Although Myers knew he had to establish a dealer network, he wasn’t quite sure how to do it until his first farm show in Peoria, Ill., after the 1992 harvest season. 

“Independent manufacturers’ representatives — which I didn't even know existed — stopped by our booth,” Myers recalls. “I started hooking up with some of those folks. They were good for me because they had the connections to the implement dealers.”

As business continued to grow in the early ’90s, a huge break came when Myers was contacted by Case IH in 1994. The following year, the OEM put 60 yield monitor systems in fields as part of a large test program. 

“I thought we might get into the OEM business, but I wasn't expecting it that early,” Myers says. “They went into production in March 1996. I think that after a full year with them, OEM sales might have been 40% of my total, but over the years, our aftermarket sales grew more than OEM sales. For a long time, we've maintained about 75% aftermarket and 25% OEM sales.”

Reflecting on those early days, Myers says he had no indication of the precision farming boom that lay ahead. 

“I anticipated making maps with dead reckoning and compasses,” he recalls. “Global positioning came along a couple years after I started the business and was becoming usable. As GPS made mapping practical, it became obvious that people wanted the whole system ready to just plug in and go.”

“We took a single product that Al introduced to the world in 1992 and morphed it into everything that you see today in these tractors,” Morman says. “Steering systems, nozzle by nozzle sprayer control, accurate planting systems, all this stuff came from the competition that Al brought to the industry with that first on-the-go yield monitor.” 

New Era

Myers recognized that advanced users were looking for yield maps coupled with analytics, and that meant the company would need to offer software. In 1996, Ag Leader unveiled the GPS 2000, a stand-alone receiver and antenna system capable of basic field mapping, allowing data to be tied spatially so a yield map could be produced. As technological tools were rapidly changing the face of agriculture, not all farmers were able to adapt, Myers recalls. 

“That was a real struggle in the beginning, and that's one of the reasons we developed a very strong technical support department,” he says. “It was a struggle to get most farmers trained. In the beginning, practically none of those who were buying yield monitors had even touched a computer before. ”

Myers views 2004 as the dawn of the modern era for Ag Leader. The company introduced the InSight display and started transitioning its products to the CAN bus type of electric architecture that most farm machinery was moving toward at the time. 

“That really gave us the platform for expanding into all these different functions that we have now,” Myers says. “Prior to the InSight display, we did grain and cotton yield monitoring and some planter and spreader control, but that's all we could do. The InSight and CAN bus architecture really opened the future for us. We were able to introduce the first reliable, easy to use, large color touchscreen display in agriculture. It was not the first color display, but it was a giant step ahead.”

It was around this time that Al’s youngest son, Mike Myers, became a key player for the Ag Leader team.  

“I was at Iowa State for computer engineering and was working in the engineering department full-time in the summers,” Mike said on a recent Ag Leader podcast. “Before my senior year, Al came to me and asked if I’d mind taking a semester off from school. I didn’t really like that idea, but we were working on the InSight display, and it had to get done by the end of winter so that we could ship it on time.”

Mike put his aspirations of working for Apple or Microsoft on hold and agreed to help his dad out. He went to Iowa State part-time and worked 25-30 hours a week doing engineering for Ag Leader.

“And when I graduated from Iowa State, it seemed obvious to me that I could bring a lot of value to the company, so I basically just stuck around after that.” 

Team Building

Al Myers’ insatiable appetite for innovation is a quality that’s been instilled in his employees over the years.

“Al is a very humble leader,” Morman says. “He’s still involved every day with the business. He’s a very hands-on guy because he’s an engineer. Everybody in the company has the same goal — to make products that allow the grower to become more efficient. Everybody knows which direction we need to go because Al instilled that in all of us.” 

“It was an advantage for me to build the engineering department,” Myers says. “I knew the mechanical engineering end of things and did my own electronics and programming in the beginning, but I needed to bring in people who had strong expertise in that. I also built a very strong management staff, and with our capable engineering department, we can produce products of OEM or better quality.” 

Mike Myers, currently the vice president of engineering and finance, is set to follow in his dad’s footsteps and continue the tradition of innovation at Ag Leader.  

Many of Ag Leader’s new employees are fresh out of school, and, in most cases, come from a farming background. Al Myers challenges his team to find direction — literally — from the field to stay ahead of the curve. 

“I have a whole department of product managers and specialists doing market research by going out and riding with farmers, talking with them and walking in their fields,” Myers says. “Our challenge is to keep our existing product lines viable by introducing enhancements. We also put every penny we can into research and development. You have to put the R&D effort into new products to stay ahead of the game. We are always trying to figure out the next thing that the farmer is going to need and want out of technology.” 

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