Dec. 6, 2021

As Raven Industries officially became part of global agriculture ag equipment company CNH Industrial last week, which member of the corporate leadership team who was on the ground in Sioux Falls said a lot about how Raven might fit into the larger equation.

Parag Garg is the chief digital officer for CNHi, named to the role earlier this year following four years as vice president of product technology at T-Mobile US Inc. His resume includes program- and product-related roles at Microsoft, Amazon and Sears Holdings.

So for Garg, who leads teams worldwide, to survey the landscape in Sioux Falls and declare the Raven office “one of our highest concentrations of tech talent” says something.

“It’s really the West Coast of the Midwest,” he said. “We look at this as a tech innovation hub and a community we’ll continue to invest in.”

That’s more than talk, it seems. Raven recently acquired 48 acres to expand its Innovation Campus near Baltic, where new tech products are developed and tested.

It’s also in hiring mode in Sioux Falls, looking for a huge range of positions and skill sets.

“Cloud developers, embedded developers, electrical engineers, data scientists, AI, machine learning, really the engineering gamut,” Garg said. “Technical product management, technical program management. The beauty of this area is we have such a diverse, collective group of talent that can already do end-to-end work that it’s easy to fit in more talent and continue to bring up scale.”

Operations and professional support roles from marketing to customer service are needed too.

In short: “We’re hiring, we’re hiring, we’re hiring,” Garg said. “We need as many people as we can possibly get.”

Leadership shifts

While Garg will interface often with Raven, the general manager in Sioux Falls for CNHi will be Eric Shuman, who has been with the company for 21 years and is relocating from Wisconsin, where he mostly recently served as vice president for the global product line in harvesting. His career at CNHi has included assignments in Italy and Spain, and he has spent the past decade leading global teams in quality, product management, manufacturing and product development.

Former Raven CEO Dan Rykus has assumed the role of part-time strategic adviser for the CNHi executive leadership team. Rykhus joined Raven as an intern in 1990 and had served as president and CEO since 2010.

“There’s challenges when you put a small company into a big company,” he said. “A couple things we have to stay focused on is speed and entrepreneurialism. We have to move faster than the competition, and it gets harder when you get into a larger company, and we’re mindful of that and have plans to ensure we stay that way.”

CNHi brings a significant opportunity to accelerate Raven’s efforts, though, Rykhus said. Raven, as a company with $400 million in annual revenue, invested $20 million to $30 million each year in growing its autonomous ag technology. CNHi, a company with $26 billion in annual revenue, “spends multiples of our R&D budget every year,” Rykhus said.

“And they’re the second-largest ag OEM (original equipment manufacturer) in the world, and all this technology gets to efficiently go into those machines. … It’s a really good next step for the Raven technology. We’ve invested really well, but we’re small compared to (CNHi), and the investment is just going to go off the charts.”

Raven’s applied technology division, which focuses on technology for agriculture-related uses such as autonomous equipment, is what attracted CNHi, which stands for Case New Holland Industrial. The company designs, manufactures and sells agricultural and construction machinery and equipment.

In addition to integrating Raven technology into its own products, CNHi anticipates selling Raven products to others in the industry.

The first in-house products featuring fully integrated Raven precision agriculture systems will become available next year and continue to carry the Raven name.

“Raven is a fantastic company, and they touched a lot of lives, and I think the thing that makes this integration with CNH amazing is you get worldwide reach, this global scale,” Garg said.

Rykhus’s transition will be for an undetermined amount of time and include continuing to lead Raven’s other two divisions, engineered films and Aerostar, as they likely will be sold off at some point.

“I think we need to just take it a quarter at a time and see how it goes,” he said. “I could see it going on for quite a while.”

Future focus

For now, engineered films and Aerostar both continue to grow from Sioux Falls. The Aerostar operation will be moving into the former Colorado Technical University building at 3901 W. 59th St. and out of other facilities, including the downtown headquarters.

“Aerostar is growing their tech talent, and ATD (the applied technology division) is growing their tech talent as a result of the CNHi investment, and we have to have more space,” Rykhus said.

He said while he anticipates both divisions will draw acquisition interest from companies in their respective industries, he also thinks they will continue to have a presence in Sioux Falls.

“We built a single one Raven,” Rykhus said. “It isn’t without emotion that we understand this is going to all change, but people here understand the business sense behind it.”

Raven’s more than 1,300-person team includes 638 employees dedicated to applied technology, of which 468 are based in Sioux Falls. All 117 centralized services employees are in Sioux Falls. But regardless of what happens to the other two divisions, Raven employees will have a role within CNH Industrial, Rykhus said.

“From the beginning, CNHi has told us they intend to grow employment here, and they really need and want just about everybody that’s on the Raven team,” he said. “These centralized functions like HR, finance, legal, there’s work for everybody on those teams.”

The leadership team within Raven will include:

• Margaret Carmody, focusing on marketing, communications and community relations.
• Nicole Freesemann, focusing on human resources.
• Anthony Schmidt, focusing on IT and facilities.
• Jake Wurth, focusing on accounting.

Scott Wickersham will continue to lead the engineered films operation, and Jim Nelson will continue to lead Aerostar.

Raven plans to continue its ground-up approach to developing talent, Rykhus added.

That includes everything from hosting open houses for high school students and an immersive college internship experience to investing in STEM programs through Girl Scouts to encourage more women to pursue technical occupations. The Raven Precision Agriculture Center at South Dakota State University opened this fall, supporting the university’s bachelor’s degree and minor in precision agriculture as well as students studying agricultural and biosystems engineering, agricultural systems technology, agronomy and agricultural science.

From CNHi’s perspective, “it’s a no-brainer to invest here and bring more opportunities into the market,” Garg said. “You have an innovation farm and campus so close, you have a world-class facility in the heart of the city, you have great talent in the community and people with relevant experience. This is a farming community, and you’ve built a fantastic epicenter in a relevant location. It’s not one ingredient. It’s everything.”