John Deere laying off 75 employees at Ottumwa plant in early 2025

OTTUMWA, Iowa (Iowa’s News Now) — John Deere announced a mass layoff that will affect 75 employees at its Ottumwa facility.

According to the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) site, the announcement was made Monday. The layoffs will go into effect on Feb. 7.

This comes after John Deere Ottumwa Works temporary shut down the plant in early December. They say the shutdown was a response to reduced customer demand for agricultural equipment. The plant is now reopened.

Iowa’s News Now asked John Deere about the layoffs and they sent this statement in response: “As was recently stated in our fourth quarter earnings report, challenging market conditions continue to result in reduced demand for our equipment with projected earnings for 2025 down $5B from 2023 when earnings were $10.1B. To remain globally competitive, we must continue making workforce adjustments as needed to our manufacturing footprint. Today, we’ve informed employees at our Ottumwa, Iowa, facility that approximately 75 production employees will be placed on indefinite layoff effective Feb. 7.”

John Deere provided these reasons for why orders are down:

• As of December, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) forecast major row-crop cash receipts to be down another 16% in 2024, following an 8% decline in 2023.
• The USDA also forecasts marketing year average prices for the new crop (recently harvested) to continue to decline from 2023 and to be down over 30% compared to a couple of years ago (compared to 2022: corn -37%, soybeans -24%, and wheat -37%).
• Despite some interest rate reductions, the current interest rate level is still elevated compared to recent history.

The company will be offered affected employees transition assistance, which may include severance packages.

This is part of a string of layoffs at John Deere just in the last week. On Jan. 3, 112 employees were laid off at the Waterloo facility and 80 were laid off at John Deere Davenport Works.

In all, 1,740 John Deere employees have been laid off in the last ten months.