Raven Industries Brand Guidelines: Sioux Falls Balloons, OMNiDRIVE and a CNH Brand Since 2021

Four balloon engineers and an old airbase.

Raven Industries was founded in 1956 in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, to build research balloons for the United States Navy. English Wikipedia names its founders as James Smith, Paul “Ed” Yost, Duwayne Thon and Joseph Kaliszewski, who had worked together in the aeronautical research division of General Mills. The new company made polyethylene balloons for very high altitudes and worked at first out of an old hospital building on an abandoned Second World War airbase; in 1961 it moved into the former Manchester Biscuit Company building.

Balloons took Raven somewhere few would guess from its later business. On 22 October 1960, Wikipedia records, Yost built and flew a hot-air balloon about forty feet across for three miles, the start of a chain of events that revived sport ballooning; Raven, Piccard Balloons and Semco were among the first makers of the new hot-air balloons. Demand grew so much that Raven set up a subsidiary, Aerostar, to concentrate on balloon production. By the 1980s it was selling more than 200 balloons a year, Wikipedia says, and in 1966 it had added a larger plant near the Sioux Falls airport. It stopped making hot-air balloons in 2007, citing the cost of liability insurance and a shrinking market.

The balloon work stayed visible for decades. Between 1984 and 2019 Raven made hundreds of balloons and other inflatables for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, and from 2012 to 2021 Aerostar worked with Loon, then part of Alphabet, on high-altitude communications balloons, according to Wikipedia.

Applied Technology and the OMNi push.

Alongside the balloons grew a farm business. By 2021 Raven was organised into three divisions, Applied Technology, Engineered Films and Aerostar, Progressive Farmer reported in its August 2021 issue. Applied Technology was the precision-agriculture arm, with products for application control, guidance and steering, field computers, boom control, cloud services and logistics, and injection. CNH Industrial was already its largest single customer, the magazine said, and the two companies had a long technology partnership.

Raven was also moving toward autonomy. Before the CNH deal it bought the intellectual property and patents of Jaybridge Robotics, announced on 7 April 2021, a portfolio that Progressive Farmer said covered path planning, obstacle detection and avoidance, and control of several machines at once. It also grouped its autonomy work under a new brand, OMNi. Under that scheme the AutoCart name, which came with Raven’s earlier purchase of Smart Ag, became OMNiDRIVE, and a self-propelled platform called DOT became OMNiPOWER, carrying interchangeable implements for spreading and spraying, Progressive Farmer reported.

Farms.com described OMNiDRIVE’s harvest application in November 2022. The kit fits existing machines: the combine operator calls a driverless tractor pulling a grain cart to the harvester, unloads, and sends the tractor back to a staging area, with one person controlling both machines through a tablet-based interface. By then, the site noted, Raven was part of CNH Industrial.

How precision farming presents itself.

Precision-farming and agricultural-robot companies sell technology that most people never see up close, so their imagery has to do a lot of explaining. The most familiar picture is a machine working a long crop row, shot low and often in the warm light of early morning or evening, with the rows running away toward the horizon. It speaks of scale and repetition: the field is large, and the machine passes over every metre of it.

The second recurring picture is the screen. Guidance and control makers show in-cab displays filled with colour field maps — bands of colour for harvest, seeding or coverage — with a small tractor or sprayer icon tracing its path. Drone-eye views of fields do similar work from outside the cab, turning a farm into a grid, a patchwork or a set of passes that reads almost like a diagram.

People appear too, usually as working figures rather than models: a farmer at the edge of a field holding a tablet, an engineer kneeling beside a robot between the plants, a dealer pointing at a display. Robot makers lean on close-ups of cameras, solar panels and wheels, and on small machines set against wide open ground.

Much of this imagery is made for the trade-show calendar. Launches cluster around large events such as Agritechnica in Hanover, World FIRA, the agricultural-robotics meeting in France, and the Farm Progress Show in the American Midwest, where companies build branded stands, demonstration plots and live field runs. For a designer the visual language is consistent: greens and earth tones taken from the field, high-contrast interface colour taken from the screens, and clean sans-serif type that looks at home on a display.

A CNH brand since November 2021.

CNH Industrial completed its acquisition of Raven on 30 November 2021, according to CNH’s announcement that day, ending Raven’s time as a Nasdaq-listed company. CNH chief executive Scott Wine had described the purchase to Progressive Farmer as buying “a tech hub in Sioux Falls.” CNH kept the precision-agriculture business and let the rest go: Engineered Films went to the private-equity firm Industrial Opportunity Partners, and Aerostar went to TCOM Holdings in 2021, Wikipedia says. CNH said the first of its own machines with fully integrated Raven systems would arrive in 2022.

Investment followed. In March 2022 CNH opened an engineering centre in Scottsdale, Arizona, to support the Raven business and announced plans to expand Raven’s Innovation Campus near Baltic, South Dakota, Power Progress reported, with the aim of bringing Raven technology to the Case IH and New Holland platforms.

Raven today is a brand inside CNH rather than a separate company. CNH’s June 2025 press materials list it among the group’s regionally focused brands and describe it, in CNH’s own words, as a leader in digital agriculture, precision technology and autonomous systems. In April 2025 the Sioux Falls Development Foundation reported that CNH employs about 500 people in Sioux Falls, across a downtown office and industrial space near the airport, where the Raven legacy continues, with the work still centred on spraying and spreading technology. The same report says the CNH precision team in Sioux Falls was also integrating Augmenta, a Greek machine-vision company CNH bought in 2023, and testing new products at an expanded innovation campus north of the city. The local ties run further: the Raven Precision Agriculture Center at South Dakota State University opened in the autumn of 2021, according to Wikipedia.

For a design guide, Raven Industries shows how one name can travel from balloons above the clouds to controls in a sprayer cab, and then into a larger group, without losing its identity. Compare Case IH and New Holland, the CNH machinery brands its technology now serves. For this guide we use raven slate, ink, prairie-sky grey and signal orange with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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