Engineering grads Klemme, Warntjes to be honored

Two engineering graduates who have become pioneers in their field of expertise will be honored as Distinguished Engineers by the Jerome J. Lohr College of Engineering at South Dakota State University April 28.

Selected as the 2026 Distinguished Engineers are Kent Klemme and Steve Warntjes.

Kent Klemme, who earned bachelor’s and master’s degree in agricultural and biosystems engineering, lives in Apex, North Carolina, and serves as director of engineering for turf and compact utility products with John Deere, in Cary, North Carolina. Steve Warntjes, a 1983 electrical engineering graduate, is senior vice president of diversified business unit engineering and test development for Mini-Circuits, a multimillion, multinational producer of radio frequency components, subsystems and automated test equipment.

The pair will be honored at the April 28 Engineering Awards Banquet in Volstorff Ballroom in the University Student Union on the SDSU campus. The 6:30 p.m. reception will be followed by the 7 p.m. dinner. The awards, which includes recognition of faculty and staff excellence awards and scholarship recipients, follow the dinner.

Tickets ($20) are available for the general public and must be purchased by April 14 through the college’s website.

For questions on tickets, contact the college’s event coordinator, Jenny Bickett, by email or call 605-688-6792.

Klemme

Klemme, a native of Le Mars, Iowa, has had a quarter-century of successes with John Deere.

He was a pioneer in precision agriculture before that was even a term. During his graduate studies under Don Froehlich, he developed a yield monitor based on a field grid system. In his first postgraduate position, he and friend formed an “ahead-of-its-time” company that developed precision ag applications.

After one year, he joined Ag-Chem Equipment designing sprayers and applicators.

Klemme joined John Deere in 2001 as a project engineer and quickly gained more managerial duties. He became the manager for product development in the Netherlands after Deere had bought a company there and later led the sprayer design team for Deere. In 2016, Klemme was named president of Hagie Manufacturing, a joint venture between the well-established Iowa spraying manufacturer and Deere.

In 2020, Klemme became vice president of Blue River Technology, where his responsibility was to oversee the advancement of a sustainable sprayer.

By March 2022, the See & Spray sprayer was on the market. This revolutionary product created a new standard for precision agriculture by reducing herbicide use by up to two-thirds with cameras and AI models to spray only weeds.

In his current position, he seeks to bring precision technologies to turf markets.

Klemme and his wife, Wendy (Cragoe), a 1991 SDSU pharmacy graduate, have two sons and two grandsons.

Warntjes

Warntjes, originally of Sheldon, Iowa, enrolled at SDSU at a time when the computer field was just emerging.

Today his resume includes top management positions with National Instruments, Advanced Mirco Devices and Agilent Technologies, a spin-off of Hewlett-Packard Industries.

His work in research and development at Hewlett-Packard gave him lasting name recognition in the field of electrical engineering. Leading a team of 15 engineers at HP in Colorado Springs, in 1996 Warntjes and team invented the mixed-signal oscilloscope, now a standard tool for any electrical engineer.

After a two-year position with HP in Amsterdam, he returned stateside in 1993 as oscilloscope project manager. Oscilloscopes at that time typically had four channels, greatly limiting the amount of electrical signals engineers could view at one time.

By 1996, the Packard HP 54645D, a scope plus16-channel logic analyzer, was on the market.

HP’s mixed-signal oscilloscopes gained top position in the oscilloscope market after Tektronix had dominated it for nearly 50 years. Today the global oscilloscope market is estimated at $3 billion per year, and mixed-signal oscilloscopes represent two-thirds of that.

By 2010, he was leading research and development for National Instruments Corp. In 2014, he guided a digitizer/oscilloscope project that earned the Best of Test award for the firm.

Warntjes and his wife, Susan, live in Austin, Texas, where both participate in the martial arts. They have a daughter, who lives in New York City. He has a stepdaughter in Denver and a stepson in Austin.