[HN Gopher] For tech-weary Midwest farmers, 40-year-old tractors...
___________________________________________________________________
For tech-weary Midwest farmers, 40-year-old tractors now a hot
commodity
Author : sbuccini
Score : 302 points
Date : 2020-01-06 18:23 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.startribune.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.startribune.com)
| bondolo wrote:
| I learned to drive tractor on a John Deere 4240! It is good to
| know that my skills stacking and loading round bales, plowing,
| discing and harrowing are still viable.
| melling wrote:
| " They cost a fraction of the price, and then the operating costs
| are much less because they're so much easier to fix," he said."
|
| It's not really so much a technology problem as the ability to
| repair, probably by the farmers themselves.
|
| Companies don't make it easy. You need special equipment, tools,
| etc.
|
| We could insist on a right to repair, open standards, etc
| maxmalysh wrote:
| Vote with your wallet.
| pmiller2 wrote:
| That seems to be what this article is describing.
| xtian wrote:
| Vote with your vote. As far as I know only two candidates in
| the presidential primary race support right-to-repair:
| Sanders and Warren.
| pleasantpeasant wrote:
| Yet, farmers will keep voting against their interests and
| vote for a Republican who is being lobbied by these same
| companies taking away their right-to-repair.
| xtian wrote:
| That remains to be seen, but if all that's on offer are
| corporate-backed candidates then the Republican strategy
| of focusing on cultural issues will definitely win in
| rural areas.
| xupybd wrote:
| Farmers have complex interests. Right to repair is not
| the only issue they will be voting on.
| vajrabum wrote:
| No there's also how tarrifs affect export markets, among
| a few others, but that one hits pretty close to home for
| a lot of the really big ag operators.
| viator wrote:
| Because the shortest path to fixing anything is always
| electing a politician who knows nothing about that thing,
| in order to have them approve legislation written by other
| people who know nothing about that thing, that demands that
| companies do a thing. That _always_ works great.
| xtian wrote:
| Certainly all the greatest societal reforms have been
| brought about by individual purchasing decisions.
| viator wrote:
| Followed closely by the second most influential action,
| encouraging other people to vote the same way you do in
| website comments on articles that don't pertain to
| elections.
|
| Good luck, Mssr. Quixote.
| [deleted]
| xtian wrote:
| I would encourage everyone to vote for the candidates who
| best represent their values even though voting by itself
| does not produce meaningful change.
| svachalek wrote:
| I think voting with your wallet is the more sensible
| approach to getting the products you want, but we also need
| politicians to stop passing crazy laws that make it illegal
| for you to even attempt repairing your own possessions.
| privateSFacct wrote:
| All good ideas, but repairing surface mount / integrated / dust
| and vibration glued parts is not as easy EVEN IF they were open
| standards as a 40 year old tractor is to repair. I spent way to
| long repairing an old gas engine, it was super simple in terms
| of operating approach. Opening the hood on my new car - the
| fixes are not as obvious.
| lonelappde wrote:
| If the machine used standard specs and protocols, you could
| buy replacement boards on a competitive open market.
| ziftface wrote:
| I can't help but think that this is intentional. I'm pretty
| sure it's possible to create a more modular design without
| sacrificing anything. Especially given John Deere's record,
| it doesn't seem far fetched that they would actively seek out
| ways to make it more difficult to repair their tractors.
| asdff wrote:
| It's definitely intentional. You pop the hood of a new car
| and you see a plastic cover, not the engine. The plastic
| cover doesn't do anything for the car, it adds cost to the
| car, and mechanics have to remove and reinstall it if they
| do any work at all.
|
| However, it does have a function: to obscure you from the
| workings of your car, and push you to take the car to a
| dealership or someone buying genuine parts at least.
| kbrackbill wrote:
| If it truly does nothing, why would the mechanic replace
| it instead of just leaving it off? Genuine question, I
| know nothing about this. Do the manufacturers at least
| have some explanation for why it's there other than to
| make access more difficult?
| melling wrote:
| I couldn't even swap out a headlight in my girlfriend's car,
| because of the tight space.
|
| Instead she has to pay a garage to do it. That's not it used
| to be.
| mobilemidget wrote:
| I had the same on a 2002 Toyota avensis, and the price of
| the lights wasn't like 40 years ago either unfortunately.
| planteen wrote:
| I mean that sounds more like "It's a pain in the ass to
| change a headlight in my girlfriend's car, so I have her
| bring it to a shop" than a right to repair issue. Or are
| you saying the shop needs special tooling to get the job
| done? What kind of car is it? There's usually a few YouTube
| videos showing how to do things like this.
|
| I have an older gas guzzling SUV on a truck chassis. Lots
| of repairs are a lot easier than my wife's car, because
| there is a lot more space. But that is a fundamental
| tradeoff between two vehicle classes and gas guzzlers
| versus high MPG crossovers. My SUV is newer than her car
| too.
| hinkley wrote:
| I volunteered to replace a headlight in my girlfriend's car
| long ago. The socket was completely buried. No access from
| above. The assembly looked like it was held in by two
| screws and a section of 3/8" metal bar, so no problem, I'll
| remove those, pull it out and then replace the bulb. Nope.
| You couldn't actually get it out because the hole was
| slightly too small.
|
| Looked it up online, shops put this model on the lift and
| access it from below. Ended up laying on a piece of
| cardboard in a light rain because it was only accessible
| from below the bumper. If my forearms were any shorter (I'm
| pretty tall) I would not have been able to do even that.
|
| Meanwhile the headlight on my 10 year old VW went out a
| couple months ago. There's a twist-on cap, and a twist-in
| socket. The cap is visible standing up.
|
| I had the replacement bulb in in under a minute.
| Unfortunately the matching bulb on the other side, the
| socket was a bit wedged and I spent most of the time
| getting it out.
| Johnny555 wrote:
| The Ford Fusion requires removing the front bumper cover:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMxBBdMeNho
|
| I rented one once and on a long trip I noticed a headlamp
| was out, I was going to just buy new bulbs and replace
| them, but once I saw the procedure, I called the rental
| place and drove 30 minutes to swap out the car.
|
| If they are going to make it that hard to swap headlights,
| they should use LED's which (should) never need to be
| replaced.
| planteen wrote:
| Some things are much easier with ODB electronics though. Like
| if a cylinder is misfiring, you pull out a code scanner and
| see exactly which spark plug needs to get replaced.
| Polylactic_acid wrote:
| It is a technology issue. Computers make things complex and
| opaque where they were once simple. When something stops
| turning you can look at it. Does it need grease? Is something
| blocking it from turning? When a microcontroller stops sending
| out the correct signals how could a farmer possibly do anything
| about that or even know what is going wrong?
| Eric_WVGG wrote:
| huge discussion here about Nebraska voting for right-to-repair
| a few weeks ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21805633
| ogre_codes wrote:
| > We could insist on a right to repair, open standards, etc
|
| The advantage older equipment has is that a generalist can
| repair it because the equipment is fairly simple and well
| understood. Parts on older equipment are easier to source or
| sometimes can be fabricated by the farmer themselves. Newer
| equipment has tighter tolerances and components are more
| difficult to fabricate or repair. Computerized components
| require special tools to interact with and specific knowledge
| to configure. Newer equipment is more complex and thus more
| difficult to diagnose and repair.
|
| Right to repair won't fix that. Regulations aren't going to
| make manufacturers return to having simpler machines, it can
| only force them to make the knowledge required to repair those
| machines public. If need a left-handed knurled whats-it to
| remove a part or a special diagnostics tool to service the
| electronics, regulations might force the companies provide
| documentation and sell those tools, but it won't remove the
| need for those special tools and domain expertise.
|
| The only real way to change this would be for a manufacturer to
| pivot to selling field serviceable equipment which seems
| unlikely.
| rtkwe wrote:
| Specifically though on tractors we're seeing companies
| essentially DRMing replacement parts. Farmers etc can easily
| find and install parts but then the computer controller will
| not recognize the replacement or won't reset from the error
| condition.
| ogre_codes wrote:
| Yeah, that's something regulations can handle (and should).
| RosanaAnaDana wrote:
| There is probably a sizable market for building out software and
| technology for 'upgrading' older farm equipment to modern
| principals, such as self driving, variable rate fertilization,
| variable rate planting, etc. When I was more involved in ag
| research I met several farmers who DIY built themselves variable
| rate fertilization drills. While its not ubiquitous, the farming
| community has a very long culture of DIY out of pure necessity. I
| think this is the source of the pushback against companies like
| JD.
| dbcurtis wrote:
| Everything that you mention except the self-steering is a
| function of the attached implement, not the tractor. That makes
| incremental upgrades of that sort much easier.
| RosanaAnaDana wrote:
| Well, no. Precision agriculture is an integration of many
| components of the farming operation, all of them very much
| data driven.
|
| Lets just take the example of variable rate fertilization,
| because its the one I'm most familiar with. In the case of
| winter wheat (hard red and white), there are 3 primary
| components determining both yield (kg/m^2) and protein
| (g/kg). They are the available water, the available nitrogen
| and the 'site index' which is generally related to soil
| depth, but slope and aspect also play into this.
|
| So, if what you want to do is land on a very specific amount
| of protein, say 7.5% across all of your fields in a dryland
| cropping situation. You need to know how much much water is
| available at all points in your field; how much nitrogen is
| available at all points in your field; and what scalar to
| carry around for a given XY position in your field. Maybe
| think of the scalar as an 'X-factor' to multiply the result
| of Water*Nitrogen by to adjust for local conditions.
|
| Wheat, grown in high water low nitrogen gets very tall and
| has low protein and higher yield (to an extent). Wheat grown
| in high nitrogen stays short, but has higher protein and
| lower yield (to an extent). So it becomes a trade off between
| protein % and yield, and the theoretical maximum is described
| by the site index.
|
| Wrapping it all together. First, find a cooperative old kook
| of a farmer. Second, convince him to let you drill a hole in
| his up auger to mount a hyper spectral sensor. Third, duct
| tape/ bungee mount a LiDAR puck to the front of the combine.
| 4th, solder some leads into the on harvest yield monitor.
| 5th, mount a high quality GPS unit to the top of the
| harvester if you don't have one already (or can't access the
| NMEA stream). Add car batteries, some old notebook computers
| to get the data, and a few days to harvest. Boom. Now your
| combine is a fully integrated data collection platform. You
| now have a measurement of grain height at all locations in
| your field. You also have a measurement of protein content at
| all locations in your field (with a little PCA wizardry and
| some protein sampling). Combine the two and you now have a
| 'site-index' that is nitrogen/ available water independent
| that you can use in your variable rate drill to adjust the
| fertilization rate to match the site index (since you can
| control the fertilization rate and not the available water).
| This will give you fairly precise control and allow you to
| more or less homogenize the overall protein content of the
| field. Alternatively, you could also optimize for yield
| (allowing protein to fluctuate).
| froindt wrote:
| I've heard of farmers going so far as to make their own GPS
| guidance systems, enhanced before they were widely available
| and reasonably priced. I'm not sure how accurate and repeatable
| they were.
|
| Going to any farm that's been around for 20+ years, you'd see
| so many custom solutions that are really functional.
|
| Farmer one-off solutions are kind of like homebrew Excel
| applications - they're infinitely customizable, the end user
| knows exactly how it should work and can reasonably make it
| happen, and it's a small fraction of the cost of a
| commercial/IT SOLUTION. It may not be as reliable, but it's
| good enough.
| pmiller2 wrote:
| Does civilian GPS have enough resolution to be useful in a
| tractor guidance system?
| RosanaAnaDana wrote:
| RTK does. Also, fields are big and 'generally' there isn't
| much to hit out there. I think most new harvesters these
| days are self driving.
| froindt wrote:
| That's true, but if you're spraying a field and veer off
| by ~12", you're running over corn and killing your
| profit.
| froindt wrote:
| I belive they were enhancing it with terrestrial base
| stations (Loran-C was mentioned in the discussion, which
| was 10+ years ago). John Deere has proprietary secret sauce
| and if I recall correctly, they can get sub 1" accuracy.
| That precision farming has enabled things like different
| amounts of fertilizer for different parts of the field, a
| substantial material savings and improvement for the
| environment.
| GlenTheMachine wrote:
| Not by itself, in most situations. Maybe if you're
| automating a combine, where you're doing repeating patterns
| in a big flat field with no obstacles and where 1 meter
| deviations from the desired trajectory isn't an issue (not
| an uncommon situation, but for a lot of use cases you
| really do care about that 1 meter deviation, e.g. for
| plowing or cultivating).
|
| Otherwise you have to augment, eg with relative GPS or
| machine vision.
| lostgame wrote:
| >> the farming community has a very long culture of DIY out of
| pure necessity
|
| Can confirm. And it's largely because a farmer's job is the
| management of dozens, hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands
| of living beings - whether those are animals or plants.
|
| Thusly the level of unpredictability exponentially increases in
| this field versus a number of other fields - and yet this field
| is hypercritical to the sustainment of humanity itself.
|
| With weather, disease, and all other mitigating factors taken
| into mind, and despite a farmer's best efforts, there may be
| entire large sections of crops that completely fail - or
| animals that get diseased and affect the rest of the herd. This
| can lead to significant losses that I've unfortunately
| experienced firsthand.
|
| If it's Harvest season - that season only lasts a very certain,
| specified period of time, and if equipment fails, farmers will
| do _whatever_ they have to do to hack around to make it work.
|
| I've seen an incredible amount of DIY innovation firsthand in
| these kind of crises. Farmers are some of the most hardworking,
| dedicated, and innovative people I've ever had the pleasure to
| meet.
|
| And let me tell you - when farmers are dealing with crises like
| this - the idea of a piece of software getting in their way,
| when a single day or two can make all the difference in the
| world - it's not something they want to be involved with,
| unless they know they can fix it themselves.
| gen220 wrote:
| We recently had to bin a beloved TV, and were looking for a
| "simple" 4k TV (i.e. _not a smart TV_ ) to replace it, and were
| surprised to find that they simply don't exist!
|
| We ended up uncovering a 6 year old 1080p TV that was still in
| the box at Best Buy.
|
| All in all, this problem might present an opportunity -- there
| might be new markets for these types of devices (dumb TVs,
| tractors, refrigerators, air conditioners, thermostats). Given
| them a modern UX, but eschew all of the creepy features of modern
| tech (always-on monitoring, open tcp/ip ports, impossible to
| repair).
|
| In theory these high-quality, low-recurring-revenue products
| should be easier to build, and similarly easy to market ("we
| don't spy on you, we break in ways that are fixable"). And you
| can charge a premium, because you're offering the freedom of
| ownership (ironic, I know).
| Someone1234 wrote:
| Just don't hook the "smart TV" up to the internet. Then you
| have a dumb TV.
| mushufasa wrote:
| well, if you just don't network the 'smart TV,' you can still
| have a dumb tv while benefitting from the subsidized hardware.
| masonhensley wrote:
| The Sceptre TV's available at Walmart don't have smart features
| in them (yet).
|
| https://www.walmart.com/browse/electronics/sceptre-tvs/3944_...
|
| - 65 inch (4k) - $350
|
| - 55 inch (4k) - $240
| [deleted]
| fifthace wrote:
| If tractors with closed software are such a problem, why doesn't
| a company build old-school tractors? Heck, you could use a 1980
| design, currently selling second-hand for $40-60k, based on
| expired patents.
| mattgrice wrote:
| Farmers need same-day access to replacement parts, which means
| a dealer with a full stock of parts within driving range.
| Belarus/MTZ tractors are low tech designs but have about one
| dealer in every state.
| knolan wrote:
| My father is an agricultural mechanic here in Ireland. Lots of
| farmers here use very old tractors. It's not unusual to see David
| Brownes, Case Internationals, Massey Fergusons, John Deeres and
| Zetors going back 20 - 30 years or more.
|
| There's a strong industry of companies selling spares too. Many
| farmers simply can not afford they new stuff and in many cases
| they are huge in size making them unsuited to small out buildings
| on family farms. That's before all this new wave of shitty
| behaviour towards repairing rights and software.
| macinjosh wrote:
| My grandfather, rest his soul, was a 3rd generation rancher and
| farmer. He bought 2 John Deere tractors in the '80s and used them
| for 35 years. They are still being used to this day on the ranch.
|
| Growing up, I visited the ranch regularly. Farming and ranching
| is very hard on equipment so the tractors often needed repair. My
| father and grandfather could seemingly fix anything on the
| tractor without even needing to go to the parts store. (The
| closest one was a 1 hour drive). Without this capability my
| family never would have been able to make a living of any kind
| with their land.
|
| In 2020 farmland is being gobbled up by corporations. The family
| farmer is going extinct. That means tractor companies are getting
| a whole new customer who is nothing like the previous.
| Corporations want tractors as a service, they want them to be
| self-driving, and they want to manage them in bulk. They don't
| really care if they can repair them because they pay someone else
| to do it.
|
| Personally, it is sad to see this change since so much of my
| family history and memories are tied up in the way things used to
| be. I sometimes feel out of place in my family because I couldn't
| fix a single thing on a tractor. On the other hand my grandfather
| didn't touch a computer in his entire life.
|
| The world changes and sometimes it sucks but that is how progress
| is made.
| NicoJuicy wrote:
| Tractor as a service will only bite them back.
|
| Look at how popular 40-year old tractors are :)
|
| It's never been a better time to create a good old repairable
| machine.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| >Personally, it is sad to see this change since so much of my
| family history and memories are tied up in the way things used
| to be
|
| In some ways I can relate to that, but that is an extremely
| dangerous trap to go down.
| johnchristopher wrote:
| Do you think end-users products from corporation style farms
| are cheaper than family farm (for equivalent quality) ?
| steveklabnik wrote:
| I come from at least three generations of cattle farmers. My
| dad had to work a tool and die job, because unlike his father,
| it was already not possible to raise a family via family farm.
|
| It's really brutal.
| EETruth wrote:
| Perfect, they should bring back serfdom and have the filthy
| rurals work and keep it quiet. Might allow them to go to church
| every Sunday tho.
| earlINmeyerkeg wrote:
| The greatest innovation in the history of mankind was a land
| consolidation. It took what 100 peasants all making enough food
| for subsistence living to 100 peasants be able to make enough
| food for thousands of people.
|
| It's not sad, it's progress.
| sl1ck731 wrote:
| The same could be said for robots displacing humans in
| factories or trucks or anywhere else. That doesn't make it
| less sad for people's whose livelihoods depend on those
| positions just because its technological progress.
| wolco wrote:
| What is the fear around robots? Machines have been
| displacing human labour for the last 100 years.
| cmcd wrote:
| During the industrial revolution hard labor jobs
| transitioned to maintenance work for the machines. The
| problem is as we improve at automation the need for non-
| technical maintenance decreases.
|
| A small team of engineers can displace thousands or tens
| of thousands of workers without creating any new
| opportunities.
| mrb wrote:
| << _A small team of engineers can displace thousands or
| tens of thousands of workers without creating any new
| opportunities._ >>
|
| A corporation that did that would have significantly
| increased its profits, and this new wealth is often (not
| always) indirectly redistributed to society. For example
| the corporation could increase its production (ie. hiring
| more workers), or increase salaries/bonuses, or increase
| stock buybacks (therefore benefiting stock owners whoever
| they are), or spin off new business units, or decrease
| the prices of their products/services to further improve
| their competitiveness (hence benefiting customers), etc.
| Rarely does a corporation sit on piles of cash doing
| nothing (one notable counter-example: Apple.)
| wolco wrote:
| It frees up a population to do other work. A small team
| of engineers can create a platform that creates something
| new to work on. Second life clothing shop for example
| that would not exist without machines displacing humans.
| ahoy wrote:
| Losing your job to automation is bad for your livelihood.
| It has been since we started automating things.
| wolco wrote:
| Is it bad for your children's livelihood? You are sending
| a message on a computer made by a machine. Parts are so
| small it would be impossible to do by hand which created
| a number of other jobs to support this new ability.
| throwawayhhakdl wrote:
| If you work in the fields, and I invent tech that makes
| you twice as efficient, the most likely result is that
| half of people like you lose their jobs, and wages stay
| the same, if not decline due to oversupply.
|
| Might be great for me, but it sucks balls for you. And it
| tends to suck balls for more people than it helps.
|
| Edit: and that basically follows through to your kids...
| beardedetim wrote:
| > doesn't make it less sad for people's who livelihoods
| depend on those positions
|
| I totally agree. Id say, however, that we should be making
| it so those people, and we all, are okay without a job/with
| our jobs being automated away, not be Luddites about it.
| andrepd wrote:
| Land consolidation can be done through communes/co-ops, in
| which case the benefits of increased productivity are fairly
| distributed, or through private corporations, in which case
| profits are privatised and concentrated on a small owner
| elite class.
| jessant wrote:
| Nothing stopping people from doing that.
| windexh8er wrote:
| There are many corporate things that "stop people from
| doing that".
|
| Seed monopolies [0]. Costco is undercutting chicken
| production just to maintain a $4.99 offering to their
| customers [1]. Mega farms have put over 2700 family farms
| out of business in Wisconsin [2]. CAFOs create pollution
| equivalent to 168 million people in the state of Iowa
| with only a total population of 3.2 million people [3].
| All of this manure gets dumped back into the soil for
| monoculture corn farming which is grown to feed livestock
| which is also significantly inefficient and drains local
| resources on clean and fresh water supplies and
| significantly pollutes downstream via runoff into large
| rivers [4]. The main polluters are, again, these large
| scale farms concentrating operations for efficiencies to
| fulfill the ever expanding lineup of highly processed
| foods the majority of western culture now eats on a daily
| basis.
|
| Money stops local farming. These mega farms are not in
| the business to make a great product, they're in the
| business to make a great profit - at the expense of their
| customers, no different than the tobacco manufacturers
| agenda. Between lobbyism, patents, mergers and grants by
| states desperate for revenue the concentration of control
| in farming has become very bleak in a short decade.
|
| [0] https://philhoward.net/2018/12/31/global-seed-
| industry-chang... [1]
| https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/11/business/costco-5-dollar-
| chic... [2]
| https://pulitzercenter.org/reporting/industrial-dairy-
| farmin... [3] https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/mon
| ey/agriculture/20... [4]
| https://biologicaldiversity.org/w/news/press-
| releases/center...
| ahoy wrote:
| There is an enormous body of law in the US that
| incentivizes a top-down corporate business structure and
| disincentives a co-op business structure.
| jessant wrote:
| I think human nature incentivizes top-down corporate
| business structures and disincentivizes co-op businesss
| structures.
| NeoBasilisk wrote:
| I would be very careful in trying to attribute something
| as complex as corporate structures to human nature. We
| have seen massive changes in all parts of society
| throughout the last 10k years. I don't think the human
| genome has changed so rapidly as to cycle through
| slavery, feudalism, mercantilism, capitalism, etc.
| apt-get wrote:
| Which is why 75% of France's farmers belong to an
| agricultural cooperative?
| cpach wrote:
| Are those profitable though? Farming is heavily
| subsidized by the EU.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| And American agriculture is likewise heavily subsidized
| by the federal government.
| chottocharaii wrote:
| Perhaps, but the body of law point means we'll never find
| out if you're right or not.
| giggles_giggles wrote:
| This is quite a claim, but it's too vague for me to
| research independently. Where would I even start in
| exploring the "enormous body of law" that "incentivizes a
| top-down corporate business structure?" I am not asking
| rhetorically -- this is news to me and I'd like to know
| the details.
|
| Of course, co-ops aren't common in the US, but they do
| exist (like REI) so I'm just curious about the details of
| this criticism of the legal landscape in the US but
| without further information am unable to research the
| claim.
| emiliobumachar wrote:
| Arguably that's exactly the problem. There's so much law
| applying to farming that you'd need a sizable legal
| department to know it all. That favors centralization.
| earlINmeyerkeg wrote:
| There are dairy co-ops where I live that do this sort of
| thing. That's why they're so huge. However the small ma and
| pop ones that have local well known businesses charge an
| arm and a leg for half a gallon of milk. Yeah sorry, I'll
| pay half that cost for a gallon at walmart, thanks.
| quacked wrote:
| Your choice unfortunately affects the greater world.
| Which would you rather have- a locally-produced society
| that's expensive to live in, or a Walmart society that's
| convenient to live in?
| bigjimmyk3 wrote:
| I was fascinated to hear a recent news story about how
| this works. The US has a long history of subsidizing its
| dairy industry (not unlike other countries) and part of
| that has been a "price floor" on milk. This floor applies
| to retailers purchasing milk from producers /
| distributors, but if the retailer also owns the
| producer... there's no retail price floor. Hence, the
| fairly extreme price difference between a regional
| dairy's milk and Great Value.
| 8note wrote:
| how much of that is government subsidies?
| Amezarak wrote:
| This particular progress makes us vastly more vulnerable to a
| catastrophic systems collapse. A lot of small, independent
| farmers are more antifragile to natural events than a few
| giant megacorporations. We're optimizing for profits at the
| expense of disaster.
| 8bitsrule wrote:
| Here we are, in a time when the shortcomings of
| centralization are rabidly apparent -across the board-.
| Counting that as some kind of win can only appeal to those
| who believe they are winning. For all the rest of us, the
| cheerful irony is more than a little disarming.
|
| Efficiency and longevity can be inversely proportional. May
| the reductionists alone reap their crop.
| durge wrote:
| You should read 'The Storm Before the Storm' by Mike Duncan.
| It details the fall of the Roman Republic and highlights the
| role played by land consolidation and the social dislocation
| that gave rise to the empire. For better or worse, it was
| definitely less stable.
| dwnvoted2hell wrote:
| I wouldn't call it all progress. I mean, we require
| fertilizer and pesticides today. There was a time when
| neither was needed.
| vonnik wrote:
| Who says progress can't be sad?
|
| The consolidation you're talking about was a massive
| disruption, which brought a lot of change to families and
| societies. Most kinds of change are painful even when they
| lead to greater efficiency.
|
| While the transformation of agriculture has led to great
| prosperity, prosperity also brings hierarchy; i.e. more
| unequal social forms.
|
| Much of the US has transitioned from a relatively agrarian
| and egalitarian society to one that is much richer, but also
| less equal and more divided, in the last 150 years.
|
| There are clear tradeoffs in that transition, which some
| people might call the march of progress. Ways of life die
| off, and those who knew them in childhood often regret their
| passage, regardless of whether the world's wheat production
| increases.
| zorpner wrote:
| _It 's not sad, it's progress._
|
| These are not mutually exclusive concepts.
| kristiandupont wrote:
| Indeed. Also, many things that are good in moderation are
| bad in excess.
| temporalparts wrote:
| It's sad that progress must mean sadness for some. We
| should have better social safety net so that displacement
| doesn't mean despair.
| macinjosh wrote:
| While the financial/livelihood component is a major
| factor I think most of those affected, if asked, would
| say that is the least of the reasons for their sadness.
| It is the intangible things being lost and the end of a
| way of life that causes the most pain IMHO.
| earlINmeyerkeg wrote:
| You're right. I think I personally just get so incredibly
| upset with people who always look toward the past or are
| just mortified of change. I associate the sadness with
| their fear of change.
| trhway wrote:
| it is a great progress, yep. We just always implement it in a
| sad, social darwinism style, way.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JEYHczRar8&list=PLwcGjCE72U.
| ..
| macinjosh wrote:
| Progress on a societal scale for certain. Sadness on the
| personal scale as new generations mourn the loss of their
| family's historical way of life. Both can exist :)
| earlINmeyerkeg wrote:
| That only exists on a generational level. The generations
| born afterward will never know about it, and therefore not
| care because it wasn't embedded in their cultural
| perspective.
|
| It's like taking a childs binky away. Over time, you
| totally forget why you even had the thing in the first
| place.
| cpach wrote:
| No need to be condescending.
| jv22222 wrote:
| I heard somewhere that the greatest innovation (the most
| impactful at the particular stage of our evolution) was the
| bicycle, because, it enabled human cross breeding over much
| larger distances at a much faster rate than possible before.
| Armisael16 wrote:
| That seems rather implausible given that railroads came
| about at the same time.
| jv22222 wrote:
| Well, there would be a lot more bicycles and they could
| go a lot more places a lot faster, no? I.E. They would
| enable a much faster rate of genetic mutation.
| Armisael16 wrote:
| No. Bicycles were heavy, uncomfortable products for the
| first ~40 years of their existence. Rubber tires and
| pedals didn't come to bicycles until the 1860s. By that
| point the US had >30k miles of extensively linking most
| of the northern states. The modern bicycle didn't really
| come into being until the 1890s.
|
| I'm having a hard time getting numbers for track in
| Europe, but the UK was the real pioneer and Germany
| followed quickly.
| jv22222 wrote:
| Well, clearly, wherever I heard that from was a terrible
| source of information! I stand corrected!
| jeffrallen wrote:
| Also isn't it a lot more comfortable cross-breeding in a
| sleeper car than on a bicycle? (Asking for a friend.)
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Thanks for sharing this about your grandfather.
|
| > The world changes and sometimes it sucks but that is how
| progress is made.
|
| This touches on something I think a lot about. Massive
| driverless farms, in my mind's eye, looks like one puzzle piece
| towards the utopia of the future. But you do lose the human
| aspect. It reminds me of Star Trek where Picard is working with
| his hands on a vineyard. Capitalism is abolished so he does it
| just for the human reasons. There's no way he can compete with
| a replicator.
|
| So that leads me to thinking about how we're in a really tight
| spot. The "human" present (past?) of salt of the Earth people
| making our products with a human touch and passion vs. the
| demands of the future utopia we want(?). It's a tight spot
| because capitalism mode is still active. The people who want to
| be passionate about their craft still have to compete
| commercially. In a future it might be that they can do it just
| because that's what they feel like doing. (super tangent: that
| reminds me of the "Primitive Technology" trend on YouTube where
| people re-discover technology just for the heck of it)
|
| It also reminds me of a response I once got. I regularly use
| farriers as an example of a skilled job that has pretty much
| gone obsolete because of automobiles. Someone once responded,
| "have you seen a farrier at work? It's art."
| macinjosh wrote:
| I like to think that these advances allow us to spend more of
| our time finding and creating new kinds of art. The common
| factor between now and then is humans. Humans are artful
| beings so I am not worried about losing that. We'll just have
| to look to different places for it.
| pm90 wrote:
| You make an interesting point. I think ideally what we want
| is:
|
| * easy automation for those that need it; if corporations
| want to driverless tractors doing all their farming, so be
| it. They're responding to a market that is demanding a lot of
| cheap food.
|
| * occupation as a choice; the productivity gains from
| automation shouldn't _all_ just pile on to the people who
| made the investment; but it could be used to provide
| necessities to those that need them. So a small scale farmer,
| for instance, would not be competing directly in the same
| market as the corporation, and they wouldn 't need to make a
| profit to do what they want to.
|
| Human brains are great at seeing patterns; we shouldn't be
| wasting them on repetitive work that can be mechanized. Let
| people do what they want to without existential threats and
| see what happens.
|
| In a certain sense, this is already true for the wealthy. The
| nature of wealth is that it gives you safety nets to fall
| back on if you fail at what you want to do. A lot many of the
| greatest artists came from wealthy backgrounds.
|
| I would honestly want a lot more people creating art, video
| games, curing cancer etc. than have more people picking
| crops.
| wolco wrote:
| That's the piece we are missing. Sharing the benefits of
| automation as a feedback of the ecomonic system.
| LinuxBender wrote:
| I don't have any references for this, just the farmers I
| have spoken to, so take this with a grain of salt. The
| massive mono-crop farming apparently have the draw-back of
| not following some of the recycling processes that old
| school, small farm farmers did to keep the soil rich and
| diverse in nutrients. i.e. rotating out crops, bringing in
| animals to eat old crops, flowers, provide diverse waste
| product as fertilizer. Now it is all just bags of specific
| minerals added back in by machine, based on the bare
| minimum that they are required to by people that test the
| soil. Depending on who I talk to, I hear that there may be
| less than 60 harvests left before crops basically have
| little nutritional value. I've also heard that this is
| basically already happening, in that, crops have less
| nutritional value than they did say 50 years ago. But
| again, I don't have any references so this could all be
| nonsense.
| [deleted]
| colechristensen wrote:
| I am a silicon valley DevOps engineer with roots in an Iowa
| family farm which 20 years ago was trolling farm auctions to find
| pre-electronics-dominated equipment so it could be repaired on
| site, if anybody has any questions.
| apotatopot wrote:
| "tech weary" and "An expensive repair would be $15,000 to
| $20,000, but you're still well below the cost of buying a new
| tractor that's $150,000 to $250,000." wtf come on. This has
| nothing to do with technology.
| pmiller2 wrote:
| Here's where "tech weary" (side note: maybe "tech wary") comes
| in:
|
| > There are some good things about the software in newer
| machines, said Peterson. The dealer will get a warning if
| something is about to break and can contact the farmer ahead of
| time to nip the problem in the bud. But if something does
| break, the farmer is powerless, stuck in the field waiting for
| a service truck from the dealership to come out to their farm
| and charge up to $150 per hour for labor.
| nas wrote:
| As someone who grew up on a farm and spent 7 years running one
| (few thousand acres so fairly good size), I can provide some
| background on why this is happening.
|
| The large farms are driving new equipment sales. They are the
| ones buying the brand new John Deere $700k combine harvesters
| will all the bells and whistles. The problem is, those bells and
| whistles add a lot of extra complexity to the machine, making it
| harder and more expensive to fix. Deere doesn't make it easier
| since they don't provide details needed for 3rd party repair
| people (e.g. schematics, software tools for managing embedded
| controllers, etc). The people buying new equipment don't care
| about that. Their equipment is covered by warranty and Deere
| fixes it for them (or replaces it). They sell the machine after
| it is a year or two. So, they never deal with the crap repair-
| ability of new equipment. The 2nd stage used market cares a
| little but not so much either. They can still get Deere to fix it
| for them, maybe not under warranty.
|
| By the time the equipment gets to the 3rd tier used market, it is
| already heavily deprecated. The loss in value due to poor repair-
| ability is not getting fed back up the chain in any significant
| way which would make the primary buyers change their decision
| making. They want the bells and whistles and they will pay a
| little extra in deprecation to get them. The problem for society
| is that you have a $700k machine that is basically a paperweight
| after a decade or two. You might was well drive it in the junk
| pile because no one is going to be able to make it run. At least,
| not without tearing out heaps of electronics that are no longer
| working. New machines are utterly dependent on onboard electronic
| control systems (e.g. ECMs). They won't run without them.
|
| New machines are disposable and that is what the buyers are
| deciding to choose. You can't put all the blame on companies like
| Deere. The contrast to old farm equipment is dramatic though. We
| have an old Ferguson tractor, might be from the 1950s. Everything
| on that tractor can be fixed. If we wanted, we could make it run
| like it just came out of the factory. For jobs on the farm that
| don't need a big tractor, it does them just fine. Probably in 100
| years you will still be able to keep it running if you want.
| brenden2 wrote:
| The technology itself is not the issue, the problem is that
| companies are at war with their customers. These companies will
| go to any length to extract as much revenue as possible. Milking
| your customers is not good for business, especially if you drive
| them into insolvency.
|
| I hope in the future there are more companies that try to align
| incentives with their customers, such that their business
| practices help customers be more successful (although many of
| them preach this, very few actually do). Many businesses these
| days seem to be geared toward making a quick buck, rather than
| really providing any value.
| JMTQp8lwXL wrote:
| In other markets, customers could just switch to a new business
| that was less shady. In this particular case, it doesn't seem
| like there are many alternative suppliers, so farmers have no
| other options. If they did, they would've gone with them.
| Buying decades-old tractors suggested they somewhat already
| have tried to find alternatives.
| [deleted]
| minikites wrote:
| >I hope in the future there are more companies that try to
| align incentives with their customers
|
| Sometimes the invisible hand is invisible because it's not
| there. I don't understand how "fewer regulations" is supposed
| to address problems like these, or really any market failure
| state.
| StanislavPetrov wrote:
| Perhaps if you consider "regulations" like the DMCAA,
| "intellectual copyright" laws, patent laws and a host of
| other laws and regulations that criminalize the repair or
| alteration of machinery or other items that have been
| purchased you might garner a better understanding. If farmers
| weren't prevented by law from repairing or altering the
| equipment they've purchased this problem largely would not
| exist.
| darksaints wrote:
| > Milking your customers is not good for business, especially
| if you drive them into insolvency.
|
| That is unless you are a government contractor...
| ng7j5d9 wrote:
| > Milking your customers is not good for business
|
| Maybe that's true in high-choice, low-stakes consumer
| situations, like "where should I eat dinner tonight?", but is
| it true in industries with high barriers of entry?
|
| If I decide I'm flying across the country to visit family, I'm
| going to buy a ticket from some airline that is in fact trying
| to extract as much revenue as possible from customers. And the
| airline business seems to be healthy.
|
| If I need to buy a new car, I'm going to be presented with
| models and trim packages designed specifically to extract the
| most money from the customer. Honda doesn't offer DX, LX and EX
| trim packages to save you money - they bundle things together
| so that even if all you care about is a sunroof, you're also
| paying for alloy wheels, fog lights, etc.
|
| I've never shopped for tractors, but I'd suspect that maybe the
| tractor companies that stay in business are in fact the ones
| which extract as much revenue as possible from customers.
| ciconia wrote:
| > The technology itself is not the issue...
|
| In a way, it is. There's no argument today's machines
| (including even consumer cars) are more technologically
| complicated than those of 40 years ago. There's more stuff
| (read _features_ ) that can break, and there's more
| microcontrollers and embedded computers that run software (read
| _bugs_ ) with sometimes intricate behavior.
|
| Those 40-year old tractors are easier to maintain because
| everything is mechanical, so it's easier to diagnose and easier
| to fix.
| Vysero wrote:
| Big AGG works the same way as any other industry: make enough
| money to grind your competition into the dust. If that means
| yanking features from a product so that you can sell it at
| multiple price points or if it means adding self destruct
| mechanizes that only you can fix then so be it. Obviously, not
| all entities work this way (bless their hearts) but I think
| it's fair to say most of the successful ones do.
| hcarvalhoalves wrote:
| Not long ago, it seems companies were still in the business of
| making tractors, or cars, or cakes, or something... Nowadays it
| seems every company is in the business of making money and
| paying bonuses for directors. The rest is an excuse.
| ianmcgowan wrote:
| There are some robber baron's from the late 1800's that would
| like to have a word...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robber_baron_(industrialist)
| smabie wrote:
| The teleological purpose of a company is to make money. Also,
| what time period are you talking about, exactly?
| sneak wrote:
| If customers don't want this stuff, why isn't there a competing
| company offering non-DRM tractors?
| xnyan wrote:
| http://www.belarus-tractor.com/en/
| f311a wrote:
| They are pretty good for their price. The factory is still
| producing some models that were first designed in the
| 1970-1980s.
| jotm wrote:
| I think parts availability might be a problem with those,
| as well as a general lack of knowledge about them.
| Otherwise, yeah MTZs are simple and easy to fix.
| catalogia wrote:
| How many times must it be demonstrated that "market forces"
| is not a silver bullet to every problem before people take
| the hint?
| gitgudnubs wrote:
| This problem was created by regulation. It's not clear that
| markets can work when governments grant monopolies, and
| don't restrict the ensuing vertical integration. The only
| solution is to grant weaker monopolies.
| dsr_ wrote:
| Market forces would work in this situation, if only the
| situation were different:
|
| - if there were an existing competitive market, that would
| help.
|
| - if there were a clear long-term market, that might
| inspire competition.
|
| But in this case, market forces caused the problem.
| deith wrote:
| >Market forces would work in this situation, if only the
| situation were different
|
| That can be said every time the market fails to adjust
| itself.
| catalogia wrote:
| > _X could solve Y if only Y were Z_
|
| That's a nice hypothetical, but hardly helps these
| farmers. The real solution is America's most hated four
| letter word: regulation.
| wvenable wrote:
| Why was this downvoted? I just made the same comment before
| noticing this one already done. Competition is what solves
| these kind of things.
| skywhopper wrote:
| Sure, but how do you propose to introduce competition into
| this market?
| Yizahi wrote:
| It will trickle down of course. /s
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Declare John Deere a monopoly and break them up?
| wvenable wrote:
| Well the market has already been identified.
| [deleted]
| mratsim wrote:
| I guess, convincing Elon Musk that we need tractors on
| Mars could stimulate some competition.
| lostgame wrote:
| If you don't know the answer to that - you may have wanted to
| think it through a little more.
|
| Manufacturing at scale is hard and expensive. John Deere has
| been doing it for years, creating the most reliable tractors
| in the world for decades and has only recently decided to
| bend customers over to give them the ol' in-out-in-out.
|
| A new brand would need to start from almost smaller than
| scratch, and have tens of million dollars of investment to
| even get started producing their own tractors. Then they'd
| have the uphill battle of a set of people who are extremely
| reliant on these machines to trust a new company with no
| track record with highly mission-critical equipment.
|
| It would be an incredibly high-risk investment, with little
| to no guarantee of success.
|
| Instead, as the article says - these farmers are not buying
| new tractors from _anyone_ at the moment.
| Vesuvium wrote:
| Is that really a problem in the country of the Silicon
| Valley? Actually, that might be the only thing preventing
| this from happening.
| tastygreenapple wrote:
| John Deere has not been making the 'most reliable tractors
| in the world for decades'. Their products are categorically
| inferior to Japanese products like those made by Kubota,
| and frankly I'd trust a Mahindra to go the distance before
| a Deere.
|
| I think Deere was supported by blind patriotism on
| small/medium farms and really good post-sale support for
| large operations. I'm pretty sure their unit sales are
| falling, hardly a sign of a company that's getting its
| product right.
| solatic wrote:
| In today's market, your argument doesn't hold water.
|
| A new brand would need to start from smaller than scratch?
| So what? People start new companies every day.
|
| It would require tens of millions of dollars of investment?
| So what? We keep being told how capital markets are just
| sloshing with cash looking for investment opportunities;
| that one of the reasons for rising inequality is due to the
| _dearth_ of investment opportunities for the rich to use to
| seek returns.
|
| They'd have trouble finding customers willing to give them
| a shot? So what? _Every_ startup has this problem. You
| solve it by differentiating yourself from your incumbent
| competitor. When your competitor is so hated that they 're
| getting negative press in national news outlets and state
| legislatures are being pressured to pass laws, your
| differentiation proposition _is practically written for
| you._
|
| I'm sure there are tractor upstarts out there trying to get
| funding. The question is, if they're not getting funding
| then why not, and why doesn't anybody know about them?
| chalupa-man wrote:
| The moment you started to see any real success with a
| company like this and become significant competition,
| John Deere would reverse their equipment-as-a-service
| DRM-based model, and you would be instantly crushed by
| their far more familiar and established brand with all
| the accumulated knowledge and trust people already have.
| It's so certain that you have essentially no chance of
| long-term success. John Deere can operate like this
| because there's no competition, but the second there is
| competition than can revert to how they were and you are
| dead, so there's no point even trying.
| catalogia wrote:
| Manufacturing industrial equipment is a far cry from your
| typical ycombinator style mobile-app startup.
| VRay wrote:
| Imagine, they could be the next WeWork!
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Capital markets are looking for _worthwhile_ investment
| opportunities. An established ag-implements manufacturer
| can probably use that sort of risk capital to expand into
| making tractors, or something like that. Getting a large
| firm started "from scratch" is going to be less
| feasible. And these things also take their time to
| happen, of course.
| okareaman wrote:
| I like to do road trips as a hobby and I see a lot of
| Japanese and other Asian brand tractors in American farming
| areas,so there is competition
| CharlesColeman wrote:
| > If customers don't want this stuff, why isn't there a
| competing company offering non-DRM tractors?
|
| Because modern capitalism is not a system that will magically
| fulfill customer needs, despite propaganda to the contrary.
| The way the system actually works is that the wants/needs of
| the capital-holders take priority over the wants/needs of
| other stakeholders (e.g. customers and workers). The other
| stakeholders are often forced to accept _minimally
| acceptable_ deals, as long as the capital-holders are able to
| maintain barriers to entry (like large investments in
| capital).
|
| A new market entrant will likely be tempted (eventually, if
| not immediately) to implement DRM just like Deere has. And
| Deere can always drop DRM temporarily if it will let them
| fend off a competitive threat.
| [deleted]
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| > The way the system actually works is that the wants/needs
| of the capital-holders take priority over the wants/needs
| of other stakeholders (e.g. customers and workers).
|
| The capital-holders did not (in most cases) get a "you are
| now free to hose your customers" card. The cases where they
| _are_ free to do so are cases where there is a lack of
| competition. So "modern capitalism is not a system that
| will magically fulfill customer needs _in the absence of
| competition_ ". But if there is actual competition, and the
| wants of the capital-holders take priority over the wants
| of the customers, that's not going to work out well for the
| capital-holders.
| CharlesColeman wrote:
| > So "modern capitalism is not a system that will
| magically fulfill customer needs in the absence of
| competition".
|
| But modern capitalism, at least in the American context,
| is a system being drained of competition. Competitors
| conspire to destroy it by merging and acquiring each
| other, and the deregulatory economic zeitgeist that's
| been in force for 40 years means the government has done
| little to foster it.
|
| Markets tend towards equilibrium, and bitter competition
| is a kind of disequilibrium.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| > But modern capitalism, at least in the American
| context, is a system being drained of competition.
|
| I agree, and I agree that it's a problem. But it's the
| "being drained of competition" that's the problem, not
| capitalism itself. (Well, capitalism itself is something
| that would prefer to drain itself of competition - even
| Adam Smith knew that - but for capitalism to work
| properly, there has to be competition.)
|
| There seem to be two kinds of "draining of competition".
| First, there's the "just too good" kind. Microsoft,
| Google, Amazon, and (the subject at hand) John Deere may
| all be of this kind (though Microsoft did plenty of dirty
| tricks to get there). Economics of scale and network
| effects create positive feedback loops where one
| competitor can win it all. I don't really know what to do
| about that.
|
| The second kind is government-caused (or at least
| -allowed) monopoly. There's only one electric company
| here, because the government thought it made sense for
| there to be. Some other monopolies are less directly
| government caused, but heavy regulations can make it so
| that only the largest firms have the resources to comply,
| and all the smaller firms die.
|
| Government-allowed is when the government approves a
| merger of firms that are big enough that the merger
| significantly decreases (or eliminates) competition.
|
| With the government we've had for the last 40 years, I
| don't know what to do about this kind, either.
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| I wonder how many presales a company would need to collect
| to make it worthwhile spinning up a tractor manufacturing
| plant.
|
| Deere would need to decide whether to drop DRM to prevent
| your presale campaign.
|
| If they do the consumer wins, and the new company can
| refund the presales and walk away.
|
| If they don't you get your tractor manufacturing setup
| build and are then in the game.
| skywhopper wrote:
| Because it would be really expensive to start a new tractor
| manufacturing business; it would take years to even get
| prototypes up and running; you'd still have to prove that
| your tractors were as good as or better than these 40 year
| old antiques (which they probably wouldn't be at first);
| you'd have to be able to make something that could meet
| safety and efficiency standards of today while giving up the
| advantages of tight control over maintenance; you'd have to
| figure out how to compete with the dealer, mechanic, and
| parts networks that represent a huge advantage of the
| existing players; and you'd have to figure out how to do all
| of that without running out of money. It's probably a twenty-
| year project. You up for it?
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| Could you not simply copy the 40 year old tractors almost
| exactly. Any patents should be expired.
| jdboyd wrote:
| I think that you would have a hard time getting EPA
| approval if you starting making brand new copies of
| legacy engine designs. A new diesel tractor engine has to
| meet EPA Final Tier 4/ Stage IV standards. I don't know
| what would stand in the way of making a knock off of the
| 4440 chassis and transmission that uses a new Cummins or
| other crate engine though.
| andybalholm wrote:
| Nope. If you did, I'm pretty sure the EPA would shut you
| down. Emissions regulations aren't quite as strict for
| tractors as for cars and trucks, but they are headed in
| the same direction. I don't think it's possible to meet
| emissions without computerized controls. And once you've
| put hundreds or thousands of dollars worth of electronics
| on the tractor, it's hard to resist the temptation to add
| DRM.
| PerryCox wrote:
| Because the bigger companies forced them out of business or
| acquired them.
| wetpaws wrote:
| Because there is no competition in the US.
| s_y_n_t_a_x wrote:
| There's already competition.
|
| Kubota
|
| JCB
|
| Kioti (I used to build these w/ my grand parents)
| cpach wrote:
| Does farmers in other countries somehow enjoy a plethora of
| tractor manufacturers to choose from?
| davchana wrote:
| Punjab state of India is pretty much Agriculture based, &
| have options of Ford, FarmTrac tractors as well as John
| Deere, Scot, this year models as well as from 1970s;
| along with local Indian Brands like Sonalika, Preet,
| Mahindra being equally good or better.
| lb1lf wrote:
| Living in a rural, Norwegian area, I can remember seeing
| the following brands of tractors recently - Fiat, Zetor,
| Case, John Deere, New Holland and Massey Ferguson. I've
| probably not paid attention to at least a couple more - I
| am not a tractor aficionado...
| throwaway744678 wrote:
| In Europe, Claas, New Holland Come to mind immediately.
| But there are definitely others.
| appleshore wrote:
| https://www.opensourceecology.org/marcin-jakubowski
| floren wrote:
| Mahindra is selling small and medium tractors in the US now;
| I don't know for sure but I wouldn't be surprised if they
| were much more user-serviceable than the American brands
| people are complaining about.
| kasey_junk wrote:
| Note: This story is about heavy duty tractors. Lighter duty
| tractors are much more competitive marketplace.
| floren wrote:
| Yeah, Mahindra has some reasonably large tractors on
| their website, but the really Big Tractors you'll find
| from say John Deere aren't available. According to
| Wikipedia they're the largest tractor seller in the
| world, so maybe they'll expand!
| bsder wrote:
| Because manufacturing isn't software.
|
| It takes a _LOT_ of capital to build a company capable of
| manufacturing something like a tractor. And nobody will buy
| it initially because it has an unknown reliability record.
|
| Look at the article, the farmers _all_ make predictions about
| _exactly_ how long those John-Deere tractors will last
| because they have roughly 40 years of experience working with
| them.
| ttcbj wrote:
| I'm not convinced this is accurate.
|
| When an industry is offered a technology-based productivity
| improvement by a vendor, the increased profit associated with
| that improvement can go to three places:
|
| 1. The technology vendor itself 2. The business purchasing the
| technology 3. The customer
|
| When the business purchasing the technology is a commodity
| business (its product is undifferentiated from a large number
| of competitive producers, e.g. corn, soybeans), the value from
| the technology will generally either stay with the technology
| vendor or flow down to the consumer in the form of lower
| prices.
|
| This is why technology investment in a commodity business is
| often about a need to keep up with your competitors and not
| about actually increasing your profit. To paraphrase Charlie
| Munger, the productivity improvement doesn't 'stick to your
| ribs' if you are the farmer.
|
| I think any business sophisticated enough to build highly
| automated farm tractors is also going to be sophisticated
| enough to realize that it doesn't make sense for the farmers to
| own the value associated with those productivity improvements.
| That is the plight of a commodity producer in the supply chain,
| I don't think it's a moral failing of the technology vendor.
| scarmig wrote:
| > Milking your customers is not good for business, especially
| if you drive them into insolvency.
|
| It clearly is good for business, even if it's bad for customers
| and society at large. Pretending it's bad for business just
| encourages complacency because it suggests that the natural
| discipline of the market will drive the milkers out of business
| and encourage good business practices. But that doesn't happen,
| and if we want that to change there needs to be some source of
| external regulations to prevent it from happening.
| Vesuvium wrote:
| These companies are losing customers. That is never good for
| business. Eventually, someone will take the matter into his
| own hand and start making 80s-like tractors, so these
| companies will lose even more customers. They could do the
| same, but at this point they lost the trust of their
| customers, so it will be very hard to gain them back.
| minikites wrote:
| Really? Which products are getting more repairable with
| time? Nobody is bringing back easily repairable washing
| machines or easily repairable automobiles.
| wolco wrote:
| Parts and service cost as much as a new unit. This
| happened after free trade and if we produced locally the
| repair business would be a growing field.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| I don't know about cars, but I am typing this on a
| Thinkpad in which I can change the battery with no tools
| and can change most of the internal components without
| more than a screw-driver.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| That's partly _because_ there 's so much older stock.
| Also, the "easily-repairable" products of the past were
| not nearly as cheap! The closest comparison today would
| be "heavy-duty", "pro" models, often built by niche
| manufacturers, which do advertise ease of servicing as
| part of the value.
| LgWoodenBadger wrote:
| Lots of products are more repairable now, by the owner,
| primarily due to the internet (YouTube specifically),
| along with websites dedicated to providing schematics and
| parts lists/ordering (Appliance Parts Pros, etc.).
|
| I've personally repaired a broken dishwasher (temperature
| sensor's solder busted), the hot-surface ignitor of a
| gas-fired water heater, the water-filter socket of my
| frig, and helped a friend repair the ignitor in his gas-
| fired dryer.
|
| All thanks to Youtube videos with instructions/tutorials,
| and the availability of parts.
|
| Prior to these, I would have had to call a repairman, and
| then he'd probably say "you need a whole control board"
| or "the unit's dead."
| stevehawk wrote:
| Your argument is wholly incorrect, though. Manufacturers
| aren't making things easier to repair. Those things you
| repaired? They were already easily repaired. In the case
| of your argument, the only thing that has changed is
| whether or not people know how to repair things. And
| these days most people don't and most aren't willing to
| try without step by step instructions on how to.
| ultrarunner wrote:
| Being suddenly in the market for a new washing machine
| myself, I might argue that a large portion of the value
| of a washing machine is in its aesthetics. Same (probably
| more so) for cars. I'd probably need to put more thought
| into that, but I am fairly certain that aesthetics don't
| count for much in a tractor on a farm. It's possible that
| classic-styled tractors might even be mark in their
| favor.
|
| Either way, I suspect, apples to oranges.
| dsego wrote:
| Quality of materials [1], workmanship, capacity, ease of
| loading, max spin speed, gentle spin option, energy
| rating, water consumption, quietness, quick wash
| function, drums that reduce creasing and so on. Good
| quality washing machines are more expensive but not
| because of aesthetics.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGGhmKknKXo
| TimTheTinker wrote:
| It does make a big difference to have an air conditioner.
| And GPS guidance.
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| If I could buy a washing machine with a 10 year warranty
| I would not care at all what it looked like.
|
| My washing machine is leaking at the moment. I have to
| decide whether or not its worth my time pulling it
| outside and apart to see if it can be fixed, or if I
| should just go buy a new one for $750
| aj7 wrote:
| Very true.
| tejtm wrote:
| Maybe they are loosing a particular kind of customer they
| may want to loose anyway. Neither the number of acres to be
| farmed nor the number of mouths to feed decrease when a
| small farm goes under. The tractor has no long term concern
| of sitting idle and it may be giant non-corporeal people
| prefer doing business with their own kind.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| It's good for the business in the short run, but not in any
| other sense. Reputation matters quite a bit when it comes to
| this sort of costly, mission-critical equipment, and any John
| Deere competitor now has an easy way of grabbing some of that
| market share.
| [deleted]
| peteradio wrote:
| It would drive out bad actors in the long run if there was
| proper competition in the market. Unfortunately short term
| gimmicks can give you the necessary capital to simply buy
| your competition and then you can milk your customers because
| they have no other option but not to play.
| matmann2001 wrote:
| It's great for business, in the short term. And that's all
| that really matters to shareholders.
| metalliqaz wrote:
| in the short term... and in the long term often enough,
| because those short term gains can be used for all kinds of
| naughtiness later on. monopoly, regulatory capture, rent-
| seeking, and so on.
| burlesona wrote:
| Or competition, or the farmers pushing back as they are.
| Regulation is only one of many tools for policing businesses.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Farmers are doing the same thing, especially big midwest grain
| operations.
|
| The family farmers are dinosaurs that will be out of business
| anyway. The regulatory framework, market consolidation and
| finances work against them. The only way to thrive is to be
| really big or really small.
| aj7 wrote:
| It appears that their customers are particularly defenseless,
| in contradistinction to other industrial markets.
| milofeynman wrote:
| To add some sources to this, the tractor companies have been
| milking farmers by forcing them to require subscriptions or use
| overpriced repair techs in order to get firmware
| updates/repairs.
|
| https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/kzp7ny/tractor-hacking-ri...
|
| https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2017/04/09/52...
| WaylonKenning wrote:
| This could be a business opportunity for another tractor
| manufacturer. You're not forced to buy a John Deere.
|
| Boutique tractors, hand repairable, simple parts. If people
| are hoarding onto 40 year old tractors, then that's a market
| signal that people want those type of tractors.
| deogeo wrote:
| Yes, lets keep hoping the Market will solve everything, and
| that somehow, the trend of consolidation will magically
| reverse itself on its own, despite how ever fewer companies
| control each market. Wouldn't want to realize people have
| more power than just what they buy.
| vmchale wrote:
| > Many businesses these days seem to be geared toward making a
| quick buck, rather than really providing any value.
|
| Seems like an American thing, in part.
| duxup wrote:
| The frustrating issues with this are the surrounding politics.
|
| New tractors require service contracts / subscription type deals
| for new tractors. They require authorized service only.
|
| Right to repair had some traction in Minnesota, but MN GOP
| opposed it... and guess who the farmers vote for?
| dsalzman wrote:
| Opportunity for a company like $TESLA or other startup to provide
| additional competition in the farm equipment space. It's a
| duopoly between John Deere (Green) and Case IH (Red). A modular
| electric system would work well since the required speeds are low
| and torque is important. Extra points for a small wind turbine
| based charging station that can mount to a barn.
| Tossrock wrote:
| Tesla is notorious for exactly the kind of DRM, in-house only
| servicing that the farmers are trying to avoid.
| bluGill wrote:
| A tesla uses about 20 horsepower to push itself down the
| freeway (it is capable of much more, that is what it is using
| after about 5-10 seconds to get up to speed). A tractor rated
| at 100 horsepower is expected run at 100 horsepower output
| continuously. 100 horsepower tractors are considered small (or
| maybe mid size) tractors these days.
|
| In short, a battery operated tractor will need to stop to
| recharge every 5 minutes - if you can find batteries that will
| allow you to discharge that fast, most will not.
| dejv wrote:
| There is Solectrac electric tractor which seems like something
| that fits your description. It is definitely in very early
| stage, but I can't wait to see this type of vehicles to take
| off.
| aguyfromnb wrote:
| > _Opportunity for a company like $TESLA or other startup to
| provide additional competition in the farm equipment space._
|
| Wait, what? Tesla is just as bad (or worse) when it comes to
| right-to-repair.
| lostgame wrote:
| This is one of the single best examples of the ludicrous nature
| of the recent pattern of loss of right-to-repair with regards to
| software and hardware control.
|
| John Deere is literally bottom-barrel scum of, well, I guess, now
| - the tech industry - and it's their own fault that farmers are
| turning to purchasing older models.
|
| '"There's an affinity factor if you grew up around these
| tractors, but it goes way beyond that," Peterson said. "These
| things, they're basically bulletproof. You can put 15,000 hours
| on it and if something breaks you can just replace it. It's not
| even just the price difference - the newer machines, any time
| something breaks, you've got to have a computer to fix it."'
|
| The article then goes on to mention they're SOL, with the tractor
| stuck in the field for potentially days while they wait for a
| technician to come and charge $150/hr to fix it.
|
| First off, farmers are not, for the most part, computer or
| software technicians. While there are certainly exceptions (I was
| only a farmer for 4-5 years of my life, total, I don't think I
| count), I've spent years on and off living on farms, and a lot of
| farmers in the rural US and Canada are lucky to even just have
| access to Satellite internet. I imagine doing a case study of
| farmers who would have an identical tractor with and without the
| software, and seeing how many would actually even use or miss it.
| I'm guessing not a lot.
|
| The idea of relying on software technology is profoundly alien -
| and high-risk - to even just the culture of most farmers. To then
| put arbitrary restrictions on repair is far more than enough
| reason to ignore the newer products, especially with the
| familiarity and known reliability of older models.
|
| It's a 2011 vs. 2017 MacBook Pro kinda deal - pretty much the
| same insides, but with out the ability for the user to go in and
| upgrade the RAM or the SSD to add any value afterwards, and the
| removal of familiar and useful ports. And if one part breaks,
| you're screwed and stuck travelling to an Apple store, if you're
| fortunate enough to have one in your area.
|
| Right to Repair is one of the most critical things we as tech
| users need to be defending in the upcoming years. I've been
| buying Apple computers exclusively for 15+ years, and I will be
| buying a Lenovo next, as Apple has taken away my right to repair
| and upgrade the device myself, while simultaneously removing
| features, and raising the price.
|
| If I was still a farmer, you wouldn't catch me dead buying a new
| John Deere - I could never bring myself to support such obvious
| greed and stranglehold control.
|
| At least with a Tesla, you'd get the benefit of it being an EV.
| Maybe that's a fair enough trade to lose your RtR.
|
| But with John Deere and Apple, by buying a new product of theirs,
| you are literally removing the rights and abilities you had
| several years ago. That is just pure greed - and we need to vote
| with our money.
| josephorjoe wrote:
| I'm not a farmer and I am a software engineer, but I'm with the
| famers here. I want as little software in my products as
| possible.
|
| I've been shopping for some audio equipment, and noticed that
| the latest version of an audio interface I'm interested in has
| replaced hardware switches on the device with software controls
| run from an attached computer.
|
| I was immediately turned off by the new version and will likely
| buy a used one or one from a different manufacturer.
|
| The hardware switches are old reliable technology and do not
| add much weight or size to the unit. And while the device is
| meant to be connected to a computer, it just needs to do so as
| a signal passing device, not as a device that is dependent upon
| software on the computer.
|
| I'm sure the marketing department could explain why the new
| software controlled version is super awesome, but all it looks
| like to me is extra setup headaches and creating a dependency
| on software that I have no guarantee of being able to install
| on a future computer/OS combo.
|
| Plus, there is always a chance the manufacturer will do
| something stupid/evil and brick old versions some day.
| vibrolax wrote:
| Exactly. Many years before everyone started buying computer
| controlled home audio playback devices, hobbyists and pros
| built or bought their digital audio workstations whose buss
| interfaces and device drivers made them subject to rapid
| forced obsolescence. One doesn't mind replacing working
| hardware so much when new models offer better performance.
| But once the tech matures, one resents _upgrades_ forced by
| firmware / OS / application software issues. Especially so
| when the performance becomes worse for one's use case.
| aazaa wrote:
| Flash player update scam. I'm outta there.
| ct0 wrote:
| noscript is a great tool to stop this
| metalliqaz wrote:
| and a great way to break lots of websites
| Keverw wrote:
| I'm on my phone and site won't load... but I do know there's
| some attack where ads served by a ad network can redirect a
| page... A popular blog about Apple news and rumors did that
| once for me, emailed their ad sales guy but never heard
| anything back. But all probably random, so the others who
| didn't get that didn't get the ad. Probably some sort of frame
| breaker.
| SilasX wrote:
| For tech-weary techies, Flash/JS-free sites are a hot commodity
| :-p
| lostgame wrote:
| Firstly, I didn't get this (Chrome 79.0.3945.88 on MacOS
| 10.14.6), and secondly - I found this article to be extremely
| insightful.
|
| Thirdly - does anyone here actually still have Flash on their
| machine outside of a VM?
|
| I mean, I have Adobe Animate - but not Flash.
| briantakita wrote:
| The broken tractor is a big reason why the Open Source Ecology
| project was started.
|
| https://www.opensourceecology.org
|
| Btw, Open Source Ecology does have a DIY tractor as well.
|
| https://opensourceecology.dozuki.com/c/LifeTrac
|
| https://www.opensourceecology.org/portfolio/tractor/
|
| They regularly have courses, workshops, internships at their
| Missouri farm. There's a full machine fabrication shop,
| permaculture farm, & sustainable living community. Their courses
| are a great deal & they even do work exchange. Highly recommend
| checking it out.
| pmiller2 wrote:
| So, what are the real advantages to the newer tractors over older
| tractors for farmers? Why _should_ a farmer spend 4-10x as much
| for a newer tractor as they would for a 1980s model?
| mminer237 wrote:
| I'm not an expert, but I think generally tractors have become
| much bigger and more powerful over time. This works well for
| the large farms they're marketed to as they have to prepare and
| plant huge areas quickly. Smaller farmers probably couldn't
| work the fields fast enough with their older equipment that
| can't pull super wide discs.
|
| Transmissions have definitely become super advanced, but I'm
| not sure all the advantages of that. The main thing I would
| think of is that it can compensate so you can maintain your
| speed better even when you hit a rough spot.
|
| In addition, newer tractors have a lot of nice, kind of
| gimmicky features in the cab. Things like satellite radio,
| working air conditioning, anti-theft systems, and GPS-
| controlled planting are nice even if they're not necessary.
| jccalhoun wrote:
| >In addition, newer tractors have a lot of nice, kind of
| gimmicky features in the cab. Things like satellite radio,
| working air conditioning, anti-theft systems, and GPS-
| controlled planting are nice even if they're not necessary.
|
| From what I understand, this is really the main advantage.
| JMTQp8lwXL wrote:
| My understanding is that farming equipment is quite specialized,
| but I fail to see how no entrepreneur has capitalized on making
| "old school" tractors today. The immediate retort is that John
| Deere's approach is maximally profitable-- but is it? Sketchy
| websites host hacked firmware giving farmers the freedom to work
| on their own tractors anyways. The equipment manufacturers have
| lost their goodwill with farmers. From the ashes could rise a new
| firm that doesn't try to act so, well, crony. Even if they didn't
| end up as big as the incumbents, there's no doubt a profitable
| business exists with ephemeral sales of farming equipment that
| don't mandate expensive maintenance from your company's people.
| paulmd wrote:
| nobody wants an "old school" tractor that needs someone in the
| cab driving it. Modern highly-integrated farm equipment is a
| massive boost for productivity and a massive reduction in
| costs.
|
| There's a different discussion to be had as to why there hasn't
| arisen a company that shears the sheep a bit more gently, but
| generally on the whole the market doesn't want the old-school
| tractors. This article is not the overall shape of the market.
| Farmers generally want to farm, not be software/hardware
| engineers developing their own tractor guidance systems.
|
| As for that topic, generally markets are not as efficient,
| modern businesses operate at such high scales that it's
| extremely difficult for competitors to enter the market. It
| took Elon Musk to do it for the auto industry, that's the scale
| of funding and production that you need to compete. It's an
| oligopoly, not an efficient market.
|
| techpeople like ourselves are the last ones that should be
| pointing fingers, we are the ones who created the whole "as a
| service" model, and created the basis for closed firmware that
| users have no right to access. It's our business models applied
| to a different market, and it's just as noxious when we do it.
|
| It's not like I can go take a look at the firmware of the
| processor I'm typing this on, now is it? Why doesn't someone
| just start up a new CPU company that lets me see everything?
|
| (and yeah some people like RAPTOR are trying but that's the
| shape of the problem, it's a niche desire and there's enormous
| startup costs, and established players can easily drop prices
| for a few years and crush you, so realistically it's not a
| market that can be efficient.)
|
| Markets aren't going to do this stuff on their own. If you
| don't regulate them via something like right to repair, they'll
| skin you as roughly as they please and crush any upstart who
| tries to do things "the right way". Welcome to the Free Market
| - a truly free market is rarely "fair" to competitors or
| pleasant to customers.
| froindt wrote:
| You can go with non-John-Deere equipment and get a relatively
| cheap and simple tractor. I'm not sure about the minimum you
| can get in terms of electronics.
|
| A big challengefarm equipment manufacturing companies are
| facing are related to emissions controls. A 40 year old tractor
| doesn't give a rip about CO2 emissions, but new equipment has
| to meet the strict standards. This means you've probably added
| a computer to fine tune performance, or perhaps you're simply
| operating moderately less efficiently than optimal.
|
| A number of years ago, some dust control laws were passed. If
| farmers were to follow the letter of the law, their harvester
| would have needed to spray water to prevent dust from the
| gravel road, and needed to do similar out in the field
| (harvesting corn is very dusty). It would be hopelessly
| uneconomical, and would have absolutely killed efficiency in
| harvesting. It was talked about on the farm radio programs
| pretty extensively in the context of "the politicians don't get
| what it takes to farm. These sorts of controls sound great for
| factories, but they're not adding nuance to the bill for
| farmers, and it's unrealistic they we could follow the law if
| we wanted to."
| sailfast wrote:
| This occurred to me as well. At a minimum it would seem like a
| good idea for a larger Ag business to work with a competitor to
| bring Deere back to that line of thinking.
|
| The farmer in the article that hooked up their own Satellite
| steering has got the right idea. I don't rely on my Auto
| manufacturer's entertainment console - I use a software
| company's version because it's better, and gets regular
| updates.
|
| Can you imagine your entire net worth that year being
| determined by a single badly timed software push from a tractor
| company? (Granted, they may have "pivoted" to be quite good at
| software, but it doesn't sound like that's the case here) That
| would be frightening to me.
| Will_Parker wrote:
| > The immediate retort is that John Deere's approach is
| maximally profitable-- but is it?
|
| If your profit has to come from sales, but a lot of theirs
| comes from locking you into a maintenance profit, isn't this a
| big problem, when they can lower their sale prices much lower
| than yours?
|
| See what happened when printer manufacturers figured out it was
| more profitable to sell you ink than printers, even taking a
| loss on the first sale. They all had to do it once one did.
| Everyone knew the printers were getting cheap and terrible, but
| still very few wanted to pay 2x as much on the initial
| purchase.
|
| With games and other software as well, we see more and more
| monetizing with ads, DLC and subscriptions, even though most
| gamers would probably say this had made games worse overall.
| weinzierl wrote:
| I have an IHC (International Harvester Company) 433 that is about
| 60 years old and it is still in use occasionally for forest work.
| It is amazing how robust and reliable these old machines are.
|
| Fun facts:
|
| - It has 8 reverse gears and 16 forward ones. With a maximum
| speed of about 25 km/h this is very granular. On the other hand:
| the diesel engine is very forgiving and not easily stalled.
|
| - It does have an operating hours counter instead of an odometer.
| pmiller2 wrote:
| I always felt as though an odometer reading was only a proxy
| for what really matters when it comes to most maintenance
| schedules (operating hours). Tires and brakes would be an
| exception, but for most parts, operating hours is the better
| proxy. There's a reason airplane maintenance schedules go by
| hours flown rather than distance traveled.
| markvdb wrote:
| The Karhkiv tractor plant models from the USSR are one step
| easier still to maintain, and hence very popular outside the
| west:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kharkiv_Tractor_Plant
|
| The XTZ 150K: http://xtz.ua/en/kolisni-
| tractory/xtz-150k-09-172.html
| golem14 wrote:
| Tons of equipment on Alibaba
|
| https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/large-wheel-tractor-w...
|
| Not the faintest idea if any of it is decent. However, China
| probably uses their own tractors. They have a huge farms also,
| so maybe these are serviceable...
| jotm wrote:
| MTZ, too.
|
| I drive past a John Deere dealership/showroom, and a New
| Holland one and wonder who is even buying those in Eastern
| Europe. Doesn't seem like a good investment.
| aj7 wrote:
| It appears that tractors in general are dramatically overpriced.
| Who else makes big tractors? Brazil?
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > Brazil?
|
| Up to a point. Larger than that point there are different
| specializations that you will only get from a single
| manufacturer. For a few of those that manufacturer is
| Brazilian, but most of the time it's from the US.
| red-indian wrote:
| My own tractor is 67 years old. The parts catalog brags that not
| only do they carry every part new, but they have a photo of a
| copy they built entirely from contemporary made parts. It's a
| fine tractor and not hard to work on.
| dekhn wrote:
| I work with CNC and 3D printing, but I still enjoy my chisels and
| plane. There's something satisfying knowing the tool you're using
| is one people have used for thousands of years (with minor
| incremental updates to the technology) and it's still the best
| tool for the job.
| pleasantpeasant wrote:
| Right to repair laws need to be put in place.
|
| American corporations are trying to reach a point where you don't
| own products. You are merely long-term renting or leasing
| products from them. And any alterations or repairs will come with
| a heavy price.
|
| It's already hard enough to repair your own vehicle without
| taking it to a dealership. How long until small car shops can't
| even fix any cars if they don't have the tools or software.
| asdff wrote:
| That reality is already here. Good luck getting your Tesla
| serviced at the local garage.
| artursapek wrote:
| While that's true, at least electric cars have a low
| maintenance burden compared to ICE cars.
| xnyan wrote:
| It's already here. The only reason I can do my own work on my
| N20 engine BMW is because they implemented really bad and
| vulnerable car DRM that can be trivially defeated, but they
| have improved on that in latter models.
| BoorishBears wrote:
| You can't work on them, or you can't flash them with
| emissions control defeating tunes?
| onetimemanytime wrote:
| >> _You are merely long-term renting or leasing products from
| them._
|
| Correction: You lease _after_ buying them once. I doubt the
| govt will help, USA is kinda hands off
| duxup wrote:
| Right to repair had some traction in Minnesota, but the same
| politicians that farmers vote (MNGOP) for opposed it.
|
| There's a lot of strange ideological nose cutting off in rural
| america.
| jeffrallen wrote:
| A farmer in my village in Switzerland imported a 1980's Ford
| tractor from Texas. He had to repair the front axle, which had
| been cut. He told me the axle was cut to render the tractor
| unusable after it was traded in for some kind of emissions
| credit. Anyone hear of such a system?
| jdhn wrote:
| Sounds like the farming equivalent of Cash for Clunkers. IIRC,
| Cash for Clunkers rendered the vehicle inoperable by destroying
| the engine block, and in this case it seems that they cut the
| axle.
| vearwhershuh wrote:
| _" These things, they're basically bulletproof. You can put
| 15,000 hours on it and if something breaks you can just replace
| it."_
|
| Amen.
|
| It is true that there is always someone saying "Things were
| better back then."
|
| But that doesn't always mean that they are wrong.
| svachalek wrote:
| Yup. I also put large household appliances in this category.
| They've been getting more expensive and more fragile for
| decades, without much real progress other than energy
| efficiency which is unrelated to the fragility afaik.
| Diederich wrote:
| Do you think normal gas powered cars have have been getting
| less reliable?
|
| I agree with what many others here have said about how hard
| it is to service new vehicles. After he died, I kept my
| grandpa's 1970 Chevy C-10 pickup going for years. It was
| simple and very easy to fix/work on.
|
| But it needed a lot more attention than modern cars, and I
| think that while the age played a factor, it was just
| inherently less reliable.
|
| Key points: that Chevy needed an oil change every 3-4000
| miles. New cars need oil changes every 8-10000 miles, give or
| take. Old cars also needed tune-ups.
|
| What do you think?
| logfromblammo wrote:
| The individual parts have been getting more reliable, but
| they keep adding more points of failure.
|
| Like airbags. First, there was an airbag on the steering
| column. Then, there was one added to the passenger-side
| dashboard. Then they added side-curtain bags for head and
| hips. If you move the air bag reliability from 95% to 99%,
| but then add six more air bags, that's a 93.2% chance none
| will be bad. And if you cut the price of one airbag to 30%,
| but then add six more, that's still spending twice as much
| on airbags total. In some cars, an airbag deployment event
| totals the car. Cheaper to buy a new one than to replace
| all the air bags. Never mind the body damage.
|
| If you made a car with 1980 features out of 2020 parts, it
| would be lighter, cheaper, and more reliable. But it would
| also have 1980 gas mileage and safety features, and you'd
| be back to hand-cranked windows.
|
| Some of the newer features are worth the weight and
| complexity. Others are not. There could definitely be a
| market for a $5000 new car that requires little servicing,
| that can all be done at home without special tools, and 30
| miles to the gallon--not from complex engine designs, or
| tricks like shutting down 2 cylinders in a 6 cylinder
| engine, but just from being lightweight with a good engine
| design.
|
| Anyone else remember when the car radio only had one
| speaker? When you could see around the A columns without
| moving your head? When the automatic part of the
| transmission was just pneumatically controlling the clutch
| for the paddle-shifted manual?
|
| We have the technology now to make a crapbox deathtrap that
| only needs to slow down to under 15 mph somewhere near a
| quicklube every 15000 miles, in order to last 500000 miles.
| The stripped-down car concept is explored by Polaris with
| the Slingshot, which is legally classified as a motorcycle,
| in order to build to a lower passenger safety standard.
| You're going to wear a helmet in your car, right? _[wink]_
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| I think cars are different because there _is_ so much
| competition in the market.
| mushufasa wrote:
| older cars were more repairable. reliability is harder to
| make a blanket statement about.
|
| the most important difference IMO is that older cars are
| now dangerously unsafe by modern standards, by orders of
| magnitude. crumple zones, multiple airbags, pedestrian
| scoops, and now driver-assists like emergency braking.
| frenchyatwork wrote:
| Cars are a bit of an anomalous category here. Driving is
| a pretty dangerous activity, so it's pretty sensible to
| give up some reliability & repair-ability in order for a
| safer road-coffin.
|
| This is much less true for something like a
| fridge/thermostat/tractor.
| asdff wrote:
| Pretty much all audio equipment falls into this as well. A
| vintage marantz stereo is going to sound better than nearly
| anything on the floor at best buy today, and if something
| goes wrong you either pop in a new part and take the thing to
| someone who can solder a wire and read a schematic. Unlike a
| modern stereo that's a hunk of junk if a piece of critical
| plastic snaps in half or a cheap quality solder on the
| silicon board cracks out of warranty, not to mention the
| sound quality.
| jerf wrote:
| But how does the "vintage marantz" sound compared to
| something you can buy with, say, an hour's research with an
| internet search engine? Including price?
|
| I don't know the answer to that. But I do know from
| experience that while your average $15 headbuds are total,
| absolute, utter garbage, that if you do your research there
| are $15 headbuds that sound pretty good. They may not be
| $100+ quality headphones, but for something that fits in my
| pocket they're quite credible. Don't just buy whatever one
| has finagled their way into Best Buy or the checkout
| counter at your grocery store, but that's not necessarily
| everything the market has to offer.
| miker64 wrote:
| > But how does the "vintage marantz" sound compared to
| something you can buy with, say, an hour's research with
| an internet search engine? Including price?
|
| Considerably better in the sub $300 range, and depends at
| the $600+ range. I'd personally go with the Marantz
| still, but I'd want to do some serious a/b testing.
| amluto wrote:
| It is related to some extent. Things like brushed DC motors
| can be very reliable if you're willing to replace brushes on
| occasion, but they're wildly inefficient. Better motors need
| more complicated circuitry, and it's easy to cheap out and
| make that circuitry unreliable. It's certainly harder to
| repair.
| dejv wrote:
| As a person operating decades old equipment I see trade offs
| here. Old machines are reliable and cheap to operate, but they
| are also NOISY, steering require quite some muscle strength and
| cabin without ac and filters is not pleasant and most
| importantly good for your health.
| ketzo wrote:
| Disclaimer: I have been on a tractor exactly once in my life, no
| idea what any of the realities of this would be. _But..._
|
| Doesn't it seem like there's a huge opening for Cheap Solid DIY
| Tractors Inc.? All I read about is how farmers hate tractors
| available now for their lock-in, their shitty software, their
| insane costs -- I wonder what's preventing someone from selling
| tractors that match the description listed in this article.
| randomdata wrote:
| As a farmer, I don't think I've ever met another farmer who
| hates modern equipment. I'm not sure where that narrative has
| come from. We drool over the latest tech.
|
| I know many who choose older equipment for financial reasons,
| as the article suggests. Modern equipment is insanely expensive
| to purchase and is simply out of reach of the smaller farmer.
|
| If older equipment was actually a hot commodity, more than
| newer equipment, economics tells us that older equipment would
| be worth _more_ than newer equipment and that is simply not the
| case. Price falls consistently with age for a comparable
| machine. They are paying more for a 1980 model because someone
| else is paying even more for the 2000 model.
|
| There are plenty of basic tractors on the market with little in
| the way of electronics. But building a new tractor is
| expensive. While they come in well below the cost of a decked
| out John Deere, they are still a lot more expensive than a 40
| year old tractor.
| dejv wrote:
| Somebody posted about open source tractor, but deleted the post
| before I managed to reply, so here we go:
|
| Growing up in communist country it was really hard to buy tractor
| for your personal use as private enterprise ls was prohibited and
| all land was confiscated except of 1000m2 for personal use.
|
| Owning tractors even for land this large (and to share with
| family and friends) was still something desirable so people come
| with their own designs build on top of ready-made or repurposed
| materials.
|
| I can still see those machines from 70s or even 50s still working
| as there is nothing in them to break down.
|
| I personally own 30 years old tractor which first life was spent
| on rice field of Japan. Again very simple build and outside of
| structural damage there is almost nothing that can fail. I am
| sure it will live for another 40 or 50 years without much
| problems.
| ngneer wrote:
| This may be the single most important information security
| problem worth solving on our planet. This is not about who gets
| to see the latest movie at what resolution, it is about vendors
| and farmers fighting for control of the plant, in this case the
| tractor, and indirectly its yields. I think the world needs an
| open source tractor, or else am hoping the right to repair
| movement addresses these difficulties.
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| It's more than that. I'm in Australia, hiding inside away from
| the smoke haze, thinking about where global warming is going.
| Seems clear to me that in the next 20-30 years most farming
| will need to move indoors into climate controlled environments.
| We'll need to have closed systems where the air, water, soils,
| and our biodiversity is carefully managed.
| oilman wrote:
| People don't want DRM in their tractors?! I'm SHOCKED.
| hinkley wrote:
| I belonged to a club up until last year where probably half of
| the members were currently or formerly professional landscapers
| or related careers.
|
| The number of them who were not into computers was quite high. I
| want to say it's 'surprising' but that statement doesn't even
| survive a giggle test. Not everyone is enamored of IT the way we
| are, and some have perfectly good reasons for that. Not every
| step we take is a step forward.
|
| I kinda think that the only reason we don't hear more complaints
| is that people are preoccupied with other professions that don't
| quite deliver on their promises, especially the medical
| profession. If Western Medicine somehow got sorted out tomorrow,
| I would not be surprised if by next week many of those pitchforks
| were pointed at us.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2020-01-06 23:00 UTC)