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Comment by afandian | Hacker News Reader

How long before tractor manufacturers buy "environmental regulations" to prohibit the use of older machinery?

electric conversions seem like they'd make a lot of sense here anyways. high torque and low maintenance.

As a farmer I am interested buying one, especially as I am using tractors for light work: spraying, towing and light field work. There are few hacked tractors already available, but it will take some time before supply chain mature enough.

I am pessimistic about having heavy duty industrial scale tractors with current battery technology. Those machines are monsters and when you interpolate consumption from light workloads to those monsters it just doesn't compute. Another angle in economics is that those machines have to work for many hours a day (combines in heavy seasons run for 12+, 7 days a week) which is also hard with current batteries.

I believe that this is the area where hydrogen technology is supposed to step in. I am sceptical of that as well though.

As you note the light loads will do well with electric systems, there is a lot of low hanging fruit to take care of on every farm before the big horsepower will get tackled.. and maybe autonomous tech will get good enough that the answer will instead be replacing a lot of the high-HP jobs with more lower HP jobs instead?

Depends on the what’s being grown. Sometimes you need monster HP.

Even with light work, electrical systems add to the weight leading to built in inefficiencies. I don’t know if we can move away from diesel at this point.

You need monster HP when you are trying to do a lot in a single pass, when I talk about the idea of autonomous+electric I am envisioning trading less work per pass for less HP and trading that off for more units and less labour.

Back in the bad old days you'd work 6 inches deep with a single-bottom plow behind a single draft horse! You can always break it up enough to get the HP down! ;)

It’s suitable for vegetable and small acreage farms. That’s the farm automation platform I am working on...we can swarm small Ag bots over connected small acreages. It’s the best use of robotics and automation tech in the field because every market farm or small acreage farm flips beds 2-3 times/year and have crops that have continuous multiple harvest windows.

If you're doing ground work with a tractor then weight is actually a good thing. The way it was always explained to me is weight determines what the tractor is capable of, horsepower is how quickly you could do it.

Well, the time window in which you should do certain farming operation without product degradation is often quite short and having smaller tractor doing it autonomously might not cut it. Once you need to buy few of those to replace one you are buying into bigger chance to failure, more maintenance duties etc and it might result in higher cost per unit.

I think biogas might be winner for farms. If reliable and cheap production and liquefaction could be done. LNG seems perfectly reasonable self-supplied source for farms. There is likely enough waste material around for power needs of farming equipment. And source is local.

This is an insane idea. But.

Given that unlike cars, tractors work in a bounded area, could some kind of permanent power cord work? Given that irrigation water can get to all those crops, can't a power cable?

I think the difference is that water lines for irrigation are mostly aerial except for the one spot where they enter the ground water source. Further, the lines themselves don't move, the machine holding the lines moves. Finally, there is a substantial difference in 'I have a small water leak' and 'I have a small power leak'.

Maybe I'm being too closed minded, but I can't see that working long term. The stresses of being dragged around the field, or the infrastructure required to hang the power cord overhead would just be outlandish. For some reason, I can't get the picture of a powered grid of wire mesh over a field like giant bumper cars.

Series of heavy-payload drones to keep the cable aloft. The drones can draw power from it to power themselves indefinitely. And of course you'd need a massive slip ring at the tractor.

Do you mean like a center pivot? Actually that’s not a bad idea. In theory.

I was about to post the same. After all, if I can mow my lawn with an electric mower without electrocuting myself with just a little bit of route planning, can't farmers do just the same?

for farm situation i think battery swaps would work much better. Also giving that the farmers can also have wind/solar installs those extra batteries can be used as grid storage the rest of the time.

https://www.varta-storage.com/fileadmin/varta_storage/downlo...

VARTA is looking into Ag robotics battery market.

Not for tractors of this size. A Tesla has enough battery to last maybe 10 minutes at the rate big tractors use power. A Tesla might put out 500 horsepower for 3 seconds, but then it is up to the speed limit and you back off to 20 horsepower for the rest of the trip. A tractor starts off putting out 500 horsepower, and maintains that for 10 hours or so.

That's like comparing a Camry to a Deere -- you'd redesign the entire vehicle for peak & nominal loads.

Going from a 4,000 lb tesla to a 25,000 lb tractor, you'd accumulate significant additional battery mass & completely redesign EV systems (motors, controllers, batteries, charge paths, etc). A more apt comparison would be the Tesla Semi.

While you're at it... it might be worth completely re-thinking the problem in light of semi-autonomy. E.g. if you're going to have recharge periods, a fleet of 3x 8000-lb semi-autonomous robots might be preferable to a single 25,000 lb tractor (since labor is no longer a consideration). This also has benefits for soil compaction.

YMMV.

> a fleet of 3x 8000-lb semi-autonomous robots might be preferable to a single 25,000 lb tractor (since labor is no longer a consideration). This also has benefits for soil compaction.

Actually this is false. Turns out soil compaction is NOT linear with weight. Your 8000lbs tractor making 3 passes compacts the soil across 3 sets of tire tracks, the 1 25000lbs tractor does about 10% more compaction in the one set of tire tracks, but no compaction at all for the other 2 where there are not tires at all. This is why tracks end up worse then tires in the real world: same 10% less compaction, but you lose all the gains at the end of the row when you turn and now the tracks compact a lot more ground.

Hydraulic hybrid conversion might make more sense.

https://www.machinedesign.com/markets/energy/article/2183194...

As Reed's replacing the engines with newer engines it probably won't be a problem for him. Of course not everyone has the skills or time to do that.

I'm not imagining a good-faith law here.

To draw a parallel, and I don't know how things work in the states, in Europe the CE mark is only valid when the equipment is installed in the approved way.

I did this for a boat once (including a brand new engine), and the relevant regulation is the Recreational Craft Directive. To get a boat legal to sell, you need to perform a relevant declaration, reference to the correct EU regulations and their localised translation into law, pay someone qualified to prepare the paperwork and translate the regulations ... a nightmare of paperwork and very expensive.

I'm not suggesting any bad-faith legistlation in the Recreational Craft Directive, I fully support very progressive environmental regulations, and not drawing the parallel too too closely...

But if you did want to curtail people's freedoms through regulation paperwork, there are all kinds of places you could hide a gotcha.

Off the top of my head:

- How about the energy efficiency of the whole power train?

- Approved lubricants.

- Annual energy efficiency certification of the whole vehicle from an approved organisation.

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