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Comment by JamisonM | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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.

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