Electric Monarch tractor can plow a field without a driver and run for ten hours
thedrive.com
thedrive.com
But where’s the barrier to entry? AI is going to dramatically alter this competitive landscape and John Deere’s DRM is not going to to stop it.
Honestly, I love watching these companies drive nails into their own coffins.
I was on the Google homepage today on my iPhone and was getting popups advertising Chrome (on the homepage!) and then again in the search results advertising the Google app. I changed my default to DDG right then and there.
Seriously, it’s like 4 taps. Settings > Safari > Search Engine > DDG.
Don’t support these shitty companies and just watch them burn themselves to the ground. It might take 10 years but consumers ultimately will be the arbiter.
I will literally pay money for a search engine that's privacy focused and can get closer to Google in terms of performance.
Even for not-that-obscure bands, all DDG needs to do is return the wikipedia page and it fails to do that.
A 70% reduction in Google sounds like a win.
I’ve tried to replace Google with both DDG and Bing. Both of their results are frankly terrible compared to Google’s. Google’s transition to its current hybrid Ask-Jeeves-style question/traditional query search engine, along with its inline answers above the result list both blow its competitors out of the water. Google also does a much better job of letting the user know the freshness or up-to-dateness of results with its inline last-modified/updated time stamps.
Both of those things have made it impossible for me to switch off of Google without immediately having problems quickly finding relevant, up-to-date information on the web. I do desperately want to switch, though.
I also especially despise AMP. It constantly breaks websites and itself, especially on iOS.
I would love this state, but getting there is not simple. DRM is just one facet of it: companies selling machinery have worked on hardware for decades, making their systems physically robust and able to take lots of abuse. This raises the barrier to entry a lot. My 2c.
See the comments about repair parts. These aren't cheap toys like smartphones and eyepads that are only meant to last a few years. Ag machinery are capital assets that should function for decades. The people buying this equipment are in it for the long haul, and anyone financing such a venture should be also.
If SV VC prefers scale-and-exit schemes, then it's not a good fit, but SV VC isn't the only source of capital.
We've got a Kubota CUT, when rats chewed out the writing harness we were 4 weeks before we had it up and running even with insurance + dealership.
Personally I'd love to see someone come in and clean house. Weight and torque are the two things you want in a tractor and electric has both in spades. I think tractors in the CUT space where hydrostatic transmission are common would make a really good fit since you can basically eliminate the HST.
If I had the option for either a pure-electric or diesel-electric I would have seriously considered it. At least in our case the workload is a lot of hauling, intermittent groundwork and field mowing(<10ac) all of which would have fit really well.
Also all the JD DRM stuff only applies in the larger 100hp+ market. In the SCUT/CUT/Utility Tractor market there's a fairly robust set of companies(Kubota, LS, JD, Mahindra, Yanmar, etc).
> Don’t support these shitty companies
Then start by changing your phone.
Mahindra is the worlds most popular tractor and any man and his dog can service them.
That said, lots of Kubota around these parts with KMA and KIE in the greater metro area.
They look solid, like cast iron old style tractors.
Also they are relatively inexpensive compared to like John Deere.
All that being said comparing them to big John Deere tractors is like comparing a golf cart to pickup truck. They don't make the massive sized ones that are responsible for the bulk of production field activity.
I just switched my search engine from DDG to StartPage because I was on a DDG results page and there was a pop-up advertising their app. Why does a search engine need a phone app? Seriously!
Honestly, if you’re concerned about being tracked then you should ignore adds directly related to the webpage your on. Advertising yoga mats on a yoga website don’t take insight into you. Advertising yoga mats on a personal finance site after you visited the yoga webpage is another story.
Of course, having that at launch is one thing, but future decisions could always be made by the bean counters leading to a locked down platform.
> Honestly, I love watching these companies drive nails into their own coffins.
There's trillions to be made before AI is needed. There's no AI problem
AI isn't magic beans, it's only sold that way. AI will have DRM. Can you use GPT-3?
John Deere can at any time remove the DRM so not sure why they will get nails in their coffins. They have the lead and can pivot at any time. If DRM is a killer...
Agriculture has become a industry of scale, but that might be it's undoing. It might be better to have an electric tractor doing the ploughing, but wouldn't it be even better to do less ploughing? With the invention of fertilizers (which isn't bad in itself) we where able to scale, but we needed more fertilizer, the soil became more barren and devoid of soil life with every iteration.
With heavier tractors we needed to lower the water level to not get stuck in the soft soils, the heavier tractors compacted the soils even more, so we needed heavier tractors to till en plough the soil again. Otherwise we couldn't force the same crop out of the soil year after year.
When we're only looking at the economic outcomes of the agronomic industry, we're forgetting a few things. I work in IT, I work at an environmental NGO, I have an interest in agroecology, organic farming and such but I often feel it's an 'either/or' kind of thing.
It's either locally sourced, community supported agriculture with a huge focus on soil restoration, resilience, crop rotation, diversity (polyculture? as opposite of monoculture) land access which attracts a specific crowd of people. Think leftist, anarchistic, community-oriented, spiritual-religious (which group I really like) but with a lot of menial/manual labor, a aversion of technology. Which can be explained by the centralistic nature of a lot of technology, and it often being focused on ‘vertical scaling’.
Or it’s hip startups with sensor tech, drones, AI-platforms predicting where you’ll have te best results and use for example ‘variable-rate seeding’ and program your fleet of heavy tractors to automate it all. We’ve automated quite a lot in ‘beef production’, but maybe we should do less of that and focus more on finding solutions to scale horizontally? (Like we might need less humongous farms producing one specific product but more smaller farms producing various products).
Hopefully this makes sense to someone ;)
I've seen quite some of that community supported agriculture.
Basically, machines were invented and put to work for a reason. Farming a field used to be backbreaking and still is, if you work a big field. Most of the communities I've been, struggle a lot with even a small vegetable garden.
In other words: big words, but low outcome, with the result of having to buy the food in the end.
"Like we might need less humongous farms producing one specific product but more smaller farms producing various products"
So I agree on that, but also on a smaller, diverse farm, I would use at least a small tractor.
But here I see the advantage of autonomous electric tractors: they could be made quite small and rather have more of them.
But I would really not go back to horse or human drawn wheat harvesting. It is not efficient. Those who like to do so as a hobby, have plenty of opportunity, but don't expect to feed the world with this approach.
Other top level comment:
+ 10 hours covers up a good day in field.
- a lot of farms are away from electricity sources to charge and sometimes internet connection is non-existent. It is risky to leave a 50k machine on its own to do its job. And what to do if battery runs out on the field?
- how long does it take to recharge? A lot of farmers will not have fast charges on their farm.
Starlink might offer a bit of disruption there, particularly once its approved for mobile usage. They might ultimately have an opportunity to offer plans/terminals specifically for situations like this too, dedicated application devices that need small amounts of bandwidth in isolated areas.
In the US? Not true. The vast majority of US farms have power for one simple reason, they irrigate. It'd be far too expensive to irrigate using a gas pump.
The exception MIGHT be dry farms, but those aren't as common as you might think. Further, most farms have shops for repairs which almost always have power for lights (and heat sometimes).
> And what to do if battery runs out on the field?
Simple, grab a gas generator, run to the tractor, and charge it up enough to hobble it to the shop and to a full charge. You might waste an hour running your generator, but that's really not that big of a deal. Many farmers already have those generators (welding is a big reason why).
A particularly ecologically focused farmer might buy some solar panels to do the same thing :).
> how long does it take to recharge? A lot of farmers will not have fast charges on their farm.
Doesn't really matter, it can charge overnight slowly. So long as the farm has access to 240V they likely can get it charge up in the 14 hours of downtime.
At $50k, this is a particularly cheap tractor as well. I'd suspect that farmers would buy 2 and completely sidestep the charging problem if they wanted to run for more than 10 hours.
I just looked on Google Earth and measured it out; we're only about 1.1 miles from a 3-phase line, so it would be feasible, but likely pretty expensive, to get that run to us.
It's actually quite common for farms to have 3 phase power at the least. Modern farming is heavily industrialized. There's all sorts of dryers or blowers or other processing equipment to be run depending on the crop or livestock. Renewables, either self owned or leased land access are a big growth thing too. This means you can be in the boonies of western Kansas and yet be proximate to truly staggering amounts of intermittent generation.
> and sometimes internet connection is non-existent.
It's not great service, but sat internet is pervasive (and yes before the mob shows up starlink is likely to vastly improve this). The main thing this needs is connectivity between the unit and farmer, which is just local wireless.
> It is risky to leave a 50k machine on its own to do its job.
The price isn't a factor in any way I can think of. Any farm bigger than trivial will have several 100 thousand dollars if not millions worth of machinery parked out in the open, and tractor automation has been a big deal for a while now including examples of self driving for simple tasks.
> And what to do if battery runs out on the field?
Probably use the farm truck to haul the portable generator up to it to charge enough to get er back to the barn. Or call the neighbor and ask for a tow. Traditional tractors get stuck all the time. On the scale of problems farmers solve routinely this is very easy.
I think it's probably easy for the audience here to misunderstand what modern farming is like due to unfamiliarity. Farming is high tech now, and farmers are amazing problem solvers. But even historically that was true. Your idealized turn of the century farmer in the US knew how to operate and fix steam engines, pumps, do basic metalwork among many other things. Modern farmers are often skilled builders and fabricators as well.
I grew up on a farm so it was kind of funny reading "A lot of farms don't have access to electricity"
It's weird to read something like that. Every farm in my farming hometown had power nearby. Heck, you'll see power lines all across Idaho primarily for farmers running pumps. You simply don't get more rural than Idaho.
To put things into perspective, this house has power.
https://goo.gl/maps/x6ZiGMhxbKxfHJSj7
Make sure you zoom out to get some perspective on how remote that little house is.
I'd put a lot of blame on movies or tv ads, that make farming look like gardening but bigger. It sure ain't lol.
https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-i...
This is what “they” said about the iPod when it was released.
https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-i...
https://www.foodandfarmingtechnology.com/news/autonomous-veh...
Also big-ass mining trucks:
https://techacute.com/zyfra-huawei-5g-test-autonomous-mining...
[0]http://farminjuryresource.com/atv-injuries/farming-injuries/...
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2018/03/20/592857197/ro...
In the more advanced countries, cow milking and meat cutting is done by robots. The US is starting to catch up.[1] Advanced technology from New Zealand is finally reaching the US. The countries that don't have a supply of low-wage illegal immigrants are ahead in advanced ag technology.
[1] https://www.robots.com/applications/meat-processing-automati...
I’m not sure I’d agree the US is overall behind in automation compared to other countries, but I think we probably do have automation in different places. Farm labor is certainly not cheap in California. Our blueberry pickers averaged about $23 an hour this year. I admit I have no context for what would be an acceptable rate in New Zealand or Europe, but I can’t imagine it’s much more than that.
This electric tractor markets itself as having twice the torque of an ICE tractor of a similar size. This means you don't need a bigger more expensive tractor.
>If anything, battery powered cars lose a lot of value as their battery capacities tend to decline over time.
EVs lose in value because of government subsidies. The list price is $30k but you only have to pay $25k because of subsidies. Nobody is going go buy your used EV for more than $25k because they can get a new one instead.
Modern EV batteries don't loose much of their capacity over time. You probably have your information from old Leafs.
Most people that actually drive EVs I've heard from do not have problems with long charging times. In fact, it only takes a couple of seconds to do most charges (the time it takes to plug it in in your garage). When they are travelling, it does take longer, but for most people it just means a slightly longer coffee break.
Coal is on its way out, and even with coal on the grid, it doesn't actually defeat the purpose, as it is still more efficient than small fossil engines not running at their optimal revs. And it is on its way out!
Hydrogen for cars is not going to happen, outside a few compliance cars. And you'll probably be surprised to learn that you can't fill up a hydrogen car as fast as a gas car.
The main problems holding EV cars back right now are lack of production capacity and upfront cost.
My sister owned a Tesla model 3 in California for 3 years. She had a lot of fun in it and used it as a daily commute. You're right that in most cases a regular person won't have any problems. They had problems with long waiting times at superchargers at charging stations during long weekends and public holidays. Once they literally had to wait for hours just to get a chance to charge it. She did lose some battery capacity and sold it.
Hydrogen takes 4 to 5 minutes to fill up as opposed to 30 to 40 minutes for EV with supercharging. There is no comparison there. Also using a fast charger all the times can damage batteries. I'm not saying Hydrogen cars are practical now. They could be in future. I hope it is.
A Google search suggests that there are lots of studies showing that 25 fast charging cycles wrecks the battery but I have driven my Model S from Norway to the UK and back three times which is about 12 k km altogether and I used Tesla chargers exclusively on the journey. The practical range is about 300 km so I must have charged much more than 40 times in addition to all the times I have charged on journeys from Oslo to Trondheim and back. I haven't noticed any significant degradation in range.
But who actually does it on ordinary days when not doing a road trip? I have had that 2015 Model S for three years and I only use the Superchargers when I know that I will travel more than a couple of hundred kilometre in a day; otherwise I can keep the car charged at home (usually just to 80% unless I plan a long trip and I usually charge again before I get to 20%. Plugging in to an ordinary domestic socket every couple of days is enough and takes seconds.
But in the UK the story is very different, 10% of new car sales and a total of less than 2% of cars are EVs.
The difference is probably down to the taxes on cars. Here in Norway expensive cars are doubly expensive because of progressive taxation on them from which EVs are exempted but in the UK you just get paid back a few thousand pounds by the state when you buy an EV. So here EVs are comparable in cost to ICE cars especially at the expensive end of the price range.
Autonomous operation is all well and good but expect resistance. Look at how many farmers are injured by tractor equipment. They will rightly fear driverless tractors.
I don't have the slightest disdain for the megafarms, but it seems a bit blinders to consider them to be the only thing in existence too. Not that there couldn't be other issues with this, but 70 HP would be plenty useful at the right price and running cost. Calling it "hobby level" seems dismissive. Something kind of roughly equivalent like the M4-071 is at least $50k, I'm not sure how many hobbyists are dropping that kind of capital on a whim in the country. At $50-100k most families are going to be thinking about commercial ROI aren't they?
I guess I'm just kind of fascinated the first few comments on something like this would be about it being "hobbyist". Anything that could lower operating costs and externalities for small farms also deserves a bit more positive attention.
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0: https://www.usfarmdata.com/percentage-of-small-medium-and-la...
1: https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/Highlights/2016/Small...
Automation is a necessity for the latter. The former is already hyper optimized w/mechanization.
I also feel that 10 hours of battery time isn't sufficient outside of the hobby space. Especially when considering that it probably isn't road legal in autonomous mode.
https://www.kubotausa.com/products/tractors/utility
Autonomy is a proof-is-in-the-pudding thing. If it works as advertised, people will adopt it eventually.
But there is plenty of market for a small utility tractor, and the people using those aren't all hobby farmers. You don't use your massive 500 hp John Deere 9630 to stack hay bales or cultivate your row crops or power your auger or post driver.
Even if you have a 500 hp monster you'll still want a utility tractor. Right tool for the right job.
for reference here’s the used market for one of their larger tractors: https://www.tractorhouse.com/listings/farm-equipment/for-sal...
Some combines just for the fun in it: https://www.tractorhouse.com/listings/farm-equipment/for-sal...
They got their lunch eaten by people who built new factories with electric motors at every station, distributing the power using wire.
These tractors are autonomous, you can have multiple tractors per operator. 5 50hp tractors are probably cheaper and more capable and easier to run by a single operator than a single 250hp diesel monster.
5 50hp tractors are in no way cheaper than one 250. Soooo many more duplicated systems and stuff to maintain and repair. With the fleet of small tractors you have like 4x the number of hours tied up in service.
And before anyone say "hurr durr muh electric" I would advice you to google up some small machine manuals, look at the service intervals and see what you'll be doing the most of. Electric motors don't mean you can throw out your grease gun. The bulk of the hours on heavy equipment maintenance are spend on the business ends of the machine that take the abuse, attachments and drive-train, not engine/trans.
You can get automotive engines with similar power to weight or power to displacement numbers as semi truck engines. They're just normal automotive engines sold for industrial use.