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Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

Progress yes, but at a peak of 70hp it won't be plowing much more than a hobby garden.

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.

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Uhm.....I'm pretty sure my family has been plowing fields(and I do mean fields, not hobby gardens) with our trusty old Ursus C330[0], making a whole 30 horse power. Not sure why 70hp would be a problem.

https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursus_C-330

Not to mention that fields are still plowed by actual horses.

FYI a modern horse can generate many horsepower, between 10 and 15hp per horse.

For speed purposes I always hook my horses up in series, not parallel. With 10 horses I can usually pull a carriage at like 160mph on level ground ;)

Yes. I've got a 28HP Kubota L-series, and have been contemplating upgrading to an M-series, but even 46 would probably set us for a good while and lots of farmers around here still find use for tractors 50+ years old that are smaller than that. Yes there are huge JDs beyond that, and the M-series tops out at 168 HP, but 70 HP still seems way beyond "hobby" level and I'm honestly and genuinely surprised to see it called that way. I mean sure I understand that in the midwest there are ginormous scale farms which are very important and a backbone of certain parts of our agriculture, but there are still plenty of farms in New England and other areas which are doing a few hundred acres or less, and experimenting with different kinds of farming (like paddy farms for rice) and intensity which alter the need for sheer power.

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 think it depends on the kind of crops grown. Combines, grain bins, harvesters etc are a whole diff ball game when it comes to grain or corn on 1000+ acres for commodity crop farms

Oh, absolutely. There are major farms operating on a completely different scale for mass staple crops, and bless them because it's an efficient backbone to a lot of our core foods. But I don't think the continued existence of small farms is that obscure either is it? This is now 3 year old (2017) data [0], and the last few years have been hard. But it's not that out of date yet nor did it shift that much from 2012 [1], the overwhelming majority of the few million farms in America are small family owned operations with <$100k annual income. Average size just 450 or so acres and even that is skewed up by the few percent of enormous farms.

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...

I am in agreement with everything you said. That’s why I divide Agtech into Large commodity acreages(single harvest) and small acreage for food and cash crops(a 100-200 acre crops growing multiple perishable fruits/vegetables/flowers throughout the year for local fresh consumption.

Automation is a necessity for the latter. The former is already hyper optimized w/mechanization.

American fields are larger, so American farmers can take advantage of larger plows for better efficiency; however, larger plows require more power from the tractor.

American farms rarely plow in the traditional sense of a plow. No till is cheaper and better for the soil. It is tricky to get into, but it is not new.

Tilling is plenty common in the midwest, but in any case there are many other implements for which the same principle applies—bigger fields => bigger implements => more power.

Do you have a picture of the plow? I can't imagine it has more than say... three bottoms, if we're being generous. American farmers need more than that. This summer I had to really crank a 90hp tractor to pull a fairly small set of discs. 30hp is a lawnmower.

This thing isn't meant to pull your 8-bottom plow attachment. It isn't the tractor a large-scale wheat or corn farmer is going to use to work the fields. Those tractors generate hundreds of horsepower and cost $250k.

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.

>cost $250k

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...

Autonomy is the game changer here. For $250K you can buy 5 of these little tractors and draw 5 12ft cultivators rather than a single 60 footer. Drive one manually to mark the headland and let the other 4 fill it in.

Bingo! And no seasonal labour shortages. And you can control everything from something like. A game console.

You wouldn't though because the one big tractor does less damage to the soil.

Joking around a little bit, but I'm kind of curious if the autonomy function would let me summon it when I get my truck stuck. Way nicer than having to walk a few miles to go get the tractor...

Plenty of tractors in this power class, and electric torque means it will punch above its weight:

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.

Before electric motors, factories used to have a single giant coal engine that used pulleys and crankshafts to distribute that power all across the factory. When electric motors became available, they replaced that single giant coal engine with a single giant electric motor.

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.

>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.

Both tractors I use have around 68hp on the engine, ~65hp on the PTO. Both have front loaders, one of them has an excavator on the back. I run them in the fields (mowing, turning, baling, etc.) and in the forest (logging, skidding, forwarding, etc.). Tractors do not need huge engines to be useable on the farm, this is only needed for 3-swathe mowers, 10-row ploughs, high-speed baler/wrappers etc.

There are a lot of operations that use midsized utility tractors extensively. This certainly won't replace a large tractor in wheat, hay, corn, and soy (plowing, disc, mowing, bailing, etc.) but can definitely replace utility tractors in orchard/vineyard spraying, CSA and organic farm style mixed-crop cultivation, etc. Think more California than Nebraska.

Surprisingly large number of tractor injuries are overturning when operating on steep slopes, a category easily avoided by not having a driver.

It would be nice if the electric could detect that circumstance (overturning) and shut itself off...

Tractors don't need horse power, they need torque.

Torque is certainly important, which is why I was a bit surprised that they haven't released torque figures for this. Just the ever nebulous "twice as much as similar sized competitors"

That makes no sense. You can get torque with lower gearing, therefore, if tractors only needed torque, then even the largest tractors could get by with a tiny engine given enough gearing. The problem is, farmers need tractors to move faster than .1 MPH, so that is why they have large engines that generate serious HP.

There's a difference between peak horsepower output and continuous horsepower output. A normal passenger car might be able to put out 300 hp, but only for a short period of time before blowing the headgasket (or destroying the drive train). Diesel engine with gobs of torque or electric is going to produce that power at a lower speed and more efficiently, so it will be able to do it longer. Being able to put out 70hp nonstop for hours on end is nothing to be ashamed of.

A modern engine will run at full hp for extended periods, hundreds of hours. In many ways, lower power settings at lower rpms can be harder on engines than running flat out. In a family car, the cooling system would drop the ball long before anything as substantial as a head gasket. It would overheat long before any actual damage.

Hundreds of hours, perhaps. But not for the entire life of the engine. If a modern passenger car engine could put out 200 hp nonstop for years on end, every semi-truck manufacturer would be putting a BMW engine in it, instead of a huge cast iron Cummins. But I'm pretty sure you'd spin a bearing, or wear out the cylinder liner, or burn a valve.

If you tuned a semi engine for peak power the way automotive engines are they wouldn't last 400k either.

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.

I guess I’m not articulating myself well, because I’m basically agreeing with you.

TFA said "40 horsepower continuously and, in short durations, peak power reaches 70 horsepower." This is a 40hp tractor.

Those were my thoughts as well. Around the size of a hobby tractor and it will be interesting to see if they can scale it up without losing endurance.

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.

10 hours of autonomous is pretty great. Someone can’t safely operate a tractor for 10 hours straight anyways

Which is why people work in shifts. Tractors/combines regularly work 24/7 during harvest.

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