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Comment by FractalParadigm | Hacker News Reader

I just want to throw my 2¢ out there, as a mid-20's who went to a high-rural-population high school, there's an entire new generation of farmers who have a) accepted that Deere's need constant/regular service calls, and b) don't care to learn how to fix it (or older equipment) themselves. At the end of the day farming is just a business same as any other, it's the same reason why a lot of trucking companies lease their trucks or warehouses lease their forklifts, it's generally cheaper and less of a headache overall.

I've tried to make pleas with some of my old friends who've complained about the locked-down nature of their JD equipment, explaining that other companies like Kubota don't have that same limitation, but the branding is just too strong ("the Kubota might be cheaper to buy, and cheaper to run, and I can easily maintain it myself, but, it's not a John Deere" - actual quote from a SW Ontario farmer)

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I also grew up in a rural high school with a large farming population. I categorize farmers into three types:

1. Professional - Usually highly educated, good business sense. Probably obtained an advanced degree in agriculture science, though not always, some self-educate very successfully. These farmers generally do not like John Deere and think they are overpriced, not as good as they once were, and find the lack of right to repair infuriating.

2. Uneducated - Likely barely passed high school due to a complete lack of effort, because they were going to be farmers and school, "couldn't teach them nothin." Farming is an identity for these individuals. Buying a John Deere is part of that lifestyle. Some kids grow up with a Ferrari on their wall, these kids had a John Deere tractor. The problem with these individuals as it relates to business is that they do not understand business or accounting and probably only have a rudimentary understanding of ag science. They overspend on equipment and their only basic ag science understanding leaves them unable to adapt as well as the pros to droughts, infestations, and other adverse conditions.

3. Gentleman Farmers - Usually educated, but perhaps in an unrelated field. Farming is a hobby. Perhaps a retirement "job." If they make money, great, if not, well, they have money to spare. They buy John Deere, because they can afford it and because it seems like the obvious choice. They are happy to pay their local dealer to fix or repair their tractor, it is something they don't have to worry about and costs are not a real going concern. Breaking even is a success.

Both the less educated farmers and the gentleman farmers treat John Deere tractors as a status symbol (every other farmer know exactly how much a John Deere tractor costs). And when you know how much they cost it is like seeing someone drive by in a Ferrari or Lamborghini, because, well, they cost as much as a Ferrari or Lamborghini, if not more. The professional farmers could care less because they are running a business.

4. The BTO (Big Time Operator). Deere has been known to give them very compelling deals that the other manufacturers cannot match. The smaller farmers are more likely to buy used equipment, so this also ensures that when the largest farmers buy Deere, green equipment is what is found on the used lot.

The biggest operators get it on a deal but the small to mid tail of the curve needs to pay full price but they aspire for the better product - which is where the margins are.

Almost a veblen good but not quite by traditional definitions.

FWIW the lock-in for farming in terms of equipment and seed product is so bananas to me. Really feels like the large corpos have got everyone squeezed.

This is a good point. I also wonder if the service agreements start to make a lot more sense for the BTOs due to scale and so they are less likely to be concerned about the right to repair.

A lot, I dare say even most, of the new equipment is leased to the first generation customers. They will run them for a year, two tops, and then it will go out on the used market for the 'regular' farmers to buy. You won't find much concern about ownership agreements when they are renting the equipment.

I also grew up in rural areas, and I agree with throwaway. your comments are condescending and also inaccurate. The more 'uneducated' farmers took pride in fixing their equipment, especially their tractors. Your comments are so far off I wonder if you even grew up in such an area or if you didn't really know your classmates at all.

For one thing, who in the heck lives in a rural area knows that many types of farmers. Farms are huge and school district areas are small.

We all need to fight for legislation that gives us the right to repair everything from our iPhones to our tractors.

Well there’s other ways of controlling this besides increased regulation, like using capitalism and stop using JD.

But back to the point, your parent stated the person was lying and you defended it. Do you mean to say we must say whatever and lie to advance an agenda?

> Some kids grow up with a Ferrari on their wall, these kids had a John Deere tractor.

John Deere has a significant toy business that has to pay off big time considering how many of these customers they produce (and the toys themselves are quite expensive IIRC).

Wow. What an incredibly offensive comment. I love how HN understands the right to repair when it comes to their gadgets, but when it comes to tractors it's probably because the farmers are uneducated hicks. Please tell me more how they don't understand AG science enough, but you have such a strong grasp on it.

JD tractors were and are reliable and top tier in quality, that's why they are popular and that's why people stick to the brand. I've built Kioti tractors when I was teenager. They'd do the job if you had to use it, but it's no JD in terms of quality.

Farmers just want the quality they've always had with JD but the ability to fix simple stuff like they used to without it costing them an arm and a leg.

The stereotypes you listed off don't sound like anyone I've ever experienced. They sound like caricatures you painted in your head with your lack of understanding.

I am sorry you took offense to the comment, it was not meant to be offensive. I never claimed to have any grasp on agriculture science. And I never called anyone a "hick." And of course I am speaking in generalities. Simply observing what I saw growing up. I grew up on a small farm (though I certainly would never call myself a farmer) and grew up with farmers of all types and all income levels. Some chose to be willfully ignorant and not really learn how to run the family business even though that was their end goal and some did. I don't think this was a matter of capacity of the individuals. Some of those that were willfully ignorant were quite well off and some were not quite as well off. Some took a formal route to education, some self studied. It is simple anecdotal observation that some of the more successful farmers I know a). Educated themselves one way or another. b). Those same farmers, for the most part, have started or have already moved away from John Deere. Largely due to the right to repair issues, in part due to the premium cost, but some of the farmers that I have talked to have relayed to me that they feel the quality has dropped, which is perhaps not reality, simply their perception based on frustrations surrounding right to repair. John Deere has also rapidly expanded their product categories and not all of their new products share the same famous reliability as their ag products, which could negatively impact overall perception of the brand.

Generally when someone is calling another uneducated it’s offensive. You can probably safely remove that word from online discourse and people wouldn’t react that way.

Talking about anybody’s education level, specifically when saying they can’t do or understand something because of it, is extremely offensive and hateful.

The tone of your comment changed dramatically in this reply. You didn't have to say hick, you implied it with your uneducated rant. You simply don't understand why they want a John Deere, and it's not because they are uneducated.

Also, maybe never try to shove people into categories, especially only 3 categories. Especially one category being "uneducated". You reached all that from a topic about repairing tractors and their choice of brand. Think about that.

Your "anecdote" doesn't match my experience and it lines up with an outsider perspective with a dash of elitism. You said you don't know anything about AG science, so how could you judge others knowledge of it?

I appreciate your feedback. I phrased poorly. By uneducated I never meant formal education exclusively. There are many ways to learn and I personally find self study to be the most effective.

And I am sorry I came across as elitist, I grew up lower to lower-middle class, and my parents grew up dirt poor. As my mother would say, "you come from a long line of poor farmers."

I judge because those students who actively refused to learn were my peers...sometimes my relatives. Again, I would say it was 50/50. Some of those individuals were very well off, and now struggle to manage the farm they inherited. Others grew up in poverty and now have advanced degrees, or have otherwise educated themselves and run a very successful farm or now own a very successful farm.

> 'Likely barely passed high school due to a complete lack of effort, because they were going to be farmers and school, "couldn't teach them nothin."

> The problem with these individuals as it relates to business is that they do not understand business or accounting and probably only have a rudimentary understanding of ag science.

> their only basic ag science understanding leaves them unable to adapt as well as the pros to droughts, infestations, and other adverse conditions."

So please tell me, how did you come to realize these faults in these people you met. Did they explain to you that their accounting was bad, did you see their books, did you test their soil, did you see them struggle with an infestation, or are you simply guessing and hurling insults?

Since you prefixed your statement with "probably" I'm going to guess that you're using the #2 category to shit on a group of people while the #1 category is used to argue your point that smart farmers support your conclusion that john deere = bad.

This situation has nothing to do with "uneducated farmers" and everything to do with JD being the top tier brand but also shafting its customers by not allowing them to repair their product.

Kubota doesn't come close to JD, especially in larger tractors and integrations.

We would struggle to discuss anything of any significant size if simplified models were not used. John Deere forecasted earnings of $5 billion this year and statistics about the education of all of their customers presumably don't exist.

You may disagree with the model used, but it was clearly an opinionated one based on personal experience. If you have a different one, then we can all compare, contrast and hopefully continue a curious conversation.

An anecdote is not a simplified model. They were stereotypes.

He shoved "uneducated farmers" into the same group of people that idolized John Deere for the brand alone, but did not offer any connection between the two.

Typical HN elitism. My anecdotes do differ, and it's mostly generational. Either you're a younger farmer that has gone to A&M and you're heavy into Ag Science or you're more old school and you use techniques passed down. Or you're a big time operator and none of this applies.

Nothing to do with what OP said.

Relax. This commenter is speaking in generalities and it's like you're interpreting it as a personal attack.

They simply said that there exist a category of farmers who do not participate in the normal schooling system and choose brands based only on status. This phenomena exists for nearly all brands. You can't possibly be disputing that these people exist?

Keep away from ad hominem attacks, they only serve to dilute your argument.

His categories are false. You think all the farmers that don't have an education are the same ones that choose the brand based on status?

No, education is generational. Most younger farmers have gone to a good ag science school like A&M. Most older farmers don't have an education but have tons of experience and use techniques passed down that are essentially the same as what is taught in schools.

Whether you brand whore or not is not based on your education status, which is what OP suggested.

Deere does not have a monopoly on quality. Yes, if you compare them to Kioti (a discount brand), they are superior, but there are other manufacturers (NH, Mahindra, Kubota, etc) where they stand up just as well.

Try sitting in a Kubota for 12 hours vs a JD. Your ass will be able to tell a difference.

At this point it's better to buy a Kubota to avoid the lock-in, but JD is still far superior when it comes to the attention to detail.

You must know my neighbour. He was running a Kubota for a year or two, but it didn't take him long to replace it with a Deere.

I have most of the major brands in my shed. I don't particularly care much about what colour I'm using. Purchases have been made based on cost, which has included some green equipment when a great auction find has been found.

My experience says that JD has the UX nailed. When you're spending 12 hour days in the seat, the little things do start to make a big difference. I am not sure it is fair to be dismissive of it as being a result of great branding. The equipment is meant to be used and the experience and comfort while using it can most definitely be worth a premium to many.

This made me think of how many developers (who spend 10 hrs/day in front of their screen) choose Apples products. A linux machine might be better on performance, maintainance, and all that, but Linux does not care about UX the way Apple does.

The only reason most devs I work with don't use a Linux laptop is that our corporate security, vpn, and auditing software isn't available for Linux. We settle for garbage-tier UX from docker + x11.app so we can do our jobs, not because Apple cares about anything.

What about all the developers (who spend 10 hrs/day in front of their screen) that choose unix machines?

The ux for the things I _actually do_ is way better on a linux machine.

Are any of the unixes[1], other than macOS, commonly used as the system powering the screen?

[1] https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/

You're not going to convince someone in the cult of Apple that their overpriced machine isn't worth the premium.

An actual VT4xx or VT5xx is the best terminal. An xterm window is a decent substitute (and if it comes with the optional Tek emulator, has some small extra whistles, but I think that has mostly been ripped out of all xterms by now).

The MacOS terminal is... so-so. I mean, it's not horrible, but it is also not great.

I am not convinced that Apple kit has the best UX (and I am in the same room as two macs that I alternate between).

I run i3/tmux/xterm wherever I can (also back when I was doing frontend). I definitely prefer this over anything Apple has been able to offer me in terms of user experience.

My comment above was just a reflection of a connection I hadn't made before. :)

I somewhere between like and REALLY like the laptops. Still not convinced by the touch bar on the work 16" MacBook Pro. But, it does seem kind of neat in many ways. At some point, I may experiment with its tex suggestions, for surrealism, if nothing else.

Lots of devs can't choose their platform. It's often a choice between Windows and Mac, if that. On a lot of the jobs I've worked, it was Windows-only. Give me a Linux machine instead and I will spend the day as happy as a genie who was permanently released from its bottle.

I actually don't know any engineers that use apple. A lot of graphic artists and designers for sure.

>Linux does not care about UX the way Apple does.

What UX? A terminal?

Linux is also only an operating system kernel.

This is old, but I remember my grandpa saying he didn't buy Deere because "everything's backwards." Not sure if he meant the controls or mechanics, or how literal he was being. Beyond that, he didn't seem to care about brand all that much, and he had great luck with his Kubota.

Hi, I worked on the new (as of ~2014) CommandArm touch screen and joystick. :)

Developing software at John Deere was frustrating, but they have some really fun, interesting problems and other, larger political/cultural problems.

The issue is really about freedom. If you don't care that a company can decide whether or not you may farm, then rent their equipment. If you do care, then you want 100% control of that equipment. Or as close to 100% as you can get.

It's sort of comparable to writing software in C (an ISO standard with many open source compilers) to run on your commodity x86 hardware versus writing an iOS Apple Store app. In one case, you have almost complete control of the HW and SW, in the other, you have no control and can be prevented from doing so at any moment for any reason.

It's not that simple. There are features of these high end tractors such as automation and satellite guidance that allow you to change the scale of your operation. In a sense, you have to make a choice about what kind of business you're going to be at the same time as you're choosing your equipment.

There are aftermarket solutions for that as well. Deere is for people who want a deluxe brand that is all encompassing vs users who don't mind fiddling with their hardware.

Yeah but if you're running a fleet, then you have to scale your outfitting and maintenance to handle that. It's not practical for a lot of people. A lot of businesses lose their ass by trying to focus on too many things at the same time.

I'm not saying this is the right way for ag. to go forward. But all our incentives right now are to either specialize a small farm around high margin product or scale as wide as possible on low margin product. That is going to set a lot of people on the course of basically renting their equipment and deferring the maintenance to the provider.

We probably should create some incentives for farmers to be more self reliant. That would probably be good for our sustainability but I don't think we should ignore that currently the choice isn't black and white.

Not sure what scale you're talking about, but Kubota doesn't really compete with Deere on larger tractors. I don't see any tracked options from Kubota and their tractors don't really go much over 200 horsepower.

Deere and Kubota only really compete at the smaller/utility side of things.

Also the reason people get locked into Deere isn't just the tractors, but the vertical integration. Can you run your John Deere NT or DB series planter with Greenstar 2 on a Kubota? Possibly, but you've got to buy the hardware from Deere and you'd have to add auto steer, etc. (FWIW Kubota doesn't even sell planters)

I live in an extremely rural area. The Deere integrations are a huge reason. Another that's not talked about is Deere field service. It's just DAMN GOOD. If you're running a serious tractor(7-9 series ) and it's the middle of planting/harvest hours can be the difference between red and black margins. Deere will roll out a team with 30ft trailer of parts out in hours if you have an issue. CaseIH will sorta match this, kubota and New Holand will simply not.

Exactly, and at the moment in time you don't care about "right to repair" - you need to get back up and running now. Which has led me to believe "right to repair" is a ruse, but for what?

Right to repair tractors has become talking point because it is a use case that cannot be easily dismissed as "unimportant to real Americans" since many Americans value individualism, hard work, and their countries reputation for food production - all of which are idealized in the concept of the independent American farmer.

> Which has led me to believe "right to repair" is a ruse, but for what?

You what? Being able to repair and control your hardware is good in itself. It doesn't need to be justified, except as a means to counteract the much stronger lobby that is trying to destroy it.

Your point about this maybe being a ruse is like the one that maybe climate change is a ruse: so what if it is? The measures we introduced to combat the (perceived?) threat will result in a net benefit to society, the environment and individual freedoms. Boo, hoo I'm living in a better world unnecessarily. Very tragic.

A ruse to give people flexibility in how they want to repair their own equipment? What a terrible thing.

In one of my other comments I noted that disabling emissions controls would probably be top priority for most of the farmers complaining about not being able to modify how their tractors work.

Nothing about "right to repair" would disallow you to use Deere field service if you want to.

In hours, aren't you already in the red? Is it tens of hours that makes the difference?

So... I think your right. Underlying a lot of trends eroding user/owner rights are practical benefits. This as true for ipods as it is for for tractors.

My grandfather had an old Massey, and several others for parts. It's easy to idealize this from afar (I do), but young farmers often don't want it.

That said, the individual preference and the systemic trend are two different things. The right to repair, is also the right to have a 3rd party repair. Competition, choice. At some point along the trend, it's about more than that. There comes a point where "who actually owns this farm" starts to be a question. JD might exercise the same power over farmers that Apple exercises over app developers. A my way or the highway world.

(not to pile on)

Right to repair also covers independent/third party service. People may not want to repair the hardware themselves, but they may want to take it to a cheaper/closer third party to repair it. The local JD service may be in the next county, but there may be a local mechanic that could repair the tractor, but cannot due to restrictions, licensing, etc.

Of course you may not want the local guy to try because they may not be competent enough, but people think that should be the owner's decision, not the manufacturer's.

This is a big problem, you can have a used JD part but it won’t work because JD needs to squeeze every once of profit from their customers. This service based trend is the worst type of rent seeking I’ve seen in years

Lots of people don't care about their right to vote but we should all freak out when it gets taken away from them.

Maybe... Compare these different proposals:

1. Disenfranchise everyone who hasn't voted in the last 10 years.

2. Require a two-year waiting period from the time you register as a voter before you can vote. Require registrations to be renewed every 6 years. Voting automatically renews an unexpired registration.

It seems to me that both proposals should attract a lot of attention. But one is more alarming than the other. And you could water it down to be even less alarming and make some good arguments for your proposal. This is how you boil a frog.

Here's one nobody seems to care about:

3. Require people to join a private club to be able to vote in primary elections. Only allow candidates who were nominated by those private clubs. Allow the private clubs to be controlled by a handful of people.

You know, now I think about it, right-to-repair has a great deal in common with right-to-vote.

Not all states require #3. Indiana does not, but you have to pick one.

People don't get to just buy a different brand of government though, unlike tractors.

Commodities tend to have very low profit margin. It wouldn't be surprising if organizations like John deer sell their tractors at a steep loss temporarily which could prevent farmers from being able to buy other brands.

John Deere MSRP is well above most competition.

A friend of mine, one of the larger farmers in the area, purchased a new CaseIH tractor a couple years back. Even before it arrived in his yard, the Deere salesman caught wind of the purchase and arrived with "We can't be having that." Made my friend an offer he couldn't refuse and the CaseIH tractor was sold before even a single hour was put on it.

A high MSRP means a lot of room to play with the numbers.

> I just want to throw my 2¢ out there, as a mid-20's who went to a high-rural-population high school, there's an entire new generation of farmers who have a) accepted that Deere's need constant/regular service calls, and b) don't care to learn how to fix it (or older equipment) themselves.

They should still want right to repair for the same reason that most of the internet wants to run on GPL software. Almost all the companies pay some vendor for it, but unlike the farmers they can just take their business elsewhere if a vendor turns bad.

> At the end of the day farming is just a business same as any other

Is your core competency farming or tractor repair? That said, I am sympathetic to farmers who want to repair their equipment. There's a scale where you have enough free time that with simple enough equipment, it does make sense to repair it yourself.

>At the end of the day farming is just a business same as any other

Being a business is the reason you want right to repairs. If a single vendor can bankrupt your business then it's not a sustainable business. Right to repair give you cheaper options for repairing your tools.

Not just cheaper, any option. If the tech is busy because everyone is harvesting at the same time; your screwed.

A lot of businesses live entirely within major tech company walled gardens, from the iOS App Store to the Azure Marketplace, where vendors have zero control over the platform. A precarious position to be in, perhaps, but hardly unsustainable.

This is correct and will probably only be broken from a crazy differentiating hardware offering (like a self-driving tractor). It's coming...

Fixing would mean hacking in this case.

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