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Comment by hackbinary | Hacker News Reader

Farmers do not want to pay for anything. My dealings with people in the farming community is that completely devalue everything around as a négociation tactic. They do not want to pay anymore than they have to for anything. In general, I don't work for or with them anymore because of the horrible way I have been treated by them. (bit generalised, but I spend 10 years working in the community)

JD is moving to a Tractor as a Service model. JD does not want to open up their systems because before not long, you just hire a robotic service to come and plow or harvest your fields. JD sees this coming and wants to be in the best possible position to market its services to land owners.

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> JD sees this coming and wants to be in the best possible position to market its services to land owners.

You may be right, but, if so, this is just another move by a massive corporation to create a vertical monopoly, and extract all the rent in the space. For at least a couple of decades, companies with massive fleets of tractors sweep through the country, working farm fields for the owners, as the seasons change across the states. Your statement makes it seem as if JD could be muscling in on this already-muscled market. Tractors have already been priced out of a lot of farmer's businesses. They may as well cut out these middlemen.

Yes, I think so. I believe it is Cat and Rio Tinto have some form of arrangement at one of RT's mines in Aus. The dump trucks are driverless and run from RT's HQ elsewhere.

Cutting out intermediataries is what cloud computing is all about. I don't really see this as any different.

> JD is moving to a Tractor as a Service model.

Part of the problem here is that in any other sort of <blank>-as-a-service model, you'd be paying MUCH less for the "service" than the <blank>. In this case, you're buying the capital equipment, and then being forced to buy a service contract in order to use it as expected, and keep it running. It'd be like buying an iPhone, needing to rent iCloud storage to make it convenient, not being able to service it (in any meaningful way), and then only being able to run apps from the App Store. Oh, wait. It's the same problem, with the same ethical and moral conundrum. In our society, a lot of us have accepted this deal for a $1,000 phone. However, it's a bit different when you're shelling out upwards of half a million for a modern tractor.

> They do not want to pay anymore than they have to for anything.

Farmers are also being squeezed by their customers - prices for farm produce have been steadily falling for over a century, see e.g. [0].

JD's commercial model requires both capital outlay in purchasing equipment, and committing to a maintenance contract that the farmer can't influence. So the farmer loses control of maintenance costs whilst also under pricing pressure for their produce.

I can't speak to your experience obviously, but farming for many is a (very) low margin business.

[0]: https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/gallery...

Yeah, I get that. But also, there is no end in the claim of how hard the Range Rover driving, fee (private) school paying, huge farm house owning farmers in the UK have it.

The vitriol that was extended by a couple of the associates (middle managers) to one of my programmers who was vegan was absolutely amazing. He just would ask if there was any dairy in something a they would go off on him. Around that time I also stopped having dairy for health reasons, but that was okay. I had previously been sympathetic to farmers and the dairy community, but after that, I was appalled. Farmers are getting what they deserve.

That chart doesn't mean it's a low margin business. The manhours needed to produce a bushel/pound/acre of X has plummeted over the past 100 years.

> JD is moving to a Tractor as a Service model.

Then they should be honest about it and rent the tractors rather than pretending to sell them.

JD leases tractors for those who prefer that model.

> They do not want to pay anymore than they have to for anything.

Who wants to pay more than they have to? I usually want to pay even less than I have to.

There is a difference between dehumanising people and making them feel worthless and negotiating in good faith, and then reneging on agreements.

Most people don’t want to pay more than they have to for things. This phenomenon often intensifies when talking about major inputs to their business.

> Farmers do not want to pay for anything. [...] They do not want to pay anymore than they have to for anything.

Who wants to pay more than they have to for anything? Who wants to pay for anything at all? How does a desire to save money make farmers different from the rest of us?

> JD is moving to a Tractor as a Service model. JD does not want to open up their systems because before not long, you just hire a robotic service to come and plow or harvest your fields. JD sees this coming and wants to be in the best possible position to market its services to land owners.

If JD wants to sell their equipment as a service, there's nothing stopping them from doing just that. But it sounds more to me like they want to retain the rights they would have in a service model while continuing to charge the prices they do for a product model. They cannot just sell their tractors as a product and treat them like a service when it's convenient.

>>They do not want to pay anymore than they have to for anything

So let me ask you, when you take your car in for service and the mechanic says "that will be $100", do you say "no no I can afford $150 so that is what I am going to pay"?

it seems odd to me that you believe only farmers do not want to pay "more than they have to for anything", I am pretty sure that applies to all persons, and all businesses

No, but if I take my car to two mechanics and one quotes me $100 and the other $150, then I might very well go for the one quoting me $150 for many different reasons.

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