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Comment by cletus | Hacker News Reader

The whole "right to repair" issue is somewhat complex but farm equipment is a pretty good example of the why this is necessary.

For anyone that doesn't know, farm equipment generally lasts a long time. There are farms out there still operating 70+ year old John Deere tractors. With proper servicing such equipment lasts a really long time.

Nowadays such equipment attracts a premium simply because it is so simple and can be serviced by the owner for many simple things. You don't need to pay for and (sometimes worse) _wait for_ a "qualified" tech with the right computer to fix a faulty sensor.

Companies deliberately make equipment that cannot be serviced to increase total revenue and it's a disgusting and egregious form of rent-seeking.

As an aside, your car's warranty is essentially a scheme to make more money similar to this. Using parts of services that aren't "genuine" can void your warranty.

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>For anyone that doesn't know, farm equipment generally lasts a long time. There are farms out there still operating 70+ year old John Deere tractors. With proper servicing such equipment lasts a really long time.

There is basically nobody out there operating even a 80s combine because when you are dealing with razor thin commodities margins a couple percent efficiency in machinery applied across your whole fleet can/will make or break you.

Some boutique fruit farmer on a tiny amount of land an hour from Boston might be using an old tractor but nobody outside that sort of use case is running antiquated equipment. Not to say everyone is running locked down JD crap but old equipment isn't nearly as responsible for the contents of the supermarket as HN likes to think it is.

>As an aside, your car's warranty is essentially a scheme to make more money similar to this. Using parts of services that aren't "genuine" can void your warranty.

This was made illegal decades ago.

Most farmers I see have an old tractor around for odd jobs. The money and most of the work is done by the new tractors, but those new tractors tend to be very big, and sometimes you only need a small tractor for a little job. These little jobs are NEVER time critical though, so if the tractor breaks they fix over the next few weeks and then do the job.

During the busy seasons farmers are working 16 hours days and they can't afford for the machines to break. However there are off months where nothing needs to be done now. The busy season for a corn farmer is planting in April, and Harvest in October, and random weeks between them for weed control (These months vary by regions and should be taken as an example not truth), with the time in between mostly filled with activities that need to be done but there is no hurry to do them today.

My Dad had a small German made John Deere tractor from the early seventies that was used for odd jobs. But it put on more hours per year than the big tractors because it was used year round.

Some of the work it did wasn't time critical, but some was. In winter, animals need to be fed daily.

That old tractor was more reliable than the newer ones.

When he sold the tractor along with the farm, he got more than it sold for brand new in the early seventies.

>When he sold the tractor along with the farm, he got more than it sold for brand new in the early seventies.

After inflation?

No. He bought it for $17k and sold it for $19k IIRC.

I grew up on a farm in north central Montana. EVERY farmer, even the bigger wealthier ones, all ran at least some equipment that was 30+ years old. We were a mid-sized operation and ran equipment that was at best between 10 and 40 years old as our primary equipment.

A classmate of mine, who now farms their family farm, still runs a large 4WD tractor that must be 50+ years old at this point. They have newer equipment, but the old stuff still gets used.

It really depends where you live I would say. US big farms sure this is probably a right statement, but around here (Quebec, Canada). We still see a lot of old farming equipment being used daily on small farm where we just can't afford a 500k harvester or 250k tractor.

Personnaly we have an old combine from at least the 70 when we need a small field to be harvested. The rest we contract to other people. We have a few tractors from the 60 for small work, but use mostly tractors from the 90/2000 for field work.

Québécois?

>>As an aside, your car's warranty is essentially a scheme to make more money similar to this. Using parts of services that aren't "genuine" can void your warranty.

> This was made illegal decades ago.

AIUI, only for consumer equipment. The Magnuson–Moss Warranty Act “generally” (non-strictly) excludes commercial and industrial equipment. It strictly, explicitly, and strongly excludes agricultural equipment from its pro-consumer requirements.

§ 700.1 (b)

https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CFR-2018-title16-vol1/xm...

My dad and grandfather both use farmall tractors from the 30s on their farms. It’s not uncommon

Farming what products and where?

And are these tractors used as their daily equipment or do they use something more modern by default and only bring the old stuff out on the rare occasions when the number of tractors doing tractor things is a big enough production bottleneck to warrant it?

I work on plenty of old junk for people. I know how this kind of stuff gets used and how important it is and isn't to business operations. There are a very tiny number of people who run large fleets of old junk with enough redundancy they are not lacking for uptime. These people are a rounding error compared to the number of people who have one or more new-ish machines and keep a couple pieces of old junk (usually very large or very niche machines) around for a particular use that the newer machines could cover but not as well as something dedicated. And this is how it works in pretty much any industry that uses heavy equipment, not just farming.

You're not wrong, but I'm having difficulty understanding the point you're after. Farms large and small use equipment new and old and have periods during the year when shit can't break.

Of course the largest exposure to the right to repair issue is with the large farms. They run the greatest percentage of newest (so greater likelihood of incident) and largest (greater impact of downtime) equipment. However, I'd say the greatest existential risks could easily be with the smaller farms that are running new kit. You're less likely to have backup equipment and are going to struggle getting priority from service teams when you're the smallest of ten customers that are broken down.

My point is that "new enough to have DRM depending on who you bought it from" machines represent the majority of heavy equipment out there in the US. There are plenty of old machine around but they're special purpose and spend a lot of time sitting around. The guy running a farm with a couple antique tractors or running a gravel pit with a collection of obsolete loaders is out there but he's a rounding error.

Ah! Makes sense considering the post you replied to. I just wasn't tracking...caffeine is still diffusing through the system lol.

Soybeans and hay for cattle in Missouri. Together they run about 250 acres, probably a quarter of that is wooded but still a decent landmass to cover. And those farmalls are their daily drivers. I believe my dad’s got a newer one he uses for it’s pto for digging post holes and such. Those old tractors are workhorses, if you know how to take care of them and work on them yourself they’ll last forever.

250 acres is a small farm these days. Those old tractors can keep running on small farms for many more years if you care for them. Though upgrading to a newer used tractor may be worth it for the the greater fuel efficiency (you didn't say, but I'm guessing those are gasoline tractors, diesel was just starting to come out in that era)

Even Jeremy Clarkson has 1000 acres, and that's in the UK

Jeremy Clarkson is a multi-millionaire global celebrity, him investing maybe 5% of his money to own a bigger estate than most actual farmers is not a surprise.

When old equipment pops up on small farms, it's usually someone operating on a small scale (~300ac or so), making a profit off land they own by keeping their costs down. Definitely not a great way to earn an income, and it probably doesn't cover their bills, but people do it.

Otherwise, the old equipment is typically used for odd jobs around the farm, like the use case of hauling produce you mentioned.

I'd agree that you see it less often with combines; they're a much more complicated machine.

> When old equipment pops up on small farms, it's usually someone operating on a small scale (~300ac or so), making a profit off land they own by keeping their costs down. Definitely not a great way to earn an income, and it probably doesn't cover their bills, but people do it.

I would say a lot of farmers who own their land are able to keep costs down & make a decent profit with older equipment. It's cheaper & can be easier/cheaper for them to fix instead of taking it somewhere.

I also recall stories about the amount of fertilizer one puts down being similar. Some people crowd their crops & spend a lot on additional fertilizer to try to boost their yields. Some try to keep costs down & accept a smaller yield. A large amount of variables seem to determine who comes out ahead.

Lots of claims here, can you provide evidence?

Diesel engines have been around for 130 years. Any improvements that could be made were made decades ago.

I don't think you need a tractor for fruit farming.

This is actually entirely untrue. Combustion engines have had something of a renaissance the last 15 years as new manufacturing and simulation technologies have enabled much more precise machining and smarter designs. This has allowed old designs to get much more efficient, and new designs once infeasible to become commonplace.

The power output of an engine that achieves 30mpg today is easily double that of just 15 years ago.

Turbos are a good example. Before, they were very expensive to add to a car, and altered the driving experience such that they weren't very practical for the average driver. Now, essentially every new combustion engine has them because you can lower displacement and actively manage power output to a greater degree, pushing up efficiency.

Some cool things are on the horizon as well, like camless engines and opposed piston diesel engines.

> Now, essentially every new combustion engine has them because you can lower displacement and actively manage power output to a greater degree, pushing up efficiency.

In Europe, yes, due to extremely stringent fuel consumption regulations — essentially, the engine needs to have very small displacement, so you need to add turbo to get at least some power out of it. A typical new car in Europe has turbocharged 1.2L engine or something in this neighborhood. In the US, however, naturally aspirated 2.0L engines are still king.

"Turbos are a good example. Before, they were very expensive to add to a car, and altered the driving experience such that they weren't very practical for the average driver. Now, essentially every new combustion engine has them because you can lower displacement and actively manage power output to a greater degree, pushing up efficiency."

This is true. In fact, some manufacturers (Volvo ?) have new models that are both super and turbo charged.

But this isn't cost-free - these are tremendously complicated engines running at very close tolerances. These will have higher failure rates and will be more expensive to maintain and fix.

Remember, kids: There's no replacement for displacement.

The only major "improvement" has been the ability to cheat the tests and pass the regulations, because those who made them didn't realize you cannot dramatically improve such an old technology.

>The power output of an engine that achieves 30mpg today is easily double that of just 15 years ago.

That's a complete lie.

>That's a complete lie.

And you're completely wrong. And this can be trivially easily confirmed by looking up the power outputs of vehicles that get any given fuel economy today vs the power outputs of vehicles of like fuel economy from decades past.

With respect to small diesels specifically, ever since diesels went from naturally aspirated indirect injection to direct injection and turbos power output has skyrocketed while fuel economy has mostly flat-lined.

Fuel economy is mostly dependent on the displacement of the engine and the load to do work (like cruise the highway or plow a field at part throttle) so it doesn't vary much unless the efficiency of converting fuel to force improves (hard) or the demands of the task decrease (hard for cars, even harder for industrial applications).

I actually looked it up. A late 19th century engine had a 26% efficiency. 1960's engines had ~34% efficiency and in the 2010's it was ~43%. So the same fuel consumption would give you 26HP in 1900, 34HP in 1960, and 43HP today.

Source?

Edit: Also, you're confusing theoretical and practical efficiency. For instance, a V8 engine can be 30% efficient in absolute terms, but if you can use an I4 for the same application because you now have a Turbo, your real world efficiency is way higher. This is exactly what we see happening in performance cars an large trucks: big displacement being replaced with turbos and hybrid systems.

Wärtsilä 31, which claims to be the most efficient engine ever built, claims 167.7g/kWh.

Diesel's engine used 317g/kWh.

So the amount of fuel used has not even halved in more than a century.

Fuel efficiency and horsepower are very different measures.

That's great if you have a diesel engine. Prior to the 80s and depending on application tons of stuff came equipped with gas engines. Those machines are fuel hogs compared to diesel stuff. If you have a diesel from prior to the era when everything grew turbochargers there's another fuel economy cliff but it's not as drastic.

Engines aren't really a problem as long as you don't let Washington bureaucrats tell you what to put on them (emissions components are a long term consumable on modern diesel engines).

There's all sorts of incremental improvements to things that just make the machines easier to operate and faster at what they do. More and more equipment (or functions on said equipment) has been going hydraulic over time and machines have been adding more and more auxiliary circuits to support that. If you're moving a lot of stuff not on pallets a pair of forks that has hydraulic width adjustment is a huge upgrade over manual. Joystick style controls are a lot smoother and faster to operate than lever style controls. New mostly glass cabs have amazing visibility compared to the mostly sheet metal cabs of old. Having a cab at all greatly improves your ability to work in the elements. A 10yr difference in equipment isn't much but for a given HP you'll start seeing a big difference in productivity at 20-30yr as all the little stuff adds up.

There have been large improvements to emissions in the past 10 years. And efficiency has been improved a bit too (though often emissions and efficiency conflict so this tends to be a wash)

vast majority of the global south is using animal labor and older machinery still for small scale farming that feeds huge numbers of people.

That’s not true on the car warranty side at all. Some luxury manufacturers and most recently Tesla make this claim, but any part that meets the spec is fine and doesn’t violate any warranty.

> Using parts of services that aren't "genuine" can void your warranty.

Not in the United States it can't. Nor can making repairs or modifications, unless the manufacturer can provide proof that your actions were what caused the issue you're asking to be corrected under warranty.

Kubota is getting popular here in Oregon. The dealerships will sell you parts for repair.

same for mcdonald ice-cream machine

https://youtu.be/SrDEtSlqJC4

Not sure how you are concluding machines to day are more simple than they were 40 years ago. If anything, they are 100x more complex with electronics, way more hydraulics, plastics, iron, engine mods to achieve power and efficiency.

The 'old' tractors are basically a motor strapped to a chasis (e.g. JD 4020). Although my gut reaction is to side with the farmers, its not so black and white. Nobody is making them buy these 'locked down' tractors, they are choosing to. Money could speak louder than words

> With proper servicing such equipment lasts a really long time.

> Nowadays such equipment attracts a premium simply because it is so simple and can be serviced by the owner for many simple things.

The comment is about how old, well-maintained equipment is simple and attracts a premium.

The manufacturers are coupling "locked down" tractors with... you know, tractors. If there are competitively produced tractors without the restrictions on owner maintenance, they will sell better, but if that market doesn't exist, the farmers cannot simply vote with their wallets. The complexity of the modern tractors does make it a difficult market for new entrants, so the existing ones own the market, and choose some of the restrictions.

It's not a simple problem - modern systems are complex, and so it's not trivial to ensure it's repairable without sophisticated tools and knowledge, but it's still a problem worth examining.

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