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"Using the John Deere Operations Center mobile app..."

So now your tractor is controlled via their network? If their server goes down, can you still farm? What if your John Deere Operations Center account has been been terminated or suspended? Here are their terms.[1] "In its sole discretion, Deere may restrict the Site or restricted areas of the Site to selected users."

Farmers have been fighting for the right to repair Deere tractors. So this is Deere's response. They now claim the right to prevent tractor owners from using them.

[1] https://www.deere.com/en/privacy-and-data/terms/

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It's pretty simple: JD and Monsanto have extracted the high margin economic value into their products, leaving the farmer as an employee managing low margin operational work and carrying the burden of weather risk. JD weather risk is spread across 1000s of farms.

Same story with ASML, Siemens and other industrial tools companies.

Things get interesting when the cost (economic value) of the tool is a largest percentage of the total $ of goods produced.

Something something owning the means of production, hahaha.

In the 20th century that phrase was written about workers, as in employees, but if even the business owners don't really own the means of production... are they really business owners ?

It seems history repeats itself, just one echelon higher in the society.

If this is true why aren't farmers using other less extractive brands? Has JD used anticompetitive practices to hinder competition?

Or did JD increase farming productivity in a pareto efficient way, so the farmers are still better off buying JD, even though JD gets to keep most of the newly created surplus?

Or is it just a race to the bottom where farmers that don't buy JD get priced out, even though buying JD makes the farmers worse off as a collective?

There is intense concentration within the industrial agriculture 'toolchain'. John Deere, CNH Industrial and AGCO, the next largest competitors, sell 75-85%+ of combine harvesters in the US. Plus, there are things like tie-ins with Bayer/Monsantos data science platforms that smaller vendors can't or don't offer.

Tom Philpott describes this really well in 'Perilous Bounty': there are lots of farmers who are price takers. Their only way forward is to hope to survive weather and price cycles by producing more, more efficiently. This ironically leads to overproduction and poor returns.

Whereas JD are price makers who can use their consolidated power to set terms and prices within the market. Farmers don't really stand a chance.

Funny I was reading a book about US-North Korea relations wherein they talk about the effect of trade sanctions on North Korea. They didn't work, basically, and one reason why was because Korean agriculture was not very mechanized, so lack of imports of parts didn't really matter.

Grain farmers are doing just fine, they are not being ground to dust by the system.

But it is certainly true that production subsidies serve to make landlords and suppliers rich just as they serve to make farmers rich - your tax dollars at work!

Are farmers “rich”? I grew up in a big farming family in a big farming community and I don’t think anyone is rich.

My grandpa probably has a few million dollars in assets, but he saved aggressively his whole life and probably worked 40% more than the average non-farmer over the same time span (longer hours, fewer/shorter vacations, retired in his late 70s, etc).

Yes, farmers have a lot of capital invested in their businesses, but their incomes (i.e., what they take home rather than reinvesting in their businesses) still seem pretty modest.

Compared to my cousins who farm, I’m pretty sure I’m wealthier than they are as a software engineer, certainly with respect to income and perhaps also with respect to total asset value.

If they scale up, buy out other farmers, basically go corporate, they can be rich. It also feels like there are huge regional differences (eg a California walnut farmer is going to be a lot richer than an Illinois corn farmer).

Sure, farmers can be rich, but I was responding to the general statement (or implication) that farmers en masse are becoming rich.

If small land holding farmers are leaving the profession en masse, leaving only the bigger farm operations, then “farmers” are becoming richer simply because the poorer ones are dropping out.

It’s bound to happen eventually, but we probably haven’t crossed that threshold yet.

There are a lot of confounding variables in the question but if you look at the labour required to operate the average farm size in Iowa (360 acres) it is not a full time job, not close to a full time job.

Grain farming doesn't become a full time job until you reach over 1000 acres, if a guy farms one section of land and makes a decent living and chooses to spend that extra time enjoying life, more power to 'em, but farming in that 640-1280 acre pocket scales really well - it is a choice!

The over half of farmers in Iowa, most of which are row-crop farmers, that are running farms under 640 acres, are they dropping out because of economic pressure? Maybe some, but I think mostly it is old-timers that had a great run but they have a business that provides half an income to the next generation at the current scale and the next generation would rather do one thing than two. Either way, Dad's not retiring "poor"!

(This happens a lot in my neck of the woods, lots of 1,000 acre-ish farmers retiring with kids that are professionals that "love the farm" but have no interest in it at this scale.)

Your grandpa is rich, yes.

The fact that many farmers choose to operate their business in a way that is under-leveraged and often over-work themselves instead of hiring outside help that they can certainly afford is an artifact of culture, not a measure of wealth.

Of course, coming from a rural community there is a pretty good chance that you engage in an unusually high level of personal savings and as such have converted a high income into high asset holdings, I know I do - it is something in the water I think!

> leaving the farmer as an employee

Modern sharecroppers.

Usury, rent seeking, monopsony, wealth transfer.

Institutionalized power imbalances which eventually lead to abrupt disruptions. aka Revolutions.

This story is as old as history.

I've been reading more about the Progressive Era during the apocalypse. (Currently chewing thru Caro's Master of the Senate, which covers New Deal thru Great Society.) Same challenges, rhetoric, social fault lines. Only the cast of characters have changed.

Don't worry, though. The more I learn, the more optimistic I become. We've been here before. Countless times. And somehow, humanity stumbles forward. Though the stakes are quite high for this iteration.

If there's anything "exceptional" about American Exceptionalism, my nomination is that our transfers of power have been relatively more peaceful than most.

I'm not saying things will necessarily work out. Only that it's possible we'll reach the next equilibrium. Kick the can down the road a few more decades. Potentially giving our grandkids the opportunity to revisit this never-ending argument again, on their own terms.

Right now, just knowing it's possible is hope enough for me.

Considering the notoriety of John Deere fighting the right to repair and right to own movement, I have a hunch that their adoption of any new technology could be largely motivated by curbing ownership.

I would say many software services moving to cloud and to a subscription has largely prevented those products from being pirated or even necessarily owned. Inspired by that, for JD the most convenient path to create an "anti-piratable" product is by slapping a label of "autonomous and AI" and have them being directly controlled from a central location.

> I have a hunch that their adoption of any new technology could be largely motivated by curbing ownership.

I’m plenty critical of John Deere (having worked there for a decade), but I think you have it backwards. Technology drives profit for John Deere, and John Deere’s right to repair is a defensive play to keep third parties from eating into those profits.

Parenthetically, I also strongly suspect that the tech media are overly-cynical about its portrait of Deere’s anti-right-to-repair stance. Practically speaking, it becomes a lot more expensive to ship software updates when you can’t guarantee anything about the state of the system you’re shipping to because the customer has modified various things. Moreover, the more people tamper with these complex, dynamic systems, the more likely there are to be issues, which Deere probably fears will erode its “quality” reputation (Deere’s management can’t maintain Deere’s reputation; it certainly doesn’t want other parties accelerating the erosion). Furthermore, triaging issues and litigating responsibility becomes dramatically more expensive (note that unlike other parts of the software industry, “issues” here are tens of thousands of dollars per incident in the best case and “loss of life lawsuits” in the worst case). So yeah, all of these things are about “profit” from Deere’s perspective, but it seems to me to be less about avoiding competition per se and more about the substantial cost burden on Deere to support a third party ecosystem.

As another parenthetical, I also think people attribute more competence to Deere’s software business than I’ve personally observed. I would honestly love to work on Deere’s technical problems, but Deere has so many political, cultural, and managerial problems that impede technical progress.

Not all that different than commercial aircraft. If Boeing cuts you off from software updates or replacement parts then your ailiner is basically worthless and unable to fly within a month. Many agribusinesses are probably fine with this as a tradeoff for the decreased manning of an autonomous tractor. JD might say that the small farmers who dont like the arrangement are not its target market.

If you have a 747-400 those updates come on 1.44MB floppies

I wasn't sure if you were joking or not.

https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/11/21363122/boeing-747s-flop...

That was probably a major upgrade from the -100!

A farmer owning a $250,000 tractor is a very different thing than a pilot owning a $250,000,000 aircraft. I would say that there is a much greater expectation that a farmer should be able to repair their own tractor, for example.

The GP’s point was these are probably targeted towards very large industrial farms.

I would agree, if we're talking CUT/SCUT you're in the realm of something that is easily serviceable(and the market doesn't really do DRM/lock-out currently) however these are different scale machines that are much pricier(just a quick glance looks like higher end 8Rs can start at 600k).

I havent met a farmer who owns his own working tractor at this scale. They are almost universally owned by the farmer's business entity. Any farmer operating as a sole propietor, and is in the market for a $500k tractor, needs legal advice asap. These are industrial machines, not household appliances.

Wait, maybe Jeremy Clarkson bought that lambo tractor under his own name. But it is more likely that his production company owns it.

irrelevant who the legal owning entity is.

The fact is, a pilot did not purchase the plane with his own money, and is working for a giant corporation that can negotiate a contract with another giant corporation.

A farmer, esp. a small scale private farmer, is not in the same position to negotiate a favourable contract as American Airlines would to Boeing.

The aircraft operator could be leasing the aircraft as well, in which case the lessor (typically a giant financial org) has a contract with the aircraft manufacturer.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aircraft_lease

this is not a piece of equipment suited to a small scale private farmer, though. this machine is for someone to whom acreage represents a block on a spreadsheet.

This statement is not accurate. Everyone summer I visit my friend's farm in central Illinois. Three people are responsible for farming 1000 acres. I've seen tractors and combines that are the size and cost of the 8R in the shed. This is a very normal and common family farm (though incorporated). Many of the farms in the area are this size and operated by private farmers.

If the family owns a corporation that owns a tractor, the family owns the tractor.

Isn't this where corporations are considered people comes in?

I'm assuming that you don't know many farmers, then. It's not universal, but it's very common that farmers are self-incorporated businesses and that those businesses own the tractors. (In fact, this is usually a wise move given how many farming expenses are favorably subsidized by the US tax code.)

The power balance is different. Boeing vs United Airlines is a somewhat uneven contest, but it's not like John Deere vs. some farmer with 4000 acres in Nebraska.

Somewhat uneven? It’s been known that certain models of planes only exist because airlines demanded Boeing to make them.

It’s a pretty even fight, and because of the existence of Airbus, the airlines actually have a slight advantage. Look at what happened when Southwest casually mentioned they might be thinking about adding A320s into their fleet. Sent Boeing scrambling.

I'm not in either of these industries, but I suspect a major difference is that an airline owning a jet has a lot more leverage against potential malfeasance by the manufacturer than the average farmer has against John Deere.

Boeing can't afford to make missteps like this because Airbus will eat their lunch. I don't think JD has a duopoly partner to keep itself in check.

John Deer has many more competitors than Boeing; farm equipment runs at slow speeds using off the shelf industrial diesel engines, and never (intentionally) leaves the ground or exceeds 30mph. Most medium sized countries have tractor factories, as they're essential for food production for the population.

It looks like they have one significant competitor, New Holland (i.e. Cnh Industrial): https://csimarket.com/stocks/competitionSEG2.php?code=DE, and two smaller that are worth mentioning: Massey Ferguson (Agco), and apparently Emerson (though I couldn't find which brands they own at a quick kagi'ing.)

Boeing actually seems to have more diverse competition, including Lockheed, Northrup, etc (although they're dominant in the commercial airplanes segment, where airbus isn't mentioned, so maybe these stats are US market only): https://csimarket.com/stocks/competitionSEG2.php?code=BA

Case International Harvester https://www.caseih.com is also a big player.

Not a farmer but worked on one growing up and my in-laws farm several thousand acres. The existence of a competitor to JD is one thing, the distance from farm to dealer is another. If the competitor dealership is 75 miles away and JD is 20 miles away that can be a major factor.

Being able to get service in the field quickly is critical during planting or harvest. During these times downtime can be exceedingly expensive if the farmer is trying to beat some change in weather.

And sure you could try and get someone other than the dealer to work on it, if you can find them. But trying to find this person when your equipment is broken and you are burning money isn’t a great option and the dealer will probably favor servicing clients who bought equipment from them.

> farm equipment runs at slow speeds using off the shelf industrial diesel engines

John Deere manufactures it’s own engines in many cases, but it also uses engines from other manufacturers.

> never (intentionally) leaves the ground or exceeds 30mph

Yes, aviation has a lot lower risk tolerance than agriculture, but ag equipment still kills plenty of people, and I’d probably rather be in a head-on collision with a honda civic going 50mph than an 8R going 30mph.

> Most medium sized countries have tractor factories, as they're essential for food production for the population.

Are you just reiterating that John Deere has more competitors? If so, I think this is misleading because most of these factories are just the same few competitors with factories in different companies (rather than distinct companies per country).

John Deer has a lot of Chinese competition, some of them their current and previous joint venture partners with suspicion of stolen IP.

This is a disproportionate comparison

Flying your modern aircraft doesn't depend on a lousy app that requires your "username and password" and probably doesn't even know what a pwd salt is. And if it goes down you can still fly (or keep flying).

You won't get cut out of replacement parts unless you're in a sanctioned country (and they do have ways of sourcing the parts).

Yes the agribusiness are ok with this, they know how to handle it (but you'll bet they'll have a lot of angry calls and lawsuits in some cases). Small farms on the other hand...

If they can make an autonomous tractor, I guess they can follow the state of the art for authentication.

You'd think, but in my experience (devops engineer) that's a generous assumption of some frighteningly large companies.

There are few airlines who could purchase an airplane from Boeing while there are millions of farmers who could purchase a traktor. Corporate greed is endless and every single corporation wants to sell subscription services while denying right to repair.

But the thing is that airliners have the right (and expectation) to repair their own planes, with Boeing and Airbus running a very extensive repair/service arm of their businesses. Upkeep of certain parts of the plane (engines, computers, cabin interior features) are actually also the responsibility of the sub-vendor who makes it. There also exists an extensive ecosystem of after-market repair shops and a vested interest by regulators to keep all ships airworthy to put a check on Boeing deciding to make access to a critical software update contingent on any kind of pressure sales tactic via user agreements.

The key bit here is that the customers of the airlines are subject to tight regulation. In most right to repair debates, no one is proposing comparable regulation on farmers or car owners or etc.

True. You cannot even repair an airframe unless you are certified as a repair station by the FAA so there is no real right to repair at all.

Similarly, how much do you want third parties tinkering with your airliner’s software systems? Obviously the risk envelope for an airliner is narrower than farm equipment, but farm equipment still kills plenty of people. Automotive is probably an even better example—do you want third parties tinkering with the software systems in your car? What about other cars with which you share the road? I’m not opposed to right to repair, but I don’t think proponents have seriously considered the practical implications for mission critical systems.

If John Deere is becoming a vertically integrated tech monopoly, the next step is for them to begin buying up the farms themselves. They'll have data as to which fields have the yields, best soils, best conditions, and are the most productive.

Seems unlikely.

Not that it could not happen... there are various hedge funds that do this already, with mixed success. They generally lease back to a farmer.

John Deere doesn't have any data that the farmer wouldn't have, and they certainly don't have better access to large sums of capital than hedge funds. I can seem them participating in a capital lease agreement for someone doing this sort of operation, but operating a farm is a very different proposition.

John Deere doesn't have any data that the farmer wouldn't have.

Sure they do. They have the data from all the farms that use their service. The farmer only has data from their own farm. Deere can tell who's doing better.

Having data is not really sufficient to doing as well or better in a business though.

As an example, Zillow had all that house price data, and then blew half a billion dollars because it thought it could use that data to start buying and selling houses itself.

Then, once it has a monopoly and doesn't need to add any new "features" to its products, it can just fire all its employees and replace the CEO with a DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization).

Nah, they just package the knowledge and sell it for a nice profit. No point in doing anything else than what they already do very well. There are quite a few unknown unknowns when starting a side business, and little reason for them to do it (other than small pilot farms just to get a feel for how it works, to build better equipment)

No need to sell the intel. Keep it in house and make a killing in the commodities futures market.

Would that be legal? Unsure if it counts as legitimate research or insider trading.

Is it possible to commit insider trading on commodities? I don't think it is.

Yes. I work for John Deere ,but can't speak for the company.

The tractor and combines are sending real time crop data, it isn't hard for someone to look at that data and see across all farmers that yields are a bit different from what the market is predicting and make a large profit trading on that insider knowledge.

Those who work on that software and the admins of the database are registered with the SEC as not allowed to trade commodities. All that money they could make is directly out of our customers pockets and they wouldn't let us have that data if were were not protecting it.

Why not pay the farmers for that data (or share the resulting revenue) and sell the data feed to traders?

It is a zero sum game. Farmers sit on one side of the trade and farmers the other. Thus the value of the data is exactly equal to the amount farmers lose by the traders having the data.

Not quite, as the risk would be spread out. Lessening concentrated risk is providing real value.

Happy I posted my uneducated thoughts. I didn't know this.

Since you can't fix it yourself it will probably be in the barn waiting for an appointment at the genius bar when your account is deleted (for complaining about John Deere).

I've seen a video of a guy who 3D printed the mold of a very rare replacement part for his BMW and cast it with Aluminum, and it then fitted and worked perfectly as well as the original if not better.

I have family that still use JD tractors from 60s and 70s. In fact I have a relative who bough one for less than 2k, refurbished it for ~5k, and use it during winter for his chalet. Why don't we build pre-computerized tractors? I understand that cast-iron will break, but still the point remains with CNC machines becoming cheaper and cheaper.

> Why don't we build pre-computerized tractors?

Because unlike regular passenger cars the automation in tractors is essential for high yields. A farm that uses high tech tractors is going to beat out a farm with traditional tractors every single time. The days of the old boomer farmer are long gone; anyone who has managed to avoid getting swallowed by the conglomerates by this point has a pretty cutting edge setup that would make some startups blush. Drones, IoT, ML, etc. have been penetrating agriculture since the 2010s.

I think a better strategy would be to build open source tractor software for open source tractor hardware; some kind of "Linux for farms" coalition. It is very hard finding software people who intersect with agriculture people though which is what makes this a difficult undertaking.

There is AgStack Foundation[1], an offshoot of Linux Foundation. I have zero idea how successfull it is, though.

[1] https://agstack.org/

Awesome! Thank you for the link. It's great that people are already doing something for this field.

As I've heard from people in the agro business, the equipments are already communicating on a standard Isobus (non open source), allowing to use differents equipment together.

What would open source bring? You always need a hardware anyway, and the conditions are rough, a RPI would not survive.

And for farmers locked in JD awful customer service, well they have plenty of choices beside JD, except they are not all American.

Have you ever signed a Salesforce contract? This is how the world works now. It sucks.

I can see a seat in the picture, so you would expect that driving it by hand to be a fallback. It isn't ideal, but might be a good enough solution for their user base.

You probably need to drive the tractor over public road yourself.

Yes, as A John Deere employee who cannot speak for the company I can tell you this is carefully targeted only to things where you drive to the field, your spouse follows in a car to bring you back home and you hit start. The important part of this story is we can assume that even in the worst case nobody will be hurt as no humans are anywhere close. This is a much easier problem than driving on roads where there are other cars, bicycles, and other pedestrians. Also in operation the tractor will be slow enough that most humans and animals can outrun it, and it is visible enough that they will.

Any farming operation where humans might possibly be around this won't work for. We want this to be full autonomous, but the technology isn't ready.

The primary purpose of this is to target great engineers (ie the people who read hacker news) with the idea that we are an exciting company to work for. I personally have some code in this tractor, and I know the people who work on it. We have lots of open positions, the jobs are fun (as hard as any other engineering of course), and you might want to join us.

The alternative is that you can download the autonomous software and start using without any network connectivity.

But what happens when JD discovers a problem with the software? How do they force you to upgrade your software? What happens if the bug is dangerous or the bug causes your tractor to have mechanical issues if not upgraded?

Does the farmer want to be responsible for installing the emergency software update?

If a major problem is discovered they should do a recall or get sued for selling defective goods.

This whole idea of shipping half-baked and fixing later OTA is one of this age's great consumer scams.

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