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Comment by 7thaccount | Hacker News Reader

I'm not a farmer, but this comes up a lot. Most modern farming (the type done for money commercially and not as a hobby)is fiendishly complex. The tractors are massive and are driven by GPS and have all kinds of massive machines connected to them.

If you want a simple and cheap tractor, you can find a Farmall from like 40 years ago and restore it easily for like a grand or two (at least my friends dad was still doing this in 2008).

Typically whenever a once competitive firm becomes a lazy monopolist, at some point others want to break in and get a piece of the profit pie. It could happen someday.

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All the implements which farmers use, planters cultivators, etc have gotten larger over the years as the scale of farms have grown. A 40 year old tractor likely isn’t going to have the horsepower to work with these new implements. Also, the old tractor is likely to lack a cab which could mean no climate control for you.

Both of these would be serious issues for operating a modern, large scale farming operation.

Those older tractors can and do have enough power for modern farming. Source: I work in a shop in a farming community which usually has 10+ tractors lined up to get worked on, and the vast majority are 20-40 years old. They are much more repairable then modern tractors, so plenty of farmers actually prefer them to the newer higher tech tractors.

Oh, and most GPS steering systems don't come with the tractor, and some types of systems are retrofitted onto any tractor with a steering wheel.

That's basically what I was saying above. If you need all that a modern tractor has to offer you don't have much of a choice. If you need to farm on a smaller scale, an older (and much easier to repair) and much cheaper model is always a possibility. Although the used market is insanely expensive now I would guess.

Although I am not doubting you, I find it rather curious that you would describe tractors and/or other farm equipment as "fiendishly complex". I am not sure if there is a term or concept for this issue, but I get a strong sense from this whole concept that what is really happening is the generation of artificial and intentional complexity, if not just the perception of complexity. There is nothing inherently complex about, e.g., a tractor that has some method of automatic steering, locates itself by GPS, and follows a path set by coordinates and vectors.

Another aspect of what we are experiencing here I think is essentially a multi-level/nested con job that uses that artificial and perception of complexity to extract ever higher and compounding levels of what what are essentially rents.

The established industry players are banking on the high barrier to entry (heavy machinery production) and brand recognition (Runs like a Deere) to con the whole sector, and therefore extract wealth from the whole of society trying to feed itself.

Please feel free to challenge my perspective.

Look how hard it was for Tesla to build cars. the Capex businesses are notoriously unattractive for VCs.

I suspect that it will take some other innovation to make this worthwhile to fund. Right to repair is not innovation, its just a single feature change, so nobody cares to solve it. It generates complaints, but probably doesn't hurt sales.

At some point, maybe electrification will be that innovation. Or maybe form factor? but, JD is not ignoring product development, they just have expensive spare parts.

A data point I never see is what JD reliability is like. Toyota has expensive spare parts compared to several of their competitors, but they are also very reliable. If JD's DRMs and expensive parts are concomitant with reliable tractors, then maybe this issue is really just interesting to techno libertarians and not actual farmers? I don't have any sense for the size of the JD repair market.

I'm not sure about Deere reliability, but I've seen anecdotal evidence in the past about farmers being out of operation because they can't fix their farm equipment themselves.

Now Tesla and other EV startups are skyrocketed. Possibly now is the chance if they could attract WSB?

I think you hit the nail on the head. Much like modern web design, pointless complexity slows down competitors with distractions.

> Although I am not doubting you, I find it rather curious that you would describe tractors and/or other farm equipment as "fiendishly complex". I am not sure if there is a term or concept for this issue,

I've come across the term "confusopoly":

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

Would you consider a modern car complex? A modern tractor is at least that complicated, more in some ways, maybe less in others.

From a high level, this doesn't seem a whole lot different than the scan tools needed to diagnose new cars. Some of which are vendor-locked on cars, but at minimum, there are OBDII codes and scanners available to consumers. It's the more marque-specific scan tools that aren't as readily available (but even then, I believe indy service shops can buy/license them, but it's very expensive).

Have you ever watched Clarkson's farm? It's a comedy show about Jeremy Clarkson from top gear trying to actually farm his land himself instead of paying someone to do it. Everything is fiendishly complex. Nothing looks simple at all. His tractor (granted it's a top end Lambo) has more controls than the Enterprise in JJ Abram's Star Trek. I don't think a small startup is taking that on anytime soon.

He has to call out someone to show him how to drive it and has no idea how to get it hitched. All coming from a man who has driven more cars of different types than probably anyone on the planet. Granted, it is a comedy, buy I think if you watch the first episode, you'll get the idea as I did.

> Typically whenever a once competitive firm becomes a lazy monopolist, at some point others want to break in and get a piece of the profit pie. It could happen someday.

The problem is, as in many other domains, a combination of opportunity cost and network effect.

Getting in the commercial farming game is going to be expensive as hell and gruelling as you try to get a foothold, and unlike, say, a car, your average farmer has a ton of equipment from the same brand which works together, and the more time passes the harder it becomes to interop (though I guess at least in farming you don't have too many patented hitches or PTOs these days?)

Not to mention in farming you really need to have a network on the ball for parts and repairs, if you fuck up a farmer's season by leaving them stranded for a week they're not going to be happy campers.

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