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Comment by ford | Hacker News Reader

I know close to nothing about tractors - but I see posts about John Deere on here quite frequently.

Are there competing tractor companies? Or is the issue that people have already purchased tractors and can't repair those, and given the opportunity they'd swap out their existing John Deere for some other brand

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There are other brands, but Deere controls more than half the market. But as importantly, tractors aren't dumb machines. There are inputs in material and labor designed to work with them. So it might be that the farmers would have opted into the entire other ecosystem, but it also might be that due to escalating network effects they cannot do so without moving to a new farm in a different area.

> Or is the issue that people have already purchased tractors and can't repair those

They also claim that Deere made some promises in 2018 about changing the repairability. And that if they were false-advertised to. But "swapping" is difficult, because the machines are huge and expensive as well as part of a bigger ecosystem.

Tractors are considerably expensive. Yes, there are other brands, but they too have issues.

Finding the right tractor for a farm is a time consuming task, and currently it will take 6+ months to receive a new tractor.

Swapping a tractor requires having another tractor for farm tasks, or delaying farm tasks until the swap is complete. Delaying farm tasks is not really an option, as that can negatively impact the overall operation.

Another thing to think about is all the tooling, equipment, and accessories that are used with a tractor. These also have requirements of what type of tractor is used, and which features it has.

Romania used to build cheap tractors and sell it to many countries in the Middle East and North Africa. The quality was not great, but as the buyers said: a 14 year kid can fix this on the side of the road.

The problem with John Deere is that you cannot fix almost anything without a very expensive trip to a dealer or authorized workshop. Their explanation is that this is the only way to ensure quality (read: "rip off") repair. I don't know in detail what can be user replaceable, but probably not a lot more than the tires.

Compared to auto repairs where most shops can fix almost any car, John Deere has a monopoly on repairing their tractors; not a good one.

Think about a PC with all custom parts that only the manufacturer can build and sell. You would not buy such a thing, unless that would be the most common one you can find, over 50% of the market.

The other replies mentioned tooling and equipment but it's also very, very important for farmers to have mechanics and spare parts available nearby. Farmers often only have one or two days to harvest and when stuff breaks down, it needs to get fixed asap. Every hour counts and a day long delay can result in losses in the tens of thousands of dollars. So a competitor not only needs to make better tractors and equipment but also needs a tight supplier network across the region or country.

Plus tractors are just computers on wheels nowadays. The amount of technology in modern machinery is mind boggling. Some German (and possibly others) farmers are streaming their day work on Twitch and give interesting insights into modern farming.

Kinze, Case IH, New Holland, Massey Ferguson... yeah, there are many competitors to John Deere in the tractor industry. Sort of like how there are many competitors to Apple in the smartphone industry.

Saddly, "repairable" just isn't all that competitive of a feature. Probably because it's really hard to measure before you purchase a product.

I would have thought that repairable was a huge competitive selling point for agriculture.

From what little I know of farming, these machines work very hard and are indispensable. Often it appears there are very tight deadlines (harvest, weather etc) where you have like a 24-72 hour window to get something done otherwise the whole year's work is wasted.

If a machine can't be easily fixed, then you are up shit creek and your entire livelihood could be on the line.

The issue is whether you can repair your machinery yourself, not whether it can be repaired.

Speaking as someone who has no farming experience, but lots of general DIY experience, I would guess the two are seen as dichotomous. If you're buying older equipment, then repairability is very important (it's probably already got broken bits, which is why it's being sold). Whereas if you're buying a new extremely expensive John Deere, you want something that "just works" and the upkeep you're planning for is the financing. You're not looking down the line planning to repair it yourself, because if you were going to do that you would just buy an older machine and repair it today.

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