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Comment by zahma | Hacker News Reader

I know more and more farmers are tech savvy and getting acquainted with the tools of the trade — or at least their kids are, but is your average farmer going to know what to do with a root terminal? I’d be worried about further crippling / bricking my six-figure machine. Log dumps are great for troubleshooting, but fixing the problem isn’t necessarily straightforward. And any misstep could be calamitous.

I’m all for right to repair and sticking it to John Deere for trying to squeeze farmers, but I don’t see the end goal. A suite of hacked Deere software with various troubleshooting modules? Or is it just going to be a bargaining chip to encourage Deere to further open up its platform?

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I remember when Motherboard did a piece about this issue they interviewed a farmer. He basically said something along the lines of:

> I had no idea how any of this worked but I needed to get my tractor running so I got to Googling and figured it out.

Don't underestimate farmers. They might not be tech savvy in the traditional sense. But if you told them they needed to jailbreak their tractors to plant this season, they would figure it out.

On the other hand, Googling and downloading random shit is also the perfect way to end up with malware or break things. Wouldn't it be better if you didn't need to download unverified tools from potentially shady websites just to repair what you own? If your product requires specific proprietary software to repair, that software should be provided when the product is sold.

It's also a perfect way to enter the hacking scene

I feel like this comment is seriously underestimating the average farmer, these are people with complicated jobs and wide ranges of skill sets. Also when your livelihood is threatened unless you learn how to do something, you're gonna learn how to do that thing.

Yeah, I'm an engineer that has worked closely with farmers for much of my career. I'm in absolute awe. They are an unbelievable wealth of knowledge of all kinds of technology, hydraulics, mechanics, weather, genetics, soil science, hydrology, forecasting, business, etc. etc. etc. The list just keeps going. And in general, if your numbers are telling you one thing and the farmer is telling you another, I'd usually bet on the farmer.

These people are CEO's of massive enterprise operations managing tons of capital in a high-risk, high-tech, unbelievably complex environment that they must constantly stay on top of.

Indeed. One of the smartest human beings I know is a farmer. His breadth of knowledge is astounding.

I’m in no way demeaning a farmer by asking if their skill sets can be applied to complicated software. What I’m really wondering is what it takes to fix a hardware problem with this software. I wouldn’t underestimate anyone whose life depends on fixing a problem…

I think it's a reasonable point. I know some farmers, and in every case I can think of the answer is "probably not".

However, most of the non-farmers I know wouldn't be able to, either. My brother has a lot of rooted devices — to stream movies, play video games — but he's not tech-savvy. Usually, there's some guy on eBay who will ship a hacked device to your house, or a co-worker who will do it for a few bucks.

Unlike an iPhone, you wouldn't ship a hacked tractor (any more than you'd download a tractor...) but markets form on their own, and I suspect that's what would happen here.

Pulling back the camera a bit, this question astounds me. I guess I'm finding it very very odd the extent to which people don't understand (or better, remember) that the hackers most always win here, and those wins are nearly always a good thing. It's true that the companies end up rerouting and finding other ways to preserve profits (and subsequently get real quiet about these defeats) but for me the recent history of tech is about wins like this.

But the question is what is the victory and what or for whom is it good for? So I'm not sure I understand your astonishment as if it's so obvious that breaking into the software has inherent value.

There's a difference between rooting a device to stick it to DRM overlords, playing pirated games, or running your own homebrewed whatever on your phone versus enabling a platform through which someone can fix a complicated machine that's worth 1000x a PS5. The farmers taking out loans on these machines are betting their entire lives on it.

I'm definitely not saying this is inconsequential, but I really want to know just how many farmers are going to plug in, jailbreak, and get to tinkering with machinery that is their livelihood -- not just an expendable piece of hardware that gets discarded when its bricked...

I'd say your last question is way too narrow and short-term. It's almost by definition hard to explain because it takes a while to see and/or appreciate the effects?

Let's see if this is a close enough analogy; I'll forever maintain that Linux won the OS wars decisively broadly, and that 1-2% of the desktop is an overwhelming victory. The numbers don't sound great, but what you want to do is to compare to "what would this look like if it was only 'big-company' owned software," and the answer is very different. We probably wouldn't even be talking about "Operating systems" at all. Just "Windows" and "Apple" boxes.

Keeping this stuff open, by whatever means, law, hackery, force, whatever, has long term down the road multiplicative effects.

Not only are you estimating the astounding ingenuity of farmers it's not hard to make a convenient interface for a jailbreak.

Often times even replacing a tire is so expensive on a tractor after paying the highwaymen their fee the probability of bricking the tractor is probably not even factored in. John Deere more-or-less bricks your tractor anyway. So, arguably, it's no loss if you brick it given the alternative could be not putting food on the table because you spent 3 years of checks on repair or you'd have to buy a new one anyway.

> is your average farmer going to know what to do with a root terminal?

Who cares?

The question is 1) whether your exceptional farmer will have a root terminal available to them if they want to use it, and 2) if your average farmer calls a programmer, will they have a root terminal available to work on the farmer's behalf?

> A suite of hacked Deere software with various troubleshooting modules? Or is it just going to be a bargaining chip to encourage Deere to further open up its platform?

I don't understand how you don't think these would be massive achievements.

The goal isn't to stick it to John Deere. Who cares about John Deere? The goal is to push John Deere the company out of the tractor you bought.

Farmers here are networked - not every farmer knows everything but almost all of then are two phone calls away from any required skillset.

Case in point, I work with local farmers and I'm deeply familiar with OS design, sheep shearing robotics, geophysical air survey, integrating sat + air + land data, sympbolic algebra systems, fixing old motocycles, automating pumps and irrigation, and a slew of other skills.

We've already got a local alternative non John Deere supply line for IT parts that often break (sensors, touch screens, monitors, etc) and for various mechanical parts.

Most people in the rural community know a FiFo (Fly in | Fly out) worker or three in mining | oil & gas which provides access to global state of the art mechanical workshops and automation R&D (see Rio Tinto + robotics).

The are many things that can be done by developing stand alone Tractor OS's - integrating drone cloud data and control for one, removing the John Deere "data spying" for another (all crop data gets phoned home to John Deere "for free").

Farmers, on the whole, are phenomenally capable people. They have to be. They know how to get knowledge when they need it, and when presented with broken equipment they'll diligently work through the challenge using all the resources available to them. If you can search your way to victory, so can they.

Modern tractors are more technologically advanced than a Tesla.

If you can run a modern planter or sprayer with autodrive/gps then copy/pasting a string of text into a terminal is not going to be a problem.

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