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Comment by elzbardico | Hacker News Reader

I wonder, aren't there other vendors with more basic equipment? maybe chinese?

Farmers on other threads on this topic have stated that other vendors don't have the same repair network that John Deere has, and that being able to get timely repairs (often <24 hour) is often critical to their work due to the small time windows in which certain tasks (like harvesting) need to take place.

There are vendors with more basic equipment. But John Deere's selling point is the complex features they offer. I watched some farming YouTube videos and I was surprised by the technology in modern tractors. The tractors will drive by themselves and they'll keep track of what land they've already covered, help you align, let you control how many seeds you're planting per acre, etc. It's all very high tech and a single person in a single tractor can cover a massive area and their job is mostly just to supervise the tractor and make sure they don't run out of seed or whatever they're putting down.

Amazing features, too bad all the margin profits will end up into JDs pockets.

> too bad all the margin profits will end up into JDs pockets

The reason these tractors sell is they have positive ROI. That doesn’t justify the tying. But assuming they’re money losers will lead to poor decisions.

Positive-ish, assuming you have good harvests. If you have a bad run of harvests the debt for that expensive tractor will end your farm though.

I mean, they can have ROI, but if having one saves you 90K a year and they cost 89k a year is that really the optimal way to structure society?

So saves me 1k a year? I don't think farmers are converting their equipment to John Deere for such a paltry improvement.

But if it does truly net me 90K additional profit (and thus the gross improvement is 179k, half of which is spent on the capital to make that improvement), then yes, that looks optimal.

Millenial Farmer on youtube illustrates this pretty great. I watched an entire year of videos from planting to harvest time and all that was involved tech-wise was pretty interesting...along with his frustrations with John Deere.

https://www.youtube.com/c/MNMillennialFarmer

Strong recommend for Harry's Farm too.

of course there is. it's not hard to find a straightforward tractor that's easy for any third-party mechanic to do repairs on. that's basically kubota's whole sales pitch.

but Deeres are still popular. turns out that all the complicated software stuff is actually helpful, and some farmers want to buy it. even if a bunch of people on the internet who've never touched a tractor in real life think they shouldn't.

Kubota doesn't have the breadth of product that Deere does especially at the large end. Doosan kind of does under their various brands but they don't really compete that hard in the agricultural sector and I don't know if their repair parts and software ecosystem is more or less locked down than Deere.

> if a bunch of people on the internet who've never touched a tractor in real life think they shouldn't.

Bunches of real working farmers agree as well. I've noticed that over time, I've been seeing fewer and fewer Deere tractors working the fields around here.

plenty of real working farmers agree, sure. but they mostly just buy something else and get on with their lives.

Belarus [0]. Not really a solution given the geopolitical context.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belarus_(tractor)

Western countries don't trust China's computing hardware, for obvious reasons... why on Earth would they trust equipment that supports agricultural infrastructure?

It's a tractor, those things used to not have any computing hardware.

What we really need is a open sourced tractor protocol so if it breaks you can just slap a new chip there.

> we really need is a open sourced tractor protocol so if it breaks you can just slap a new chip there

No farmer wants this. Good servicing beats open source in hardware, in farming and frankly most non-enthusiast spaces.

any large market has segments - it is naive or worse to paint "every farmer" with a single brush; unconstructive

> No farmer wants this

I want this, my neighbour wants this, his neighbour - who runs an older, pre-proprietary John Deere wants this. Farmers need their tractors to work and anything that helps there is a boon. While ag contractors may run the latest most modern equipment farmers tend to have a few tractors themselves which tend to be a bit older, a bit more run-down than those shiny new JD/MF/NH/Valtra (in Sweden and Finland)/etc. machines. They can still do with some of the nicer parts of the electromagic on those machines.

So... once those JDs go out of support, who knows? There may be a market for an aftermarket control box, one which pulls the machine out of the clutches of the mothership and puts it where it belongs, in the hands of the farmer. I have a proposal, just donate one of those machines to me and I'll rig up such a box. Not that my current 1982 UTB640DTC (a Romanian license-built/copied (it is a bit unclear) Fiat 640 with FWA and a front loader) has given up but still...

So, good servicing is fine if you can afford it but many farmers tend to their own equipment as well in which case the availability of parts and protocol specifications really comes in handy. Mechanical parts - that what used to define a tractor - tend to be readily available but electronics and specifications are a different story.

I think you really hit the nail on the head there. In the brave new world of tractors that actually have (lots of) software in them, we need to make the right comparisons/analogies.

Saying "no farmer wants this" is the equivalent of saying that "no farmer wants the technical manual" for their pre-software-filled tractor. I bet it helps tremendously if you have the manual for your 1950 International Harvester Farmall MD and you want to keep repairing it. I have no idea how to repair tractors, nor do I own one or will probably ever own one but for some reason watching this was fun: https://youtu.be/7yuHIu1IfPw?list=PL-1mGLAjHPWy0BL-MO6MrSr-m... And somewhere in there (or maybe somewhere else on his channel) he shows these manuals, where to get them etc. Apparently even though some of the companies are out of business or no longer provide these themselves, there are re-prints of these and other companies that still make parts for these engines and tractors. The guy has a pretty small operation it seems and uses tractors mostly to make hay for his cattle but it looks like he's using that 72 year old MD as well as some other slightly (!) newer tractors to run his operation.

Farmers don't want an open source tractor protocol for its own sake, but if it allows for greater flexibility, reduced costs, and improved serviceability, then those will be relevant competitive advantages. You can see a similar phenomenon with linux on the desktop; Most people don't care about linux being open source in principle, but there is a meaningful, if small, amount of mainstream interest in it for reasons such as privacy and extending the lifespan of older hardware, both of which are enabled by linux's openness.

There is an open source tractor from the open source ecology project. From the videos it seems to be functional, however I guess for most farmers this would be a no go option.

https://opensourceecology.dozuki.com/c/LifeTrac

That's more of an american thing than a western thing.

Tell that to Australia -- they banned Huawei from their National Broadband Network and/or 5G hardware rollouts, IIRC.

Well, to be fair most of the drones used in agriculture are....DJI....

There is inherent distrust, but Deere and Case are close to pricing out/pissing enough customers. I am on the record they are sitting on the autonomous tractor tech (today) because the existing market they dominate is too lucrative. Could be their kodak moment playing out. We'll see.

Would the harvest stop if those drones were remotely-killswitched though? It would if a tractor/combine/etc. was.

There’s the Indian Mahindra which is advanced but still basic. I’ve seen a lot of them in the Midwest. Their tractor is the best selling farm tractor in the world.

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