A factory that builds modern tractors is a pretty huge investment. It’s very large and has a ton of very expensive robotics. It also has a huge supply chain that delivers a wide variety of parts to the factory for final assembly.
A factory worker, while a lot more skilled than a day labourer working on a farm, does not have access to the kind of capital needed to start a big factory. So how does it happen? The people who have the billions of dollars in capital needed to start the factory aren’t just going to give shares to workers they hire.
some of the most successful Danish agricultural companies started out as / are cooperatives.
So that provides one possible solution to the problem: start small with no capital and grow over a period of centuries to become a large co-op.
But how do you achieve it today? How do you take a bunch of workers and start a co-op factory that can compete with John Deere?
VC doesn’t work. Investors want equity for their money.
Worker co-ops have only one class of member: worker-owners. People who do both the day-to-day work and are part owners of the business. Unless the VC people are willing to show up and start punching the clock like everybody else, they are a different class: owners who don't work. Worker co-ops disallow that class of membership by definition.
Economies of scale.
We don't live in a fantasy land where things work a certain way just because it would be nice if they did.
That local fab shop would now have to provide 24-hour on-call service, which is a completely different business.
Indeed, and that is cheaper than keeping a guy on staff that can fix your equipment.
The biggest farmers I know keep someone on staff. The next tier down use outside repair services. And the smallest guys (I am a small time farmer, emphasis on small) repair their own stuff.
So in the context of myself and my own needs right to repair is crucial. But I can argue for the right to repair in general as well: Flexibility is key, in light of creaky supply chains.
A coop loses so much value when it just becomes a one email a year affair with "Hey, it's that time to vote for things again!"
I'm always reminded of the Anarchist Peasants:
I'm somewhat influenced by the descriptions of various farming organisations in Seeing Like A State which I recently read. There is a lot of active cooperation, experimentation, knowledge sharing etc. around crop varieties.
I cannot claim to know the relative difficulty of such a task, or relevant regulations. But if there were some standard designs that multiple manufacturers were involved in, I bet parts would stay in production for a very very long time.