John Deere Announces Strategic Partnership with SpaceX
deere.com
deere.com
> agreement with SpaceX to provide cutting-edge satellite communications (SATCOM) service to farmers
surely they really mean
> agreement with SpaceX to provide cutting-edge satellite communications (SATCOM) service to John Deere
When I learned about the tech for pinging data via satellite to movable/non-movable objects anywhere on earth (for real-cheap), I was intrigued and started listening to the CEO talk. Sometime later, I heard about the acquisition. They went quiet, and now they seem everywhere.
Indeed, satellites are becoming the new cellphone towers - https://spectrum.ieee.org/satellite-cellphone-starlink
This was going around years so the source may have been removed. "Seven per cent of American adults think chocolate milk comes from brown cows.." what was worse is I am pretty sure I saw the study and seem to recall it also said 40% replied "don't know" so 47% of supposed adults in the US are perplexed by chocolate milk. https://globalnews.ca/news/3535819/chocolate-milk-brown-cows...
Of course it's also surprising if this was how the question was asked, and I may be misinterpreting the interview. Sadly, the survey itself does not seem to be available to confirm or deny.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2017/06/16/533255590/alarming-number-of-..., quote: "RAGALIE-CARR: Well, there was brown cows or black-and-white cows, or they didn't know."
But saying “I don’t know” is probably the most appropriate response because they could be more colors than just black and white and brown cows, like you said. There are even orange cows that a dairy farm could be using!
But the grandparent comment is likely complaining that most people don’t know where their food comes from. And that is a fact. I get a CSA box and so I can identify where my produce comes from but the milk? I would have no idea what kind of cows it comes from. I know it’s a local farm but the color of the cows? I would have to make the trip.
In the next few decades I wouldn't be surprised if most of the farming done in the US will be done from an office building.
Last year I went to a farm where they had a guy sitting in a room with 5 screens watching tractors farm fields. The cameras, sensors radars, mapping ect. were all powered by GPS.
The data is also sent to John Deere and they will do diagnostics on your equipment for you while you are using it and let you know if you need to do anything.
SpaceX made satellite communications so ubiquitous and boring it's even used in farming. They tend to have this effect on their products. Reusable rockets are so obvious and now boring because the novelty is gone. I cannot wait for Starship to do the same with LEO (and beyond) delivery.
The other way around, if anything. John Deere was sending SF1 data to farmers via satellite in the 1990s.
Yes, you should be able to grow your own food if you want to. Yes, you should be able to buy a tractor that is repairable.
Grow your own food if you don't like it.
I guess they're making space tractors in there?
dangit.
Can't do that, if connectivity is spotty.
https://www.csoonline.com/article/572811/remote-bricking-of-...
https://doctorow.medium.com/about-those-kill-switched-ukrain...
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/08/the-latest-john-deere-repair...
And this of course isn’t a John Deere only issue.
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/14/polish-train-manufacturer-th...
Not speaking for Deere here.
HAL: I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.
Dave: What's the problem?
HAL: I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.
Dave: What are you talking about, HAL?
HAL: This support contract is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize the cash cow weve built up here.
Hopefully the world will end before they spice up their marriage and extend the offer to Tesla.
Technically it makes some sense, but most of the push is because for more "data, intelligence, cloud, AI" in order to get more "value" to big agrobusinesses or anyone who can pay to stay in the party.
Agriculture is already a massive business only a few gigantic corporations can be in. The old romantic notion of the family farm has been dying at a rapid pace in the last few decades, also, monocultures to the max!
My ironic comments are mostly due to the way John Deere does business almost perfectly align with Musk's recipe for Tesla and SpaceX to an extent.
The blindingly brightness of this future is so bleak at the same time.
In that version, you are fundamentally not a farmer, you are a marketer.
Source: grew up in a farm town. Go Wheat Kings!
Do you honestly think your family could start from scratch and still successfully compete in a saturated commodity market entrenched with others in such a position?
And don’t talk to be about nice markets, because that’s far less farming and much more marketing (as another commenter pointed out).
All of that is separate from the value destruction of inflation. We would all be better off with a stable measure of value.
Coming soon to John Deer: electric automotive technology licensed from Tesla.
You really want a tiny handful of rich incumbents owning all the land? That's never worked out well before.
Something must be going right.
Pity everyone is competing for fewer jobs and AI is just entering the market. Quality of life has always been overrated.
It might sound cynical but quality of life depends largely on which side you are on: rich or poor?
Besides, we live in the 21st century, it is possible to be both a remote subsistence farmer and an educated+connected person at the same time, and the efficiency of small scale farming can be massively boosted with the use of modern tech such as networked sensors, camera drones, AI, etc.
Not realistic if 90% of the population were farming, as asserted before. Quality of life has risen dramatically over the last century or two exactly because people are no longer bound to the fields and are able to do and create other things. Put them back in the fields and where is the wealth and quality of life going to come from?
I encourage you to consider what happens to the interior of the country when family ag-businesses go away for fully automated CorpoFarms. Paris/Berlin are showing an example currently.
The recipe for Tesla and SpaceX are to offer the best product (Model Y is the best selling vehicle in the world and Starlink is taking over because no one offers satellite internet anywhere close to as good), how does that align with John Deere selling tractors as a service?
e.g. https://www.smh.com.au/national/farmers-crippled-by-satellit...
Source: we are doing it, using AgOpenGPS (OSS autosteer) with RTK
Taking the sprinkler. I make a sprinkler system. You buy the system and can work with with your own local manual settings, no extra fees, no external communication required. But you can pay me a, lets say $15/month subscription and I will control it using AI/ML and historical data to try to control it in a way to maximize it's use and output. I think that is fine so long as your allowed to cancel the subscription and set your own basic settings and it can operate. And most parts are easily sourced and replaceable.
Sometimes it is, not arbitrarily, but as a matter of how the technology works. For example, the link I posted above.
Yes, those tractors can be manually driven like a 1980's farm tractor without guidance, but that's kind of impractical because profitably operating a farm often depends on those features.
Modern day tractors have tons of sensors on them that are always connected to make sure any failing part can be detected and fixed before it breaks, basically or actually do drive themselves, and likely have as much or more tech in then as any modern car.
Just because it has tons of sensors doesn't mean they shouldn't be replacable
They sell land prep, crop sowing, and harvesting solutions.
It's not like a car. These things are used for a few weeks a year, and if they don't do their job during that time the farm looses all their income for the year.
A better way to think of them is like construction equipment that you rent. Even big construction companies rent their equipment.
I'd want to see the numbers on exaclty how much supposed always-up farming equipment saves in crop production, compared to farmers that don't use it.
In fact, I know for certain that the most productive farmland in the US, per area unit, is least likely to use motorized equipment of any kind. And when they do it isn't equipment on par with John Deere.
Isn’t this exactly what you’d expect? Motorized equipment is for working vast amounts of farmland as efficiently as possible, so the only farmland that would be worked by hand would have to be much more lucrative in comparison.
That’s a funny way to phrase it considering that many farmers are landlords.
If you're renting a zillion acres to someone that grows corn or wheat on it, you're not a farmer, your a landlord; the renter is the farmer.
"On the last day of California's legislative session in 2000, Governor Gray Davis signed into law what had come to be known as "OBD-II." The new law expanded the OBD service information requirements in California by directing car companies to make all manuals and technical service bulletins Internet-accessible, supply tools, and offer training to all non-dealer service companies in the state."
http://fbaum.unc.edu/lobby/_107th/093_OBD_Service_Info/frame...
We need OBD regulations to be updated for reflect these new technologies. I think hydrogen vehicles are also exempt.
They are mainly exempt because most of that data is emissions related. ODB came about due to CA requiring lower emissions and smog checks. They needed a way to quickly and cheaply verify it independently of the manufacturer. Unfortunately, in VWs case, the law assumed the data isn't modified before being sent.
That's exactly why farmers push for right-to-repair. The old model of "each farmer can repair their tractor, or at least jury-rig it to work for a week" was much more scalable than John Deere somehow having enough staff and service partners to handle anything that goes wrong in those couple of weeks, and then having these people mostly idle the rest of the year.
Of course at the same time newer tractors are much more capable, and allow a farmer to be much more efficient. But for a country it's also somewhat risky to put a large part of their food supply behind a single point of failure
They are mostly a utility truck used quite often, and 2-3 times a year they hook up the expensive add-ons to do the big work
Which is why the current use of land tower connectivity is being expanded to use satellite service, providing greater redundancy and improved coverage. That reduces the risk of outage.
If you want no chance of outage on a modern tractor, you are going to have to find yourself a time machine and go way back in time. That ship sailed decades ago.
I mean, sure, you can go to your local machine shop to get custom parts made. But you can also go to your local controls shop to get custom computers made. There are ways to deal with that – not the end of the world, just annoying. Also, John Deere has been sending one-way data via satellite to their tractors since the 1990s and have had two-way connectivity via cell networks since the 2000s, should cyber warfare ever break out...
So, it's not clear why he is concerned now all of a sudden. The concern is not unwarranted exactly, but we've already been thinking about it for decades to centuries. What is it about augmenting tower-based connectivity with satellite-based connectivity that instills a new fear?
I work for Deere, but don't speak for the company.
Sounds like it works exactly the way you say it should:
> Farmers who don't get a good cell signal of course do work without getting data uploaded
How are you getting requirement from this?
Because John Deere is the best provider of this value, or because John Deere is the only provider of this value?
Edit - looking around my ag town, that also hammers right to repair which is blocked by JD's DRM approach, I don't think they are getting a cut.
Edit 2 - > If the tractor is not online or the GPS isn't working the farmer will stay home to fix things
pretty sure you mean the farmer will go to the licensed JD repair outlet and get their tractor fixed by the local farm/car dealership, vs. themselves, which is how it always was before JD started this digital apprpoach.
I'm pointing out how the farmer isn't getting a cut.
Another way of saying what you just did is the value to the finance company's buy is going straight to JD, and not to the farmer.
And that data is powering a massive commodities trading industry, with value at orders of magnitude ever higher than a farmer could hope to earn, even though the value is only, and fully, sourced from their work.
And the point is I doubt JD is bothering to consider or tell the farmer they could get a cut of the data from their own fields powering that value. When farmers and ranchers are losing their multi-generational livelihoods largely driven by other impacts from a digital world, it's a gross practice by JD, considering the farmer's work plays a key role in it.
Edit - I'm not going to veer into a back-and-forth on this, but I encourage you to ask a JD product manager about a farmer getting a data-sales cut, or maybe even try to force that across the company from your relative position, and see how that plays out.
Yes in theory we can do whatever evil you want to imagine. However realistically I don't see it happening. Getting caught selling that data means farmers lose trust and won't buy any more million dollar machines - sales of equipment is in the end worth far more than the data.
More context:
"...Seba sees it differently. It’s one thing for Deere to use his data to make a better tractor. But, he said, Deere knows when he’s planting, and he’s convinced the company sells that data to weather companies and commodities traders. Deere denies that it sells aggregated farm data to traders. Nevertheless, it’s the billions of acres of data the company collects that allows it to enter into lucrative business partnerships with complementary companies, such as Dow DuPont, which depends on soil information to make nutrient and seed planting “prescriptions.""
https://thecounter[.]org/farmobile-farm-data/
We also benefit because that data goes back to the seed scientists and advises on which hybrids work in which environment and which do not.
We use LTE and Wifi to get this data home but having Starlink in the cab is a nice idea. Especially in parts of the world (you mean there are farms outside the US?) where connectivity is minimal. Everyone here bitching about the right-to-repair issue, right or wrong, misunderstood the press release.