Tractor cab looks like a space ship (2021) [video]
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Massive respect for them. Even with this tractor, this guy likely does more work than the majority of people. They feed our entire society with a ton of work for very little reward. We don't give them the respect they're due.
At least in my area, they aren't exactly known to be geniuses. The ones that have built up their business by buying out other farms and have tons of acres and employees? Sure. The usual "inherited the family farm" type? Not so much.
They have two small periods during the year where they're up before sunrise and stop working after sundown, assuming they live in an area with one harvest. Overall they work a hell of a lot less than most of us, and have more money. I have a friend that owns a business where he sells side-by-sides, four wheelers, snowmobiles, etc. The amount that many spend by buying all the newest toys every year is incredible.
The downside, of course, is that you need to be born in to it. A tiny 100 acre farm's land is worth north of 1 million dollars, not to mention a ton of other startup costs. Land isn't for sale very often, as usually at least one child wants to take it up. I don't even know how you'd approach starting from scratch unless you were already rich.
Note: I'm referring to crop farmers. Animals are hard work and I don't understand why any small time farmer still does it.
Well, you are not going to start any kind of business without some kind of working capital. To be rich, for some definition of rich, is always a necessity when starting a business. That is not exclusive to farming.
I'm not sure farming is any worse than any other business[1], though. I have started a number of businesses in my day and the farm was probably the easiest of them to get into. Like any startup without venture capital – you start as small as possible, prove the business model, and then slowly work towards growth.
> A tiny 100 acre farm's land is worth north of 1 million dollars
Ah, if only. Imagine how easy farming would be if 100 acres was only $1MM! We haven't seen farmland that cheap around here in 20 years.
[1] Maybe software has an edge if you can find success with nothing but a budget computer, but your time commitment is going to be many orders of magnitude larger, so I expect it still requires more working capital in the end.
> The downside, of course, is that you need to be born in to it. A tiny 100 acre farm's land is worth north of 1 million dollars, not to mention a ton of other startup costs. Land isn't for sale very often, as usually at least one child wants to take it up. I don't even know how you'd approach starting from scratch unless you were already rich.
This is just flat out false. My dad started our farm (90 acres) from scratch. He did it by working his ass off, often working two or three jobs, while living frugally and saving as much as he could for a down payment. Then he got a mortgage, just like most people do when they buy property. It's hard in the sense that saving money is always hard, but it's certainly not impossible and something where you can't pull it off without a helping hand from your parents.
My parents bought a 60 acre property on a truck driver and part time school bus driver's salary. There's no way my wife and I could afford the same property today, even with us both having degrees. Land is freaking expensive now, and I assume farm equipment is also more than it was back then.
Don't get me wrong; I'm sure there are ways to do it, but I've known plenty of farmers and apart from hobby type farms they all inherited their land.
Farmers aren't all geniuses, but they also aren't mostly lazy idiots like you depict them to be.
I guess it depends on the animal, and how many. I work sometimes on a hobby farm with around 30 pineywoods cattle and they're almost maintenance free. The hay is more work than those cattle and basically all we do for that is drive tractors around for a few days, a few times a year.
The word people use for what you describe is farmhand. It is the farmhand who works on a farm. The farmhand is the agricultural equivalent of a factory worker. Indeed, someone who owns a farm, but does not work on it, would not be considered a farmhand, but they most definitely would be a farmer.
It is technically possible for one to be both a farmer and a farmhand, but being a farmer does not imply that one is also a farmhand. They are distinct roles.
And this shouldn't be surprising. Farming is a very human activity, and can be done by pretty much any human. You don't need to be exceptional to do it. In fact it would be ridiculous if you did - imagine if only 1 in 50 people was brilliant enough to become a farmer - human civilization would never have gotten started.
Praising something like this feels silly to me, much as when people talk about "being a mother is the hardest job" or similar. It's not. Being a mother is a common human experience, and most women go through it.
This isn't to say such things shouldn't be celebrated. The idea of celebrations around harvest or motherhood is appealing to me, but there's nothing exceptional here, and there shouldn't be. Simple things, regular things, things everyone can do or goes through are worth celebrating, not just the exceptions, the geniuses, the stand-outs.
You could argue more women nowadays don't want to be mothers because it's hard. Especially if that's the second job and unpaid, actually you have to pay lots of money to be a successful mother. So yeah, it's exceptional... that anyone wants to have children at all! Though that's quickly changing, too.
There's a difference between hard = effort, and hard = difficulty. Most people struggle to understand software engineering concepts. If you do understand them, then the effort required to succeed at the job is less than parenting/farming/etc; but there's a reason software engineers are in the top 20% of the economic ladder and picking vegetables on a farm is on the bottom.
And at last check, subsistence farming was still the default job worldwide. Perhaps things have changed in the last decade or two, but I have my doubts.
(I'd also take issue on the idea of parenting being difficult, vs. good parenting, vs. newer cultural expectations on parents/education/helicoptering, vs. kids being free to roam etc etc., but that's a whole huge discussion on its own - and I think there's a pretty strong argument to be made that raising kids is not harder on either axis than having a job, but doing both at once is very difficult and forces an economic choice many women are making in favor of money.)
Sure, neither is hard if you want to do it at subsistence level. Hell, I started programming at like 5 years old. Software development is the easiest endeavour a human can partake in – so easy, it is easily picked up by young children who can barely read. Anyone can build software.
But I think it is far to say that building robust, reliable, maintainable, performant, and scalable software that satisfies a market need is a different story. And same goes for farming. If you want to farm at a level beyond subsistence, that is when it becomes hard.
The key to why parenting is such a hard job: it literally doesn't end for about two or more decades and you absolutely cannot quit or slack off on this gig, no matter what!
Just because something "always has been" doesn't mean it's easy.
We might not like to admit it, but people can and do, all the time. There's an ideal as far as being a parent goes that we try to hold people to and enforce culturally - but that doesn't stop people from getting divorces or dumping their kids on their partner or parents while they go off and do their own thing. I know a number of people that more or less raised themselves - their parents provided necessities and that was about it.
There's also a larger discussion to be had on parenting and why it takes more time and effort than past generations; the difficulty of raising kids with two working parents; the move away from extended family groups and close neighbors that can help with kids; the increase in helicoptering/worrying and loss of independence; all of which contributes to making things more difficult.
> Just because something "always has been" doesn't mean it's easy.
I never said it was easy. What I said was it's not the hardest job, it's a common human experience, and it deserves celebrating even if it is an average, common thing.
This is absolutely laughable. The work is incredibly difficult. It literally destroys your body, every old farmer I've ever known has a heap of medical issues from having to do a lifetime of physical labor. It may not be intellectually difficult, but it's very difficult work.
Farming is hard work, as you noted. But most physically able people are capable of it.
Designing a rocket to put a man on the moon is difficult and a much smaller percentage is capable of that.
Point being: they've put a lot of effort into modelling the different tractors and first time I used the in-vehicle perspective I was amazed at all the screens and knobs and dials and levers and what not. They don't really do anything in the game, it's just for show, but man they are complex beasts clearly.
Then again, I can definitely see the value of at least some of these features. Like you spend an inordinate amount of time just making sure you get maximum yield from a field, while keeping costs low, so having a screen tell you how much fuel you're consuming per turn or whatever is actually pretty useful.
Anyway, I absolutely agree – farmers are incredible! I have a whole new appreciation for farming equipment and farmers in general, just from playing this silly game.
Hydraulics and attachments open up almost an endless possibilities.
Devices:
Tractor - 1979 Versatile 875. Indestructible. Used for planting with a 40' air seeder.
Trimble 500 - This is now a redundant GPS receiver which provides a special NEMA string to the device below it. Will stay in operation until I can figure out how to reliably duplicate said string via the primary GPS.
PF3000 - Old reliable. This computer allows rudimentary tracking of loads to allow for seed and fertilizer rate experiments. Data is saved to a CF card for later transfer to SMS Basic or QGIS.
CF-D1 Tablet - This handy bright touchscreen handles the signal from the primary GPS and RTK towers. It communicates with various sensors and a DC motor to steer the machine. Runs AgOpenGPS, a incredible godsend of a project which allows these kind of autosteer retrofits on old tractors for dirt cheap.
Various camera screens to monitor the operations of an Air Seeder. You know what's cheaper and more reliable than airflow and runout sensors? Cameras. :) Hopefully I'll be able to upgrade these to IP cameras this spring, but for now they're all various brands of cheap wired "backup cameras."
Agtron sensor monitor (canbus I think?) - This is supposed to monitor shaft RPMS and other various functions for the Air Seeder. It kinda works, but most functions are broken.
AtomJet Aux Hydraulic system - Allows older tractors to handle newer more intensive implements.
AgopenGPS control board (V2.. I think) - Takes Wheel Angle sensor data, GPS data, and Motion sensor Data, stews it all up on an Arduino nano and feeds that to the steeringwheel motor.
Ardusimple GPS RTK2B - Primary GPS receiver and NEMA string generator.
Not pictured - A streamdeck MK2 set up to control AgOpenGPS functions. Of dubious usefulness. :)
Other future upgrades - Replacing the main hydraulic manifold block with electronic solenoids. This should allow AgOpenGPS to raise and lower the implement automatically, as well as control various functions of the air seeder. One more step on the road to total automation!
Once you got everything dialed in you rarely made many changes, The ability to change field by field or even in a field to adopt to different soil types is nothing short of amazing. Lots of times an individual row would stop planting and you wouldn't notice.
I worked a lot with satellite infrared photos and it wasn't uncommon to look at a field and see an entire row missing or planted at a half rate. I predict in time though a lot of these screens will become less important as your AI agent will be making all these sorts of adjustments for you.
If not your style, https://imgbb.com is also an option. More ads, though
But please do upload a picture. That would be interesting.
While at uni, I worked on a local fishing boat doing (amongst many things) hardware/software integration, and did some work on equipment communicating via NMEA. Very fun blast-to-the-past, didn't know the standard was used outside of marine environments.
_However_, it seems like it could also be an inflection point, again because of technology. Imagine if tractors could tow behind them not a spraying trailer but a computer vision + laser system that could identify and zap individual weeds rather than napalming the whole ecosystem chemically, or that had arms that could pick only the correct, or ripe crop, or sub-varietal of crop, on a field planted with a variety of useful plants that balanced out the intensity with which they extracted nutrients from the soil. All of this at the cost/scale required to support the 8 billion (or so) people on the earth now with the agricultural land we have now, but perhaps too with the ability to open up more marginal bits of land to agriculture, and de-intensify the current wrung-to-death expanses of flat that we have to use now to accommodate the limitations of current farm machinery.
While lasers are not used (yet?) you can now get sprayers that will spray chemical only on weeds and not the rest of the field. Or more likely you apply herbicide at a low dose across the whole field and then a high dose (possibly different chemical) where there is a weed.
It exists. [1][2]. Robotic tractor, vision system, multiple 150W CO2 lasers. There is no such thing as overkill. It's really cool. "Certified Organic".
A more practical approach is See and Spray.[3] Cameras and deep learning are taught to recognize and target enemy weeds. The sprayer has a valve for each nozzle, and it only zaps the weeds. Uses far less pesticide. For some crops a zap of spray fertilizer is used. The weeds overdose and die. That's now a John Deere product.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53Mma8IOEzc [2] https://carbonrobotics.com/
> arms that could pick only the correct, or ripe crop, or sub-varietal of crop, on a field planted with a variety of useful plants
I've seen demos for both of these in the last year or two.
Not a ton of space ship vibe (especially the Dragon, for example), just a lot of poorly integrated individual systems that each comes with their own monitor and control system. Which is maybe better than a tightly integrated system when it comes to farming implements.
He mentions swapping out components from last season a couple of times, so lack of integration is probably a feature.
It also seems like this is one of those things that buying the base model is never enough. There were two different types of row cleaners in the front of the towed unit. There were devices at the back of each row that also seem like an add-on. The thing that presses the seeds down, and then the smart version that detected soil moisture and other info. Of course that's one of those 'for a small nominal fee' type of add-ons. John Deere seems to figure out how to keep his hand in the farmer's pocket eternally
There is also a tractor company called FERRARI, but they have nothing to do with Enzo Ferrari as far as I know.
"Ferrari Tractors are designed and built in Italy by the BCS Group." (https://www.ferraritractor.com/faq)
English Wikipedia gives up at that point, but itwiki has https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferrari_(azienda)
Google Translate: "FERRARI of Luzzara (RE) is one of the historic brands in the field of agricultural mechanization. Founded in 1954 as "Officine Meccanica Ferrari SpA", in the period of reconstruction and mechanization of the country, it was one of the most enterprising companies in the agricultural machinery sector."
Meanwhile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferrari says it was founded in 1939 and doesn't mention tractors at all.
They litereally started as a tractor company, and as I understand it was annoyed at Enzo Ferrari and challeneged himself to making a supercar, and later the "Holy Shit" Countach was born (but the earlier Lambos are really beautiful)
Jeremy Clarkson from Top Gear fame has a 2-season show about his farm. In the first episode, he buys a Lambo tractor because "of course he does" type of logic.
The name lives on in the ag market, but built by SAME, not Automobili.
> Patrick Mimran sold Lamborghini to the Chrysler Corporation in 1987 for US$25 million. [...] In 1998, Mycom Setdco and V'Power sold Lamborghini to the Volkswagen Group where it was placed under the control of the group's Audi division.
My dad was a doctor, and subscribed to the New England Journal of Medicine. The articles were opaque ("Defective Regulation of Inflammatory Mediators in Hodgkin's Disease — Supernormal Levels of Chemotactic-Factor Inactivator"??), but the ads were marvelous. Ultracentrifuges! Gel electrophoresis! Confocal microscopes! Electrosurgial units! Blood gas analyzers! Catnip for this budding engineer.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time_kinematic_positionin... [2] https://www.deere.com/en/technology-products/precision-ag-te... [3] https://www.deere.com/en/technology-products/precision-ag-te...
Looks like slapping a bunch of hardware to circumvent poor interoperability.
And F35 cockpit has large single MFD, MFD setup of any 4+ generation fighter is 2-3 screens for what I imagine to be more complicated missions.
There is also the ISO11783 protocol which this tractor (which is at least 10 years old) has in the base model that could show everything, but the resolution available isn't really good and so while 3-5 controls could use that instead of a separate box, anything on a high resolution screen needs to stay. I don't know why the manufacture of those controls choose not to.