Farmers want California to change its autonomous tractor ban [video]
nbcnews.com
nbcnews.com
None of them are wealthy enough or operate large enough farms for expensive self-driving tractors. And I share in their concern about the meta-game here: the consolidation of capital, land, and power over the food supply.
Consumers already have a hard time having any lever against rising grocery costs. Consolidation earlier on in the supply chain is not helping.
Which is to say, automation in this space isn't a bad thing in and of itself, but it can enable strange market dynamics (/imbalanced power dynamics) over food, which is objectively a bad thing.
My father runs his own chopping business and his machines aren't automated or self-driven either. For him, it's all about being able to repair the machines himself. He's been a diesel mechanic and farm hand all his life, so if something breaks on a "traditional" harvester or tractor, he knows how to fix it and get it running again.
Who in the grocery supply chain is earning huge profit margins?
As far as I understand, consumers have long benefited from myriad subsidies provided to farmers, too low fossil fuel prices that do not price in externalities, too low water prices that deplete aquifers quicker than they can recharge, and extremely cheap labor due to cheaper labor in less developed countries and government looking the other way on farms that hire illegal immigrants.
If anything, the mechanization of farms is the only force pushing food prices lower. Before that, it was the advent of the Haber-Bosch process which drastically increased yields.
He's got autosteer on a couple of pieces of equipment. His combine-harvester "only" cost $400,000 (used) compared to the $1M+ ones his neighbors use. As a fraction of $300,000, autosteer isn't particularly significant.
But it's massively useful. During a field operation, there are dozens of things the operator should be monitoring and adjusting in parallel. Pretty much all of these are automated with "idiot lights", but a good farmer is closely supervising. Less attention spent doing trivial things like steering results in more attention spend on deck levelling, rotor speed, pick-up speed, et cetera.
The internet and smartphones destroyed many categories of products and whole industries. AI is the latest cotton gin in spite of the hype because of capital's response to it with mass layoffs.
If legislators are concerned about farm jobs, this is short-sighted, as technology-driven productivity improvements are the basis for the prosperity we experience today.
Doing more for less is just better. We should probably invent an economic system that doesn't kill people when efficiency improves.
Yes, everyone hates sitting in the million dollar tractor's cab, sitting on the cushioned seat and enjoying the air conditioning while looking at the dozen screens that remind one of piloting the space shuttle.
I'm glad that California's legislators are taking a look at that, and making sure no one ever has to do it again. It's a horrible job, and the sooner it has been eliminated the sooner we can all celebrate.
The autonomous tractors are for use in fields where there are no other humans (at least so far)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soil_compaction_(agriculture)#...
The trade-off for making the tractor larger is that you can pull wider and multiple or multi-function implements to do the entire thing faster in one pass.
The larger contact patch for having an absurd number of wheels reduces soil compaction and reduces the chance you get stuck; working in fewer passes further reduces soil compaction and prevents you from getting stuck (since in the ideal case, you're doing one pass on solid ground, and never driving over tilled soil).
I suspect tanks get stuck often in part because that is fun and in part because they need to train troops how to get them unstuck and so they intentionally send tanks into mud - which is to say in a real war the generals might (should) avoid getting stuck, but in training it is important to get stuck often. I'm not a military expert though, but that is my opinion on tanks.
Removing a cab and a human removes at minimum 300-500 lbs (when you account for human weight, all the framing, window glass, HVAC components, seats, screens, etc etc) which is balanced somewhat evenly across both axles.
That means you can take that weight, and use only a portion of it to balance the tractor. Less weight overall.
First of all more weight is good! Weight means more traction, and traction is important. Depending on the system traction or horsepower may be the real limit, but the other is still close.
Second while balance can matter typically doesn't. Even when balance matters, you still need weight on the other axles. Most of the time your are towing something with most of the weight not on the tractor so you just want more weight and you want it more or less evenly balanced - about what a cab gives you.
Come to think of it, this might also benefit small landholders eventually by reducing the minimum amount of land required to fund a single tractor.
Most small landholders should sell and move to the city. You need a fair amount of size to make a decent living selling something cheap. Though my biggest worry is the medium sized farmers - wasting $10/acre in extra chemicals when you have 600 acres is only $6000 - you probably won't even notice it and in any case not wasting it costs investment too. When you have 6000 acres though that $10 is a larger number and you can afford to put a lot of money in better whatever to not waste it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44889842
> if you search me you will see elsewhere that I explained that bigger is better for the soil.
I read through your argument here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44889514
These claims are interesting but I did not find information to substantiate them with a brief search. I did find this:
https://mupages.marshall.edu/sites/nexus/2025/01/17/types-of...
> Most small landholders should sell and move to the city.
Economically, this has been true for decades irrespective of developments in autonomous vehicles. But city life is miserable, and there will always be people trying to escape it on the farm.
Of course different soils are different. You need to discuss the particulars of an individual field before you can make a judgement on what is best. But overall bigger is better.
You can gain some traction by going from tires to tracks, as some modern tractors do, but you still need a certain amount of weight or you're just going to spin when you're trying to pull a 30-foot-wide chisel plow through soil and last year's stalks.
Going fully autonomous might make tractors a little cheaper, if they don't need A/C and mirrors and things like that, but not lighter. And they'd still need the human stuff for occasions when it can't drive itself anyway, like moving it around the barn lot or going down the road to the next field.
Optimizing for time matters when paying people is involved but machine costs don't matter so much per hour.
Machine costs do matter by hour. Tractors and harvesters are extremely expensive and there is only a limited time window to get the work done. Going slower means that farmers would have to buy more machines.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/11/tech/monarch-autonomous-elect...
Or is cnn not what you mean by liberal media?
What else are they saying?
I imagine it is at least twofold:
a) provide jobs for manual laborers
b) more of an equal playing field between large-scale industrial agriculture companies and "sole proprietor" farmers
EDIT: turns out to be a case of safety regulation written before more recent advances in tractor automation. So my guesses were wrong.
Source: autosteer on JD tractors let me get really good at switch games.
I'm more worried about something like humans unexpectedly in the field. Imagine a migrant crossing a field and getting run over by a combine.
I'm not opposed to the idea of autonomous (or better near-autonomous) tractors working in fields. They'd definitely be safer than autonomous vehicles on roads. I just think people, especially at a tech-loving forum like this, are a little too quick to assume safety concerns are fully covered. Perhaps they can be, but will they be when large corporate farms cut corners on things like maintenance?
I started driving tractors when I was 10, and I've been in a couple situations where equipment failure required some quick action to get stopped before serious damage was done. Shit happens, and should be expected to happen and prepared for.
Commercial aircraft aren't legally allowed to fly with only GPS for navigation, and for good reason.
That particular one is considered outdated but still used in some areas.
Automatic landing is done by tuning into a certain frequency, and two angled transmitters are used so that a plane too far to the left receives a certain pattern and a plane too far to the right receives a different one. A similar system is used for vertical guidance. How easy is it to transmit a short repeating pattern at an aircraft to make it think it's too far to the left?
And these are allowed to fly, and refrigerators are legal too even though filling one with propane and a spark source may cause it to explode.
and Yes we do have OSS tool for that
This is the sort of feel-good rule making that stifles an economy.
Driverless tractors exist. They’ve been deployed across the world. We have real-world data about their safety and precisely zero cases where they ran into schools because they got lost.
There is a legitimate safety debate that can be had. But it should pit data against data, not hypotheticals.
There is no “autonomous tractor law”, the headline is misleading. There is a farm safety law that has been in place since long before any autonomous production farm equipment existed which prohibits self-propelled equipment without the operator seat occupied at all times while in operation. It was not unheard of for people to get on and off low-speed self-propelled (that was not self-driving) farm equipment while in operation, in an attempt at efficiency/multitasking, with attendant safety risks. That’s what the law was directed at.
If the automated tractor is remotely controlled by my smartphone (IANAF) in my pocket, does that count?
It says: "All self-propelled equipment shall, when under its own power and in motion, have an operator stationed at the vehicular controls. This shall not prohibit the operator occupying or being stationed at a location on the vehicle other than the normal driving position or cab if controls for starting, accelerating, decelerating and stopping are provided adjacent and convenient to the alternate position."
So you do explicitly need to be physically on the vehicle at all times while it's moving.
It has further rules for remotely operating "Furrow guided self-propelled mobile equipment" (which is not how modern autonomous tractors work), but even for those you need to be actively watching it and have immediate access to steering and braking controls.
I think "location on the vehicle" could reasonably be interpreted as including virtual locations. For example a drone operator is physically in a little room somewhere but they are in actuality operating controls that fulfill all of those requirements remotely. It's not hard to go from there to "I can press the stop button on my phone whenever I want" so I am effectively "stationed at the vehicular controls".
Seems pretty important in this context. This law probably exists to stop people getting crushed by jumping off while the tractor is in reverse to hook a grain bin.
It's been in place since the 1970s. At the time it was passed, it was probably reasonable to require a human operator at the controls at all times.
The law is just an anachronism that the state legislature should remove/update.
I wonder how the law is written? Could you have a set of vehicular controls in Kenya remotely hooked up to control it? And then you only pay kenyan not US labour rates?
Can't imagine tractors move fast enough whilst plowing that the extra 67 milliseconds of latency matters.
So yeah, let's let giant farm tractors, larger and more dangerous than (non-firing) tanks from WWII, roam fields nationwide.
It's very hard and time-consuming to repeal/replace a law. It's at least 10x easier to make a "technical fix"/"clarification" that preserves the original intent while removing the unintended effects. That's what should be done.
It also functions to ban unattended autonomous vehicles now that they do exist, and it may need to be adjusted to allow for an appropriate regulatory framework for limited and safe use of unattended autonomous vehicles, but that was not a subject of concern when it was written.
1. Prohibit large companies from using their size to negotiate prices, like how it used to be
2. Stop farm subsidies for all but the most critical areas. If you want to make food available to the poor, give them food stamp cards, but further restrict junk food. Supply side subsidies just create excess crops which lead to everyone trying to use cheap corn in some way. This cheap corn is then used to destroy local farmers in Latin America, further increasing illegal immigration and the power of cartels over a newly destitute population.
Example: corn burning furnaces.