Farmers Deserve the Right to Repair Their Tractors

https://www.farms.com/news/farmers-deserve-the-right-to-repair-their-tractors-168298.aspx

by anandaverma18 • 5 years ago

595 261 5 years ago

beckman466• 5 years ago

A few decades ago, any given farmer often had the skills and tools needed to quickly make repairs if their machinery broke down. These days, however, it’s not so straightforward. Most modern farm equipment is technologically advanced, containing computers and sensors that collect and transmit data. As a result, specific software tools are typically necessary to address mechanical failures and other issues.
However, most companies refuse to make those tools available to farmers, making it exceptionally difficult to fix broken machinery on their own. They can’t even go an independent mechanic, since manufacturers won’t sell them parts or diagnostic tools either. This leaves farmers essentially no choice but to take their broken equipment to a licensed dealership.
This isn’t cheap. A farmer might spend thousands of dollars on a simple adjustment they could have done themselves with the appropriate resources. On the other hand, this arrangement has proven wildly lucrative for manufacturers; for Deere, as an example, parts and repairs are up to six times more profitable than selling the equipment itself.

This is a part of a larger pattern. Our current underlying system "keeps many practical alternatives sequestered behind private firewalls or unfunded if they cannot generate adequate profits". The current system enables "an exaggerated set of intellectual property monopolies – for copyrights, trademarks and patents – [which] restrain the sharing of scientific, social and economic innovations. Hence the system discourages human cooperation, excludes many people from benefiting from innovation and slows the collective learning of humanity" [1].

Imagine today's high-tech world, without the capitalist intellectual property system. It will allow many more people to become skilled and able. I think we will look back at this phase of human civilization in horror; IP systems are an excessive way of dominating people and stifling their growth.

[1] http://wealthofthecommons.org/essay/peer-peer-economy-and-ne...

antibuddy2• 5 years ago

On the other hand the incentive for people to innovate and make it accessible to anyone is often money. The criticism of capitalism is warranted, however the supposedly bad capitalist IP system is also the reason for innovation and cooperation.

CraigJPerry• 5 years ago

Most of the interesting innovations happen on publicly funded research. Whether it’s your RNA vaccine https://investors.modernatx.com/news-releases/news-release-d... or your phones touch screen, or your siri voice assistant or your uber gps taxi

louis___• 5 years ago

This rethoric has been proven false in the software development ecosystem.

Nowadays almost all new programming languages are open-source, and *nix OS softwares have won the cultural battle over Windows in the devops community.

the supposedly bad capitalist IP system is also the reason for innovation and cooperation

For me this is as much a myth as the good old "the wealth trickles down from the rich to the poor"

brobdingnagians• 5 years ago

Are the technological advancements in tractors really worth it? Does anyone have any stats on this? I imagine tractors two decades ago did the job about the same. Is adding a whole bunch of chips to something for a very minor increase in efficiency worth losing the ability to repair it easily.

If it is anything like cars, then I would think the technology increases chance of failure and actually just increases the cost of doing business; especially when they have to wait to do simple things.

Cars 40 years ago did just fine getting from A to B, had air conditioning, radio, and worked reliably. Cars now are finicky, spy on you, and very expensive to repair. It makes me wonder if we would just be better off with not flooding everything with chips. Does connecting your car to your phone really improve your life? I don't think it would improve mine. If anything, I'm trying to connect my phone to _less_ things than I used to because it just steals my attention from things that really matter.

eliaspro• 5 years ago

Tractors and farming in general have dramatically changed throughout the last 20 years or so. They've become much bigger in size (and thereby more efficient), they're mostly self-driving once in the field and control now the whole operation very precisely down to centimeter accuracy e.g. for fertilizer application.

bluGill3• 5 years ago

Does anyone have any stats on this?

Yes, every farmer in the US who is serious (that is no small hobby farmers). If the GPS is broken they won't bring the planter out in the field. Technology allows them to put exactly the right amount of seed in the ground at the right place. They saves thousands of dollars every year just by not planting too much. Then get tens of thousands more every year because the right amount of seeds results in more yield (profit) than either too much (plants have to fight each other for sun) or too little (bare ground doesn't produce a harvest).

Farmers are still figuring out to turn other data into profit, but they are learning that some soils just never will yield well no matter how much fertilizer they put on so they don't waste money on them, while others with a little extra fertilizer will yield more. The computer lets them easily adjust fertilizer levels for each small section of land.

dalbasal2• 5 years ago

I like this line of thinking, but I don't like the grand theory aspects of it.

Terms like "current political economy." Explaining everything, from poverty to environmental degradation, as a product of psycho-societal ideas like the "false idea of material abundance." It might work as a method of criticism, but I don't think it works the other way. We need to discover and develop new ways, and that doesn't tend to work from highly broad, abstract understandings down to the practical level.

I agree with most of the major touchpoints, but I think it could be written better.^ To hazard an inexact term, this needs to be far less ideological.

Take this paragraph:

We believe that new forms of cooperative and distributed property will emerge along these lines, a trend explained by Matt Cropp in his article, “The Coming Micro-Ownership Revolution.”6 Cropp’s article explains the direct link between P2P-driven declines in transaction costs and the shift to more distributed forms of ownership. The new corporate forms will no longer be based on shareholder-based ownership, but on common capital stock, held by the commoners themselves. These new entities constitute the “third commons” of “created materiality,” i.e., humankind’s productive machinery (in other words, capital), which joins the first two commons, the inherited material commons of nature and created “immaterial” cultural commons. The new forms of distributed individual property, which can be freely aggregated into collectives, emulate the free aggregation...

The author believes this because its a highly legible, direct application of the ideas and analysis. It has the disadvantage of being both limiting, and nonspecific. Hard to use as a formula, and easy to use for rejection.

I'm totally on board with OSS/Linux & Wikimedia as existence proofs. I would also add the WWW. OSS and its ecosystems are a rich set of smaller examples. I think lichess makes a great example, somewhat similar to wikimedia. Note that Jimmy Wales is more of a capitalist/libertarian, in his ideals. He would (I assume) be totally off put by this article's take. Thibault Duplessis, Lichess' founder, describes himself as a french communist. CVince Serf is just a dude. TimBL is more of a moderate pragmatist. Good look finding a take on "contemporary capitalism" that appeals to all three.

Why carry all this unnecessary baggage.

^More practical, convincing to the unconvinced, more room to graft on other ideas, less combative, less offensive to pre-xistsing political identities....

GuB-422• 5 years ago

In fact, the pattern is that people don't want to spend a lot of money upfront and companies like sustained income.

So given the choice between a $50k tractor which cannot be repaired unless you pay a lot of money and an easy to repair $100k tractor, both farmers and manufacturers will chose the first option. Of course, farmers want an easy to repair $50k tractor, but manufacturers have to make money. And manufacturers want to sell $100k expensive-to-maintain tractors, but competition won't let them.

The system we have now, with all its flaws, is one that suits people the most. We can make laws when the free market doesn't work, for example, we could make $50k unmaintainable tractors illegal, which I think would be great, but it will piss off farmers who will need to pay $100k for their tractors and it will piss off manufacturers who will lose their steady income.

Imagine today's high-tech world, without the capitalist intellectual property system.

No need to imagine, we have China, and before that, we had USSR. Not perfect examples, especially for China, but these are the real world alternatives to capitalism.

sequesteredmar2• 5 years ago

It isn't about maintenance itself, it's limiting that maintenance to the manufacturer only artificially where it could be done by anyone.

msrenee2• 5 years ago

I'm not sure how I'm supposed to have any kind of sympathy for a manufacturer who wants to offer a worse product for more money. Especially when that directly translates to higher food costs for everyone.

I'm not saying communism is the answer, but a free market where your choices are a crappy "cheap" product or an acceptable product for twice the price isn't something to be proud of. Oh, the market will solve the problem. Well this is what the market has produced, so that means this is the best possible option. It's like some kind of religion. If this is what the market has decided, then it must be the best thing and we have no right to question it.

maxerickson• 5 years ago

The DRM in these tractors doesn't really depend on any IP laws.

There's probably some restriction on reverse engineering it, but for a relatively low volume market with difficult to manufacture hardware parts, there's not going to be all that much interest in overcoming DRM even if there weren't laws.

salamandersauce• 5 years ago

DMCA. Breaking even the shittiest DRM is illegal. This of course kills incentives to break DRM from the commercial side as nobody can make any money off it without getting sued. Otherwise I imagine some 3rd party part manufacturer would attempt it.

MikeUt2• 5 years ago

Equipment manufacturers collect lots and lots of data about soil, weather, yields, and other factors, which they can then share with or sell to “affiliates and suppliers.”

So a company selling seeds (with a no-reselling clause in their contracts) could buy that information, make a good guess at a farmer's profit margin, and individually adjust their pricing to the maximum that each farmer would be willing to pay.

Yet another way in which big players can abuse information asymmetry.

lotsofpulp4• 5 years ago

Yet another way in which big players can abuse information asymmetry.

Solution here is to not allow for the asymmetry. So much of society’s ills are caused by incentives to keep information asymmetric, so that market participants cannot make optimal (to all) informed decisions.

sackerhews• 5 years ago

Making something that only you can repair can be quite a lucrative business. This documentary is quite interesting:

McDonalds Ice Cream Machines Are Always Broken: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrDEtSlqJC4

mhb• 5 years ago

Or maybe not. Extensive discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26936774

gruez• 5 years ago

Yeah, the non-sinister explanation is that mcdonalds decided to go with a self-cleaning machine to reduce the possibility of workers messing up the cleaning cycle, taylor implementing that badly, and no one else using self-clean machines.

skeeter20202• 5 years ago

McDonalds has very strong incentives to reduce labour costs to zero. This started with very clear & limited roles which meant cheap rates, but now means reducing the number of employees. At $5/hour it's cheaper to train and manage people to do the job; @ > $15/hr you can justify an army of machines and a few technicians, even if your ice cream machine seems to be broken a lot of the time.

atoav• 5 years ago

Making something only you can repair lands you on my personal everlasting blacklist of shame (and I guess the everlasting blacklists of shame of others as well).

theshrike793• 5 years ago

A similar thing is happening with EVs.

Many car dealers don't make their money from selling cars, they make most of their money from being the only authorized repair shop for said car model. And to keep the warranty valid, you need to service the car at an authorized shop.

EVs, by design, don't require as much maintenance or as often as ICE cars. This will result in a disruption in the existing chain at some point. We'll see what actually happens in 5-10 years.

bserge3• 5 years ago

Batteries will need swapping (not often, but a high price), and there's the added bonus of being able to "encourage" people to come in for repairs by just tweaking some OTA updates. I wonder who will get caught doing that first.

sokoloff2• 5 years ago

And to keep the warranty valid, you need to service the car at an authorized shop.

Magnusson-Moss repudiates this for US consumers.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnuson–Moss_Warranty_Act

throwaway0a5e3• 5 years ago

Some dealers make bank on the service.

Some dealers are basically in the business of originating loans.

It all depends on how the owner happens to structure the business.

Often you'll have multiple dealers in the same network that take a different route because that's what works for their brand and location niches.

olyjohn2• 5 years ago

I keep hearing this thing about EVs not needing as much maintenance. Apparently nobody has looked at their maintenance schedule on their cars. Most cars don't need anything except a few oil changes by 100,000 miles. So many dealers throw in free oil changes now... and you can still have them done by Jiffy Lube if you want for about $50. People regularly hit 200k miles just doing oil changes, and changing out all the wear items that EV owners also have. If you can't afford the oil changes, you probably can't afford an EV either.

Brakes, coolant, tires, gearbox oils? Your EV still has all that. The power unit itself on an EV may be simpler, but mechanical failures in an engine in an ICE car are pretty damn rare. You're not servicing anything inside the engine, just like you're not taking apart the electric motor in your EV for maintenance.

remirk• 5 years ago

Great conclusion. This video could have been summarized in 10 minutes though. For the most part, no real information about the problem was given. I guess this is just how YouTube documentaires in 2021 are.

Glavnokoman3• 5 years ago

In the end market should take of this. If repairability is a major concern for the farmers they would just eventually buy the tractors with less of a high-tech bells and whistles. And also cheaper I guess.

zwirbl• 5 years ago

It should, but will it? The magically all-mighty market does not fix all problems without intervention

Glavnokoman3• 5 years ago

It probably won't. But that does not dismiss that it should :).

nspattak• 5 years ago

This is an oversimplification that overlooks at automotive engineering history (if not history in general). Are there 2T engines or Wankel engines available for people to choose?

WalterBright8• 5 years ago

Heavy regulation of the automotive industry is why I can't buy a new Dodge Coronet.

patrickmclaren• 5 years ago

Can you expand on how this would come to be, in practice?

apples_oranges• 5 years ago

Well, it's not that hard to imagine, is it? Someone founds a company that produces tractors but they are simpler, cheaper and can be repaired. If that's what customers want, they _will_ gain market share. If not, then the demand isn't there.

petewailes6• 5 years ago

I'm going to go out on a limb and say you don't live in a farming community...

ClumsyPilot4• 5 years ago

Pleasse stop rehashing free market platitudes without any thinking.

Look at the actual manufacturers, realise that noone is producing simple tractors any more, where are they going to come from?

vbezhenar• 5 years ago

Belarus produces simple and cheap tractors since forever, they are popular in Russia and other CIS countries. Just import them.

edulix• 5 years ago

So farmers would buy in mass simple tractors, making the manufacturer that does it alone rich amasing a huge segment of the market.

But no manufacturer wants to do it. And no venture capital wants to finance such thing. Because.. I guess.. these evil capitalists just don't want to make more money.

Is that the argument? That capitalists don't want to make more money?

Glavnokoman3• 5 years ago

Please stop attribute anything confronting your believes to lack of thinking. And if you are not aware of something that does not mean it does not exist (look for Belarus tractor references it the thread below). Even if they did not exist there is nothing (or should be nothing) stopping one from being created.

w3news• 5 years ago

My dad is also a farmer, and im impressed about the large range of knowlegde of all farmers, from nature to mechanic. I think this problem is already for a long time, and there are many farmers that dont buy new tractors anymore for this reason, that they cannot repair the tractor anymore, and it can cost a lot of money because they cannot harvest, and are waiting for the tractor dealer.

But i think the same problem is for cars, you cannot e.g. repair your Tesla everywhere, this is also very closed.

hans1729• 5 years ago

But i think the same problem is for cars, you cannot e.g. repair your Tesla everywhere, this is also very closed.

The repairment-strategy for Teslas in Germany seems to be pretty simple. You just buy a new one :-)

petewailes6• 5 years ago

Background: grew up in farming communities, live in a farming community, almost everyone around us farms.

Repairable tractors would be a huge boon. I wish to anyone listening that Deere, New Holland, Valtra, Fendt and co would produce properly repairable, open heavy hardware.

Deere is the worst in this, but the rest of the industry isn't anywhere near as good as it should be.

There's a reason you see old Defenders, Fourtraks, Rangers, Hiluxes and their ilk around so much on farms. They're mechanically simple, which means you can repair them and keep them going basically indefinitely. Compare that to a modern Deere 7 series for example, and whilst the Deere is more capable, if something goes wrong, you're basically screwed. I've no problem with the hardware getting more advanced, but that same maintainability needs to be baked in.

The problem is, no-one seems interested in shaking things up there, and the manufacturers aren't in any hurry to change. They're a conservative bunch who don't need to, and for whom it's directly more profitable to make machines which can't be repaired by anyone other than themselves and people they authorise.

majjam• 5 years ago

Probably a naive question, but arent new Kubota tractors more repairable than say, a John Deere? Or are they just as bad?

petewailes6• 5 years ago

It's a sliding scale. There's better and worse, but no-one's making open software systems which are generally available to be evaluated, updated and fixed, and the hardware side isn't much better.

Sure, a Kubota, Belarus, or JCB is better than a Massey or John Deere, but none are as good as they should be.

mikey_p5• 5 years ago

They aren't comparable in technology (lots of farmers want GPS, auto steer, etc) and they definitely don't compete on size and power. Kubota tops out around 200 horsepower and Deere offers tractors up into the 600+ range.

sumedh• 5 years ago

What about Mahindra tractors, they are pretty big in India and they sell in US as well.

petewailes6• 5 years ago

They're not even vaguely comparable in terms of utility. I may be wrong, but I think their most powerful unit comes in at mid 70'shp, with a max of ~300Nm torque. Compare that to a midrange JCB Fastrac like a 4190, which has north of 200hp and what, 950Nm? The newer ones are approaching 1500Nm, and a John Deere 9 series can get you up beyond 600hp and getting on for 3kNm of torque?

It's just not in the same league. They're very much light duty tractors.

dncornholio4• 5 years ago

I mean, if two of the biggest companies of the world, Apple and Tesla can get away with it, why not the rest of the markets?

This trend needs to stop. I cannot fathom how anyone thought preventing farmers, FARMERS for crying out loud, the people who grow our goddamn food, from repairing their equipment is way, way beyond me..

tim3332• 5 years ago

Apple's not that bad really. Typed from an 8 year old Apple with replaced battery, ssd and keyboard.

simion314• 5 years ago

But can you have it replaced for cheap on a new model? Nobody said that you can't pay Apple a big amount of money so they fix your stuff, the issue is that in newer devices it is getting harder to repair the devices using an independent service(not everyone has the money or lives near an Apple store).

Apple can just not fuck with this independent people, let them have access to the same repair documentation and parts their own people have access.

syshum3• 5 years ago

Search Louis Rossman if you really believe that

Apple is the poster child for hostility to independent repair

swiley3• 5 years ago

They weren't so bad 8 years ago.

CivBase3• 5 years ago

Who replaced those parts for you and what sort of hell did they have to put up with to facilitate those repairs? And how viable are those same repairs for a modern MacBook in comparison?

Apple's goal (same with other manufacturers like JD) isn't to eradicate independent repair. They just want to make it economically in-viable so that third-party repair disappears and most consumers choose to buy new.

ajsnigrutin• 5 years ago

The problem with modern large farmers is the same as with richer tesla owners... you buy a car/tractor with 5y warranty, you service it at a dealer (to keep your warranty), and after 5y, you trade it in for a new one. It's same as with most other devices like that.. even a mercedes... who cares about data/plans/parts/... for a 3yo mercedes? ..it's under warranty, so they'll deal with it. Same with phones... new phone has a warranty, sometimes even insurance

The problem becomes real when your tesla/tractor/mercedes/phone is 10yo (phone a bit less) and available for cheap on the second hand market... it's not under warranty anymore, financially it's not worth it to have a dealer fix it, if you can do it yourself, but you're unable to do so, because you don't have the schematics and/or parts available.

So, the large industrial farmers don't really care... it's the "little guys" who get fscked by companies like JD/tesla/apple,...

randomdata6• 5 years ago

A lot of the new equipment is not even bought, but rather leased. The largest farms will keep rolling the leases into new equipment and then the used equipment is then put out on the used market for someone to buy. The first users do not have a whole lot of concern about legally of their ownership as their leases have them renting the equipment from the start.

The users down the line may have greater concern, but they are limited to what is available on the used market. If the first generation users choose John Deere, that means they are effectively limited to John Deere.

CivBase3• 5 years ago

The problem with modern large farmers is the same as with richer tesla owners... you buy a car/tractor with 5y warranty, you service it at a dealer (to keep your warranty), and after 5y, you trade it in for a new one.

I don't think that's how that works. My grandparents own and operate a very respectable size farm for being independent and they definitely do not trade in their tractors like that. I'd be skeptical that mega-farms do this too. Even with cars the majority of the market buys second-hand, which is why the few who buy new every 5 years have someone to sell to. Tractors are an order of magnitude more expensive and independents who might consider paying good money for second-hand equipment are vanishing quickly.

dncornholio4• 5 years ago

Leasing and/or renting: Fine.

But making a monopoly on providing parts and services is not a good thing. People end up paying 2000 dollar for a 2 dollar repair.

Imagine the world when buying a new car/truck/tractor is less expensive than replacing the brakes for example. This is how the world works right now.

zepto2• 5 years ago

The question is - why do farmers not buy Kubota tractors if they want something repairable?

The only explanation given in this thread seems to be ‘branding’.

buro9• 5 years ago

No-one wants to sell hardware any longer, it's not as profitable as providing it on a subscription (dare we say "rent") and forcing all support, maintenance and additions to go through your channels as part of the subscription package.

Unfortunately this trend is everywhere now. It happened to servers, media, has started to happen to cars... but it's happened already to agricultural hardware.

Super profitable if you are the provider (especially with all the data one can yield from operating the hardware), super annoying and frustrating if you are the consumer.

willtim2• 5 years ago

The flipside to this, is that there is perhaps no longer an incentive to sell hardware with a limited lifespan.

liaukovv• 5 years ago

Thats the point though isn't it, they dont sell it anymore.

So any gains in lifespan are reaped by the company, not consumer

teachingassist• 5 years ago

The opposite, surely.

If there's no market for old hardware, there's no benefit to making new products which hold their value.

vinceguidry• 5 years ago

Nah. They'll sell you cheaply made crap for $80 along with a subscription for $10/mo then sell you slightly better cheaply made crap for $105 a year down the road and bump the sub to $12/mo for the 'increased functionality'.

tehaugmenter• 5 years ago

I mean you vote with your dollar. Stop supporting these bad practices. I don't, it's a hull to get everyone to stop and force themselves to work around. Maybe it's a losing battle, but stop giving them money and we'll be better off. I would not purchase a product with an underlying subscription. I even go as far as getting older cars so I don't have to worry about it.

cferr• 5 years ago

I would not purchase a product with an underlying subscription.

Not even your phone?

syshum3• 5 years ago

Post Ownership society where MBA's have decided that it better to have high OPEX and no CAPEX .....

Higher TCO, lower ROI, but hey those quarterly reports look great...

saurik4• 5 years ago

No-one wants to sell hardware any longer...

Then they should stop selling hardware and start renting it; but they don't do that, as that signals an honest intention to the customer and I'm pretty sure comes with a bunch of legal restrictions, both obvious and subtle. Instead, they want all the money and lack of liability that comes from selling something outright to someone else, and yet they still somehow want to maintain total control over the device in the field in order to extract revenue over time and, notably, spy on their customers. The result is that these technological locks that side-step the notion of ownership and turn every object you purchase into a sleeper agent for the manufacturer; and, as you note, no one wants to actually sell things anymore as it is going to be more profitable to build in all of these locks, so "voting with your dollars" has become all but impossible unless you either are willing to tolerate not only paying more (which is fine) but getting a shit product (as none of the good manufacturers even bother offering "own your hardware" as an option no matter how much you are willing to pay) or have so much money that you can build an entire company to commission custom hardware. :(

HPsquared2• 5 years ago

"Just say no." -Nancy Reagan

natmaka• 5 years ago

Some underlying fundamentals are known for quite a long time: "All in all, wealth consists more in use than in possession; for the actualization of the potentialities of such things and their use is wealth" -- Aristotle’s On Rhetoric

"voting with your dollars" has become all but impossible

If possessing is more often than not the best way someone may understand it and also understand when smart farmers will also understand it, then develop an adequate offering, and if it performs better most will understand. It is only "more profitable to build in all of these locks" when you have customers. Am I delusional?

silicon2401• 5 years ago

it's not as profitable as providing it on a subscription (dare we say "rent")

Simple but excellent point. We should just start calling it what it is. xbox game pass, adobe software, it's all just renting. Subscriptions are supposed to be for access to new stuff, not continuing access to the existing stuff.

freeopinion4• 5 years ago

Done right, this could actually be better.

I own a lawn mower. In fact I usually own two lawn mowers--the new one and the one I just need to repair a bit.

All of my neighbors own lawn mowers. We all use our lawn mowers about an hour per week. It's extremely wasteful to purchase 5 lawn mowers to perform 5 hours of mowing per week.

We could all hire Suwanda down the street to mow our lawns, but that would cost a lot more than buying a mower. That's mostly because of the labor costs. So what if Suwanda just rented the mower to us and charged us enough to keep the blade sharp and the engine tuned? And what if we didn't pick it up and return it to Suwanda? What if we just passed it around between us, and Suwanda was the 6th stop in the rotation?

And every once in a while, the person who got it after Suwanda noticed it was a completely different mower. So 5-6 neighbors pay $5/month and always have a mower in tip-top shape, but never actually maintain it and never shop for a new one.

defenestration2• 5 years ago

I thought about this a lot. What if we just share a lot of tools with our neighbors. It will prevent waste and free up space in your house. However, for me, it's more convenient to have my own tools. I have the freedom to mow the lawn whenever I want. Also on that sunny afternoon when all the other neighbors also want to mow their lawn. And I want a tool that's in the right condition. When I have time to do a job around the house, my tools should work. Not broken, dirty or missing a part. And I don't want a difficult conversation with my neighbor about it. Sharing and borrowing tools with my neighbors directly is fine for me. Co-owning or continuously renting together is not my cup-of-tea.

TaylorAlexander3• 5 years ago

You could also have a community tool lending library where everyone can borrow from it.

https://oaklandlibrary.org/locations/oakland-tool-lending-li...

pkaye• 5 years ago

You can rent equipment already from Home Depot or some "Rent-a-Center" place however they need to pay for their overhead so there is a hefty markup. But it makes sense for tools you use occasionally like a sod cutter or tiller.

CogitoCogito3• 5 years ago

Have you talked to your neighbors about sharing lawn mowers? Why does Suwanda need to be involved?

mikey_p5• 5 years ago

That's really because customers are demanding software now. They want auto steer, variable rate application, they want to mark their tile inlets or waterways on their fields before they upload into the tractor. They want their sprayer or planter to integrate and show them singulation and population or rates right there in the cab. Lots of famers are using iPads along with multiple in cab systems to manage all the technology and record additional data. I've see farmers planting with as many as 4 or 5 screens in their tractors and it's getting to where there's an aftermarket just for mounts to hold more screens and computers. Farmers aren't just accepting that, but they are buying additional systems that require more software all the time because at the end of the day, it's business.

the_biot2• 5 years ago

There is a lot of misinformation about this. At face value, articles like this imply you're not able or allowed to fix mechanical issues, how dare they!

What they don't mention is that manufacturers protect their electronic gear i.e. the consoles inside the machine that use GPS to run a field, adjust the attachment acccording to various sensors etc. This is very sophisticated stuff, and farmers need and want this functionality.

Farmers aren't wanting their old 1950s-era tractors back. They want more control over the software -- and in particular don't want to pay for it. And while as an open source type myself I'm sympathetic to this, I'm suspicious about the outright bullshit in articles like this.

taurath• 5 years ago

They want to be able to make adjustments, and fix mechanical issues without the whole thing shutting down and then having to take it to the one place in town that is allowed to touch the thing.

It’s one thing to say oh only the new stuff is locked down, but every part of the vehicle is, something that wasn’t the case a short while ago. In fact they’re digitizing controls and simple mechanical functionality that doesnt need to be digitized so they can abuse their maintenance monopoly.

haspok• 5 years ago

in particular don't want to pay for it

This is a complete misunderstanding of the problem, also, a false statement in most cases.

People would like to have the option to choose who, when, where and how repairs their stuff. If the only option is the manufacturer - even after the warranty period -, then that's called a monopoly and is guaranteed to result in lower standards and higher prices and reduced availability.

It is one thing to have such a problem with a laptop or a mobile, because those are relatively cheap items that are easy to replace. But if you have equipment that your livelihood depends on worth tens of thousands of dollars, then this is completely unacceptable.

lbriner• 5 years ago

It's not called a monopoly. A monopoly is a single provider of a particular service or product allowing the supplier to abuse their position.

These farmers do not have to buy John Deere. If they don't like being tied in, they shouldn't have bought the equipment in the first place and chosen a rival then one of two things happen 1) John Deere realise they have been caught with their pants down and change their policy to win customers back 2) Farmers realise there is a new normal where the equipment is simply too complicated to allow them to tinker with it (or at least without losing any manufacturers guarantee).

rich_sasha2• 5 years ago

In addition you may be effectively refused such repairs, or charged so much that it is better to buy a new product.

If the only entity who can repair the kit is the one who sells new kit too, this is even worse than a standard monopoly argument. At least a normal monopoly has an incentive to serve you at the end of the day.

DoingIsLearning3• 5 years ago

One concern I also never see discussed is that for any type of electro-mechanical system, allowing the customer to change anything or maintain anything is a actually a big liability issue.

Let's be clear, it is pretty obvious that the whole tractor-as-a-service paradigm is extremely profitable. However allowing access to diagnostics/config/firmware for anything that controls heavy machinery can be a huge liability.

You are a misconfiguration away from a work accident with injury or death.

bserge3• 5 years ago

Is there a legal reason why they can't sign a waiver? You are always a misstep away from injury or death working on any heavy equipment. That has always been the case.

throwaway0a5e3• 5 years ago

There is a century of case law from the motor vehicle world that make this a non-issue.

dncornholio4• 5 years ago

This is very sophisticated stuff

So what? A PC is very sophisticated as well but no matter which parts I put together, it works. You can abstract the sophisticated stuff away.. This is just a bad excuse IMHO

the_biot2• 5 years ago

Yes, I agree, and this is IMHO a better way out of the conundrum these farmers face: install their own electronics with similar functionality.

squiggleblaz• 5 years ago

I love the way every article about businesses making decisions that favor business concerns over customer concerns always have this balanced comment that says "What they don't mention is that the business has optimised for their own interests and ranked other concerns as a hindrance".

Yes, we know decisions aren't free. But it's not a coincidence that businesses are all simultaneously optimising in their own self interest and ignore the concrens of their customers.

mikey_p5• 5 years ago

I bet the number one feature most of these farmers want is the ability to defeat emissions controls so they don't have to use DEF (diesel exhaust fluid).

Don't believe me? Go watch some farmers on Youtube and it won't take long to pick up the hatred for government interference. I don't know if it's selection or survivorship bias or what, but farmers really do not like being told what to do by someone else.

FractalParadigm• 5 years ago

I just want to throw my 2¢ out there, as a mid-20's who went to a high-rural-population high school, there's an entire new generation of farmers who have a) accepted that Deere's need constant/regular service calls, and b) don't care to learn how to fix it (or older equipment) themselves. At the end of the day farming is just a business same as any other, it's the same reason why a lot of trucking companies lease their trucks or warehouses lease their forklifts, it's generally cheaper and less of a headache overall.

I've tried to make pleas with some of my old friends who've complained about the locked-down nature of their JD equipment, explaining that other companies like Kubota don't have that same limitation, but the branding is just too strong ("the Kubota might be cheaper to buy, and cheaper to run, and I can easily maintain it myself, but, it's not a John Deere" - actual quote from a SW Ontario farmer)

_the_inflator• 5 years ago

Fixing would mean hacking in this case.

_wldu3• 5 years ago

The issue is really about freedom. If you don't care that a company can decide whether or not you may farm, then rent their equipment. If you do care, then you want 100% control of that equipment. Or as close to 100% as you can get.

It's sort of comparable to writing software in C (an ISO standard with many open source compilers) to run on your commodity x86 hardware versus writing an iOS Apple Store app. In one case, you have almost complete control of the HW and SW, in the other, you have no control and can be prevented from doing so at any moment for any reason.

DubiousPusher3• 5 years ago

It's not that simple. There are features of these high end tractors such as automation and satellite guidance that allow you to change the scale of your operation. In a sense, you have to make a choice about what kind of business you're going to be at the same time as you're choosing your equipment.

swiley3• 5 years ago

Lots of people don't care about their right to vote but we should all freak out when it gets taken away from them.

HPsquared2• 5 years ago

People don't get to just buy a different brand of government though, unlike tractors.

freeopinion4• 5 years ago

Maybe... Compare these different proposals:

1. Disenfranchise everyone who hasn't voted in the last 10 years.

2. Require a two-year waiting period from the time you register as a voter before you can vote. Require registrations to be renewed every 6 years. Voting automatically renews an unexpired registration.

It seems to me that both proposals should attract a lot of attention. But one is more alarming than the other. And you could water it down to be even less alarming and make some good arguments for your proposal. This is how you boil a frog.

Here's one nobody seems to care about:

3. Require people to join a private club to be able to vote in primary elections. Only allow candidates who were nominated by those private clubs. Allow the private clubs to be controlled by a handful of people.

You know, now I think about it, right-to-repair has a great deal in common with right-to-vote.

dalbasal2• 5 years ago

So... I think your right. Underlying a lot of trends eroding user/owner rights are practical benefits. This as true for ipods as it is for for tractors.

My grandfather had an old Massey, and several others for parts. It's easy to idealize this from afar (I do), but young farmers often don't want it.

That said, the individual preference and the systemic trend are two different things. The right to repair, is also the right to have a 3rd party repair. Competition, choice. At some point along the trend, it's about more than that. There comes a point where "who actually owns this farm" starts to be a question. JD might exercise the same power over farmers that Apple exercises over app developers. A my way or the highway world.

randomdata6• 5 years ago

You must know my neighbour. He was running a Kubota for a year or two, but it didn't take him long to replace it with a Deere.

I have most of the major brands in my shed. I don't particularly care much about what colour I'm using. Purchases have been made based on cost, which has included some green equipment when a great auction find has been found.

My experience says that JD has the UX nailed. When you're spending 12 hour days in the seat, the little things do start to make a big difference. I am not sure it is fair to be dismissive of it as being a result of great branding. The equipment is meant to be used and the experience and comfort while using it can most definitely be worth a premium to many.

Casperin2• 5 years ago

This made me think of how many developers (who spend 10 hrs/day in front of their screen) choose Apples products. A linux machine might be better on performance, maintainance, and all that, but Linux does not care about UX the way Apple does.

throwaway8943452• 5 years ago

Hi, I worked on the new (as of ~2014) CommandArm touch screen and joystick. :)

Developing software at John Deere was frustrating, but they have some really fun, interesting problems and other, larger political/cultural problems.

dehrmann2• 5 years ago

This is old, but I remember my grandpa saying he didn't buy Deere because "everything's backwards." Not sure if he meant the controls or mechanics, or how literal he was being. Beyond that, he didn't seem to care about brand all that much, and he had great luck with his Kubota.

Tabular-Iceberg• 5 years ago

I just want to throw my 2¢ out there, as a mid-20's who went to a high-rural-population high school, there's an entire new generation of farmers who have a) accepted that Deere's need constant/regular service calls, and b) don't care to learn how to fix it (or older equipment) themselves.

They should still want right to repair for the same reason that most of the internet wants to run on GPL software. Almost all the companies pay some vendor for it, but unlike the farmers they can just take their business elsewhere if a vendor turns bad.

hippari• 5 years ago

At the end of the day farming is just a business same as any other

Being a business is the reason you want right to repairs. If a single vendor can bankrupt your business then it's not a sustainable business. Right to repair give you cheaper options for repairing your tools.

rm_-rf_slash• 5 years ago

A lot of businesses live entirely within major tech company walled gardens, from the iOS App Store to the Azure Marketplace, where vendors have zero control over the platform. A precarious position to be in, perhaps, but hardly unsustainable.

pnutjam2• 5 years ago

Not just cheaper, any option. If the tech is busy because everyone is harvesting at the same time; your screwed.

kickout• 5 years ago

This is correct and will probably only be broken from a crazy differentiating hardware offering (like a self-driving tractor). It's coming...

mikey_p5• 5 years ago

Not sure what scale you're talking about, but Kubota doesn't really compete with Deere on larger tractors. I don't see any tracked options from Kubota and their tractors don't really go much over 200 horsepower.

Deere and Kubota only really compete at the smaller/utility side of things.

Also the reason people get locked into Deere isn't just the tractors, but the vertical integration. Can you run your John Deere NT or DB series planter with Greenstar 2 on a Kubota? Possibly, but you've got to buy the hardware from Deere and you'd have to add auto steer, etc. (FWIW Kubota doesn't even sell planters)

mitchell_h• 5 years ago

I live in an extremely rural area. The Deere integrations are a huge reason. Another that's not talked about is Deere field service. It's just DAMN GOOD. If you're running a serious tractor(7-9 series ) and it's the middle of planting/harvest hours can be the difference between red and black margins. Deere will roll out a team with 30ft trailer of parts out in hours if you have an issue. CaseIH will sorta match this, kubota and New Holand will simply not.

etempleton4• 5 years ago

I also grew up in a rural high school with a large farming population. I categorize farmers into three types:

1. Professional - Usually highly educated, good business sense. Probably obtained an advanced degree in agriculture science, though not always, some self-educate very successfully. These farmers generally do not like John Deere and think they are overpriced, not as good as they once were, and find the lack of right to repair infuriating.

2. Uneducated - Likely barely passed high school due to a complete lack of effort, because they were going to be farmers and school, "couldn't teach them nothin." Farming is an identity for these individuals. Buying a John Deere is part of that lifestyle. Some kids grow up with a Ferrari on their wall, these kids had a John Deere tractor. The problem with these individuals as it relates to business is that they do not understand business or accounting and probably only have a rudimentary understanding of ag science. They overspend on equipment and their only basic ag science understanding leaves them unable to adapt as well as the pros to droughts, infestations, and other adverse conditions.

3. Gentleman Farmers - Usually educated, but perhaps in an unrelated field. Farming is a hobby. Perhaps a retirement "job." If they make money, great, if not, well, they have money to spare. They buy John Deere, because they can afford it and because it seems like the obvious choice. They are happy to pay their local dealer to fix or repair their tractor, it is something they don't have to worry about and costs are not a real going concern. Breaking even is a success.

Both the less educated farmers and the gentleman farmers treat John Deere tractors as a status symbol (every other farmer know exactly how much a John Deere tractor costs). And when you know how much they cost it is like seeing someone drive by in a Ferrari or Lamborghini, because, well, they cost as much as a Ferrari or Lamborghini, if not more. The professional farmers could care less because they are running a business.

throwaway2928936• 5 years ago

Wow. What an incredibly offensive comment. I love how HN understands the right to repair when it comes to their gadgets, but when it comes to tractors it's probably because the farmers are uneducated hicks. Please tell me more how they don't understand AG science enough, but you have such a strong grasp on it.

JD tractors were and are reliable and top tier in quality, that's why they are popular and that's why people stick to the brand. I've built Kioti tractors when I was teenager. They'd do the job if you had to use it, but it's no JD in terms of quality.

Farmers just want the quality they've always had with JD but the ability to fix simple stuff like they used to without it costing them an arm and a leg.

The stereotypes you listed off don't sound like anyone I've ever experienced. They sound like caricatures you painted in your head with your lack of understanding.

randomdata6• 5 years ago

4. The BTO (Big Time Operator). Deere has been known to give them very compelling deals that the other manufacturers cannot match. The smaller farmers are more likely to buy used equipment, so this also ensures that when the largest farmers buy Deere, green equipment is what is found on the used lot.

throwaway8943452• 5 years ago

Some kids grow up with a Ferrari on their wall, these kids had a John Deere tractor.

John Deere has a significant toy business that has to pay off big time considering how many of these customers they produce (and the toys themselves are quite expensive IIRC).

autokad• 5 years ago

I also grew up in rural areas, and I agree with throwaway. your comments are condescending and also inaccurate. The more 'uneducated' farmers took pride in fixing their equipment, especially their tractors. Your comments are so far off I wonder if you even grew up in such an area or if you didn't really know your classmates at all.

For one thing, who in the heck lives in a rural area knows that many types of farmers. Farms are huge and school district areas are small.

sybercecurity• 5 years ago

(not to pile on)

Right to repair also covers independent/third party service. People may not want to repair the hardware themselves, but they may want to take it to a cheaper/closer third party to repair it. The local JD service may be in the next county, but there may be a local mechanic that could repair the tractor, but cannot due to restrictions, licensing, etc.

Of course you may not want the local guy to try because they may not be competent enough, but people think that should be the owner's decision, not the manufacturer's.

tartoran• 5 years ago

This is a big problem, you can have a used JD part but it won’t work because JD needs to squeeze every once of profit from their customers. This service based trend is the worst type of rent seeking I’ve seen in years

dehrmann2• 5 years ago

At the end of the day farming is just a business same as any other

Is your core competency farming or tractor repair? That said, I am sympathetic to farmers who want to repair their equipment. There's a scale where you have enough free time that with simple enough equipment, it does make sense to repair it yourself.

_wldu3• 5 years ago

Old tractors are bringing top dollar at auctions (and have been for some time now). IMO, the same thing will happen with old cars/trucks some day. Now, they are mostly hobby cars for collectors and auto enthusiasts, but some day will be widely sought after due to more people wanting/needing to repair them.

Late 80s and early 90s Toyotas will be sold at a premium as will any/all old Ford F-150 trucks.

BeFlatXIII• 5 years ago

In the year 2121, the Toyota Hilux will still be the go-to choice for aspiring warlords. The difference is that they may have competition from Americans who want a repairable vehicle.

noisy_boy• 5 years ago

By that yardstick, Thailand will be the richest country on earth in terms of value of cars owned because I have never seen a higher concentration of HiLux cars anywhere else in the world.

pvaldes• 5 years ago

They are not transferable to a new owner after 40 years here by law. If is older the tractor can't be sold, and if sold privately couldn't pass the vehicle inspection test later (that must be passed each six months, if I'm not wrong).

Things can be different in your country.

The main promoters of this idea are the independent diagnostic car machines makers. For the brand is a lot of risk and possible bad publicity.

For the farmer the results can vary. Messing with its electronics could turn the tractor into a pile of garbage. Allowing the owner to mess with safety systems will typically lead to somebody realizing that can delay the repair for some months just inactivating the warning lights. People do the same all the time with car airbags. As farmers typically earn money after the harvest, they could be working for many months with a fake sense of safety. And as people love to brag, this could became quickly a popular option and a big mess

praptak• 5 years ago

This kind of anti-consumer lock in seems to be the natural course of things when more and more stuff runs software which the buyer has no control over. I don't think we can fight this with consumer decisions only, it is just too profitable to shakedown consumers like this.

gerbilly2• 5 years ago

I agree, and the software additions are mostly useless (lasers, GPS etc...).

The primary reason the software is there is for vendor lock-in and rent seeking.

helsinkiandrew• 5 years ago

If John Deere were being honest they wouldn't sell tractors, but lease them with the cost of repair built into the yearly fee. If "parts and repairs are up to six times more profitable than selling the equipment itself" eventually they will ruin their brand and people will purchase other brands.

shagie2• 5 years ago

That approach might work... if they were leased the same way that airplane engines are - by hours running. ( https://www.rrpf-leasing.com/home )

If you lease it with a calendar time instead, it would make it uneconomical for either JD (in the case of multiple farms sharing the same equipment and logging #x times more hours on the equipment) or for smaller operators (where JD prices it for the 'its running 7 days a week' when its only running 1 day a week).

It would also be necessary to make sure that there's no way to circumvent that running time clock on the devices with 3rd party software.

wscott• 5 years ago

People also want control over the information collected from their farming equipment and sent to headquarters. The machines collect information about exactly how much of which crops are planted and then at the end of the year it knows exactly the yield as it is being harvested. Knowing yields before anyone else is very valuable.

lifeisstillgood• 5 years ago

oh now that is interesting. And possibly the first real 'privacy' issue I have seen that has serious teeth.

Boxxed• 5 years ago

Apple/Google and friends have just as much power. Seeing where people are shopping is the same thing -- I bet they had evidence of the decline of malls before anyone else, for instance.

_wldu3• 5 years ago

I wonder why JD does not make a large simple tractor that is mostly mechanical and hydraulic using standard/common parts and sell them at a higher price? They could advertise them to be owner repairable to justify the higher price. It seems there is a demand.

libertine• 5 years ago

That would be a proof of concept that their current practices aren't justified, not only from a marketing standpoint but probably also from a legal standpoint.

The problem isn't providing replacement parts. I think the issue is that locking their customers in their maintenance services is part of their business model.

Most likely the lifetime of service (decades) wouldn't easily be fitted into the margin of a specific model.

TheRealDunkirk3• 5 years ago

In a properly-functioning market, it seems as though this would be an opportunity for a competitor. You have to wonder why this isn't happening.

saurik4• 5 years ago

If a competitor figures out how to build a tractor that is as good as the ones from John Deere then they probably can compete with John Deere directly--as in, "on their terms" with a locked down tractor that makes them more margin--rather than bother to sell unlocked tractors. The same issue happens with cell phones: users want control over their phones, but they also want good phones with good screens and good cameras. There are, in fact, phones you can buy that give you complete control, but they are the companies that have shit products and so are trying to use this as a differentiator to draw in a new market. If you are able to compete with the iPhone--like Samsung can, but almost no other manufacturer can (sometimes Google manages to pull it off with first party phones, but very few people buy those, so they are clearly missing something)--then you build a device as equally locked down as the iPhone and compete with it "on Apple's terms" as there is a nearly bottomless well of money that you can extract from users if you are willing to screw them and force them to participate in your closed ecosystem.

Essentially, you can't just look at the one product in isolation and think "this should exist from a competitor", as if anyone could easily make a company to go out and do it... you instead have to consider the ecosystem of companies and the numerous barriers to entry (such as patents and limited supply lines and the enormous R&D costs) and what the incentives in the market are, and it turns out that, if your product is one where the competition is already scarce--Apple + Samsung make up 80% of the mobile phone market, with the rest likely targeting people who don't have enough money to pay for high-end phones; there is a similar thing going on with tractors, with five companies controlling >70% of the market, and AFAIK mostly now selling locked down machines--you can't just expect to magically find a competitor pop up that is going to fill this particular interest. If you manage to circumnavigate all of the hurdles to build a phone that works as well as an Apple or a Samsung device, you are almost certainly going to join the oligopoly and lock your device down also, as the incentives are just too poor otherwise. The only fix for this is regulation and, to the extent to which regulation actually already exists here, legal precedent.

mnouquet5• 5 years ago

Largely EPA regulations make this impossible.

po1nt• 5 years ago

Just don't buy Apple, John Deere or similar products. There are better alternatives and you're getting yourself into a trap where seemingly only government can help you, just because you wanted to buy more prestigious goods.

zepto2• 5 years ago

This. When pressed, people end up admitting that the reason they buy these products is that they are better.

What they are missing is that they are only better because people buy them, thus funding the improvement of the next generation.

If you want open alternatives, buy them. If you want them to get better, campaign for others to buy them.

Trying to force companies whose business is based on closed products to do what you want, is not going to go well.

hackbinary4• 5 years ago

Farmers do not want to pay for anything. My dealings with people in the farming community is that completely devalue everything around as a négociation tactic. They do not want to pay anymore than they have to for anything. In general, I don't work for or with them anymore because of the horrible way I have been treated by them. (bit generalised, but I spend 10 years working in the community)

JD is moving to a Tractor as a Service model. JD does not want to open up their systems because before not long, you just hire a robotic service to come and plow or harvest your fields. JD sees this coming and wants to be in the best possible position to market its services to land owners.

sokoloff2• 5 years ago

Most people don’t want to pay more than they have to for things. This phenomenon often intensifies when talking about major inputs to their business.

checkyoursudo• 5 years ago

They do not want to pay anymore than they have to for anything.

Who wants to pay more than they have to? I usually want to pay even less than I have to.

hackbinary4• 5 years ago

There is a difference between dehumanising people and making them feel worthless and negotiating in good faith, and then reneging on agreements.

TheRealDunkirk3• 5 years ago

JD is moving to a Tractor as a Service model.

Part of the problem here is that in any other sort of <blank>-as-a-service model, you'd be paying MUCH less for the "service" than the <blank>. In this case, you're buying the capital equipment, and then being forced to buy a service contract in order to use it as expected, and keep it running. It'd be like buying an iPhone, needing to rent iCloud storage to make it convenient, not being able to service it (in any meaningful way), and then only being able to run apps from the App Store. Oh, wait. It's the same problem, with the same ethical and moral conundrum. In our society, a lot of us have accepted this deal for a $1,000 phone. However, it's a bit different when you're shelling out upwards of half a million for a modern tractor.

TheRealDunkirk3• 5 years ago

JD sees this coming and wants to be in the best possible position to market its services to land owners.

You may be right, but, if so, this is just another move by a massive corporation to create a vertical monopoly, and extract all the rent in the space. For at least a couple of decades, companies with massive fleets of tractors sweep through the country, working farm fields for the owners, as the seasons change across the states. Your statement makes it seem as if JD could be muscling in on this already-muscled market. Tractors have already been priced out of a lot of farmer's businesses. They may as well cut out these middlemen.

hackbinary4• 5 years ago

Yes, I think so. I believe it is Cat and Rio Tinto have some form of arrangement at one of RT's mines in Aus. The dump trucks are driverless and run from RT's HQ elsewhere.

Cutting out intermediataries is what cloud computing is all about. I don't really see this as any different.

syshum3• 5 years ago

>They do not want to pay anymore than they have to for anything

So let me ask you, when you take your car in for service and the mechanic says "that will be $100", do you say "no no I can afford $150 so that is what I am going to pay"?

it seems odd to me that you believe only farmers do not want to pay "more than they have to for anything", I am pretty sure that applies to all persons, and all businesses

dagw• 5 years ago

No, but if I take my car to two mechanics and one quotes me $100 and the other $150, then I might very well go for the one quoting me $150 for many different reasons.

saurik4• 5 years ago

JD is moving to a Tractor as a Service model.

Then they should be honest about it and rent the tractors rather than pretending to sell them.

bluGill3• 5 years ago

JD leases tractors for those who prefer that model.

spinningslate• 5 years ago

They do not want to pay anymore than they have to for anything.

Farmers are also being squeezed by their customers - prices for farm produce have been steadily falling for over a century, see e.g. [0].

JD's commercial model requires both capital outlay in purchasing equipment, and committing to a maintenance contract that the farmer can't influence. So the farmer loses control of maintenance costs whilst also under pricing pressure for their produce.

I can't speak to your experience obviously, but farming for many is a (very) low margin business.

[0] https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/gallery...

x86_64Ubuntu2• 5 years ago

That chart doesn't mean it's a low margin business. The manhours needed to produce a bushel/pound/acre of X has plummeted over the past 100 years.

hackbinary4• 5 years ago

Yeah, I get that. But also, there is no end in the claim of how hard the Range Rover driving, fee (private) school paying, huge farm house owning farmers in the UK have it.

The vitriol that was extended by a couple of the associates (middle managers) to one of my programmers who was vegan was absolutely amazing. He just would ask if there was any dairy in something a they would go off on him. Around that time I also stopped having dairy for health reasons, but that was okay. I had previously been sympathetic to farmers and the dairy community, but after that, I was appalled. Farmers are getting what they deserve.

CivBase3• 5 years ago

Farmers do not want to pay for anything. [...] They do not want to pay anymore than they have to for anything.

Who wants to pay more than they have to for anything? Who wants to pay for anything at all? How does a desire to save money make farmers different from the rest of us?

JD is moving to a Tractor as a Service model. JD does not want to open up their systems because before not long, you just hire a robotic service to come and plow or harvest your fields. JD sees this coming and wants to be in the best possible position to market its services to land owners.

If JD wants to sell their equipment as a service, there's nothing stopping them from doing just that. But it sounds more to me like they want to retain the rights they would have in a service model while continuing to charge the prices they do for a product model. They cannot just sell their tractors as a product and treat them like a service when it's convenient.

bbsimonbb• 5 years ago

Perhaps put those farmers in touch with diabetics who would like some affordable insulin, or researchers who would like to consult publicly funded, peer-reviewed-on-their-own-time, research.

0xbadcafebee• 5 years ago

I have the feeling someone will become very rich by buying up all the old used diesel trucks in the world and keeping them going when EVs take over the world in 4 years.

mnouquet5• 5 years ago

Good luck running a electric tractor rig moving 120,000lb (modern quad-track are ~60,000lb, plus the drill, plus the fert/seed cart) all day long...

jdikatz• 5 years ago

I’m a fan of right to repair, but I think it’s odd to include privacy / data breech concerns as an advocacy point. Operationalizing right to repair typically means making software more interoperable and sharing access information with third parties, which probably isn’t great for privacy / data security. This was the main tack that auto companies took when fighting a recent MA ballot initiative (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Massachusetts_Question_...), and there could be at least some truth to it.

nimbius• 5 years ago

diesel engine mechanic by trade here, and ive followed this topic with interest for about five years now. Its similar to large over-the-road trucks in that its ultimately manufacturers catering to large fleets instead of owner/operators.

most farms in America are corporate monoliths. "farmers" here want mttf, mtbf, metrics, and a projection of how many cam chains, PTO knuckles, lockout converters, etc... they will need to buy in 30 years of depreciable service for a machine. They want to be able to carve the machine they own down to the last cent...the only way to do that is to turn your IH or Komatsu into a rolling cloud. even the windshield wipers get a sensor.

smaller farms with actual farmers that wear hats and overalls already balk at a million dollar sticker shock from a harvester, and if you ever go to a farm and take a look around, most tractors there are nearly sixty years old. the priority is farming, not investor return. The tractor needs to perform its stated function first before anything else matters. service interval warnings and degraded performance alerts here are a failure condition the farmer works around. they arent incentivized to stop what theyre doing at 4:15 AM and call up the local JD dealer 143 miles away for an appointment. there isnt a second tractor.

If legislation isnt passed, ultimately youll end up with what commecial trucks got in response to sensor overkill: Gliders. gliders are 60 year old truck drivetrains and engines that get a new cab and body parts, and get recertified for the road. they belch smog and roar like a freight train at idle, but all thats grandfathered into EPA legislation. New manufacturers get to crank out fleet machines at high prices, and owner/operators get their old reliable filling the parking lot with NOx and waxy sulfur haze at 4 am. they become a market that manufacturers refuse to tap, because it cannot be fully exploited to the disadvantage of the operator.

gerbilly2• 5 years ago

most tractors there are nearly sixty years old.

When I worked as a farmhand we were still using some 1950s Massey Ferguson tractors every day.

An it's one of the biggest dairy farms in the province (Canada).

I mean we had newer stuff too, but the old machines were kept chugging along. I remember opening a sideplate on a MF 135 after one of the kids jammed up the transmission.

We got it unstuck with a crowbar, and were up and running again in 15 minutes.

MisterTea• 5 years ago

gliders are 60 year old truck drivetrains and engines that get a new cab and body parts, and get recertified for the road.

I doubt any gliders are running 60yo engines unless you meant 60 year old engine technology. Most likely pre EPA 2006 to avoid the DPF and later EPA 2010 SCR systems. I'd guess the popular glider engines would be Cummins big cam's, CAT 3406's, and maybe S60 Detroits.

selfhoster113• 5 years ago

they become a market that manufacturers refuse to tap, because it cannot be fully exploited to the disadvantage of the operator.

Sounds like a market failure if there is money left on the table but no competitor who wants to grab it for themselves.

markhahn• 5 years ago

Not just farmers and tractors eh?

Perhaps we should push beyond merely protecting the right to repair, but figuring out how to incentivize standardization and open protocols.

skeeter20202• 5 years ago

we got to this point building almost entirely on incentivized standards and open protocols. It's only in the past ~20 years that we've started to replay the telephone company cycle that required the intervention and kicked off the greatest innovation anyone alive has ever seen. I'm not confident that the same governments are prepared to do this again with the current crop of "to big to fail" effective monopolies, which could mean a sea change in global competition.

dbg314152• 5 years ago

Adding to the list of people who grew up on a ranch...

Growing up in the 80s and 90s, we had a bunch of old farm equipment, some from like the 1930s-era. Mostly a lot of stuff from the 60s and 70s.

And like every bit of equipment on the place had special operation rules.

"Don't run that tractor past 5k RPMs" or "Don't use the PTO Shaft (Power Take Off, the gear in the back that hooks in to power towed equipment) from Tractor A with Equipment Item B since it'll blow out." "Remember Tractor J is Brand X, but it has an engine from Brand Z, and a PTO shaft from Brand Y..."

Point being, like every piece of equipment was rigged together with duct tape. It's horrible unsafe. When you buy used equipment, nothing comes written down... like you try it, break it, and duct tape it all back together again.

Parts from Brand Y in Engine X -- because that's what the implement had in stock when you needed to repair something. Lots of home-welds, lots of splice jobs. Need a new hose? Grab one off a car... it's not rated for the tractor, but it sort of fits... and it lets you get the job done today... so cool, "works" and then likely just forget about it until it breaks.

So how on earth could John Deere be liable for the performance or safety of their equipment? If a John Deere tractor blows up, or more aptly some part suffers catastrophic failure and hurts someone... who's at fault? Does John Deere have to honor a 10-year warranty, if you cut corners on the repairs?

And, in the case of accidents, even if it's the farmer who is at, the brand suffers from the news report, "A farmer father of 7 was killed today when his John Deere tractor malfunctioned..." Left out of the story is the fact that the farmer didn't repair it to spec, or the guy the farmer bought it from didn't repair it to spec...

Anyway I side with John Deere here. It's chaos not to lock this stuff down. Who owns liability? These things are used hard, they break frequently -- especially with age. How to you know something actually works right if you don't lock down the repair process?

shagie2• 5 years ago

So how on earth could John Deere be liable for the performance or safety of their equipment? If a John Deere tractor blows up, or more aptly some part suffers catastrophic failure and hurts someone... who's at fault? Does John Deere have to honor a 10-year warranty, if you cut corners on the repairs?

This gets to a very interesting question when it comes to industrial equipment (which farm equipment falls under). Unless there is *VERY CLEAR* instructions not to do it, and the manufacturer made an effort to prevent it, the manufacturer is nearly always liable. (slide 14 https://www.slideserve.com/butch/product-liability-law-in-th... and also note slide 54 with respect to the liability - the video presentation of this slide deck is at https://youtu.be/NdN577BbnSY )

Additionally. as you noted, the news that {Brand} equipment broke and killed someone travels much faster and does more impact than the later findings that {Brand} was not at fault because the owner had removed the safety equipment from it.

dbg314152• 5 years ago

Really interesting. Thanks for sharing!

newdude116• 5 years ago

I don't find the article anymore, but I read that this is the reason why US farmers were buying Belorussian tractors

http://belarus-tractor.com/en/company/news/2016/rare-soviet-...

VMtest• 5 years ago

Not sure if anybody has mentioned this regarding open source hardware, they are really doing a great job repairing on their own

1. https://wiki.opensourceecology.org/wiki/Main_Page

2. https://youtu.be/hl7lZZP21c8 | Open Building Institute - Introductory Video

3. https://www.youtube.com/user/marcinose/playlists | Marcin Jakubowski

4. https://youtu.be/S63Cy64p2lQ | Civilization starter kit | Marcin Jakubowski | TEDxKC

Farmers Deserve the Right to Repair Their Tractors

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