How 'bout we have some cars made that way, that is, as rugged, reliable, long lasting, easy to repair, mechanically simple, as those 1980 -- 1990 farm tractors!
For tech-weary Midwest farmers, 40-year-old tractors now a hot commodity
351–360 of 511 posts
Re: For tech-weary Midwest farmers, 40-year-old tractors now a hot commodity
#352Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tractor as a service will only bite them back. Look at how popular 40-year old tractors are :) It's never been a better time to create a good old repairable machine.
They all want to get to the point of being Tesla. Hiding features only in software, pushing out updates, and trying to bake in a living (recurring revenue) model. It's a problem for a lot of reasons. First off it's the complete death of ownership. I can't fix things. At some point they will probably just lock stuff back down if I want to sell, assuming I can even sell without them getting a cut. Second, repairability…
> I don't want a car where someone can push safety critical changes the way we push shitty software updates now. I don't trust them to get it right. I don't want to be sold a car that tries to kill me after a mandatory software update. It's not needed, and it's a bad idea.
I don't want a bridge where someone can make repairs the way we make shitty pothole repairs now. I don't trust them to get it right. I don't want to pay taxes for a bridge that tries to kill me after mandatory repairs. It's not needed, and it's a bad idea. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-35W_Mississippi_River_bridge
Here's a neat idea: maybe regulating software engineering like other engineering disciplines is actually overdue? Yet at the same time, failure rate will never be zero.
Alternatively, we should renounce all engineering regulations and let anybody with a rivet gun build bridges. and airplanes.
Re: For tech-weary Midwest farmers, 40-year-old tractors now a hot commodity
#353Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you think end-users products from corporation style farms are cheaper than family farm (for equivalent quality) ?
Cheaper, yes, but currently corporate agriculture is less sustainable as they make little to no efforts in maintaining or building the top soil depth, and instead reap the soil for marginal yield gains and then buy out the small 75+ year well tended farm and do it all over again. Eventually having decent farm land is going to cost a premium and food price will rise because of it. Short term gains for long term costs.
> Eventually having decent farm land is going to cost a premium and food price will rise because of it.
I believe prime tillable land in Iowa currently goes for something like $10k/acre. That's not really in the realm of "cheap" when you need 100s of acres to be profitable in today's farm economy.
Further, the agricultural colleges in the Midwest have extension offices specifically devoted to spreading best practices regarding sustainability and soil health.
Healthy soil is productive soil. There's a reason yields keep going up, and its not just down to plant breeding.
Re: For tech-weary Midwest farmers, 40-year-old tractors now a hot commodity
#354Earlier quoted context omitted.
Punjab state of India is pretty much Agriculture based, & have options of Ford, FarmTrac tractors as well as John Deere, Scot, this year models as well as from 1970s; along with local Indian Brands like Sonalika, Preet, Mahindra being equally good or better.
Mahindra tractors are based on the old International Harvester models I think. They sell them in the US also. They look pretty cool, simple and repairable, but I don't know if they make ones the size of commercial John Deere tractors. All the Mahnindra tractors I've looked at were small.
No,not as big. All the ones I have seen in Punjab are way smaller, almost the size of an F-150 pickup truck.
Re: For tech-weary Midwest farmers, 40-year-old tractors now a hot commodity
#355My grandfather, rest his soul, was a 3rd generation rancher and farmer. He bought 2 John Deere tractors in the '80s and used them for 35 years. They are still being used to this day on the ranch. Growing up, I visited the ranch regularly. Farming and ranching is very hard on equipment so the tractors often needed repair. My father and grandfather could seemingly fix anything on the tractor without even needing to go…
My FIL had 88 acres in NE Indiana, grew corn, winter wheat, and soy beans and raised 40,000 chickens at a time. Not all the farmers were making money, and when they went out of business there were auctions. Soooo, my FIL got his farm equipment, including tractors, used at the auctions.
And he did his own repairs: I remember sitting with him at Christmas at his kitchen table with a little mechanical part, precisely machined, part of the fuel injection system. He had me looking at the part, including the moving part, to see if it could be the cause of some problem he was having with the fuel system. So, yes, he did his own repair work.
Heck, for his house he got plans from Better Homes and Gardens and did nearly all the work himself. For the baseboard heat, he innovated and made the parts himself. He did the carpentry to make his own kitchen and dining room tables and chairs, living room coffee table, etc.
For the chickens, he mixed his own feed, and for that built his own feed mixing facility with, yes, used parts. He would include corn, 55 gallon drums of anchovies from Chile, etc.
At the time, there was money in chickens due to suddenly progress in breeding, nutrition, and disease control.
For the chicken houses, he got plans from the USDA and built the houses both longer and wider than in the plans. He used no concrete and had tar paper for the sides and roofs. For the floors, those were dirt, and between batches of chickens he would use his tractor to clean out the floors and then spread wood shavings. For feeding the chickens, he designed, patented, and built his own feeders -- so the chickens have to eat all the feed and not just pick out the corn which is their favorite.
He learned the hard way that he had do to his own marketing: Some grocery store chain would promise to buy the whole flock of 40,000 but when the chickens were ready would find an excuse to delay, say, a sale on beef or pork. A delay of a week meant that had to feed the chickens for another week, and there went most of the profit. So the store would string him out until he would sell below cost just to get rid of the chickens.
So, he did his own marketing: He worked with a guy who did big chicken dinners for large organizations. Then the dates, quantities, and prices were all SET in advance. Smart.
Eventually due to NE Indiana winter snows, the chicken houses sagged a LOT, but by then he was out of the chicken business and head of the local electric power cooperative! So, building the chicken houses cheap paid off! Others built tiny chicken houses with concrete floors, cinder block walls, and tin roofs, outlast the Pyramids, and long since standing empty as the farmers went out of business.
Yup, gotta be smarter than the average hick to be successful in farming!
Re: For tech-weary Midwest farmers, 40-year-old tractors now a hot commodity
#356Earlier quoted context omitted.
They all want to get to the point of being Tesla. Hiding features only in software, pushing out updates, and trying to bake in a living (recurring revenue) model. It's a problem for a lot of reasons. First off it's the complete death of ownership. I can't fix things. At some point they will probably just lock stuff back down if I want to sell, assuming I can even sell without them getting a cut. Second, repairability…
> I can't fix things. This one sticks out to me from a job-market POV. Plumbers are already on par with psychiatrists in terms of pay. Sure, the work is hard, but from a supply-demand POV, the markets are saying that they do work that is of equal value (all this varies highly, but stick with me here). Most repair work takes a LOT of experience until the employee is anywhere near proficient. Farmers will tell you that…
Tractors aren’t that hard to work on. Medical equipment is different because lives are on the line. As a heavy equipment mechanic, the mechanics of things don’t change they just add propriety electronic controls just like automobiles. So you can’t scan the trouble codes on your tractor. Rent-seeking
Re: For tech-weary Midwest farmers, 40-year-old tractors now a hot commodity
#357Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe they are loosing a particular kind of customer they may want to loose anyway. Neither the number of acres to be farmed nor the number of mouths to feed decrease when a small farm goes under. The tractor has no long term concern of sitting idle and it may be giant non-corporeal people prefer doing business with their own kind.
lose... losing.
thanks up voted. I am terrible with fashion.
Re: For tech-weary Midwest farmers, 40-year-old tractors now a hot commodity
#358My grandfather, rest his soul, was a 3rd generation rancher and farmer. He bought 2 John Deere tractors in the '80s and used them for 35 years. They are still being used to this day on the ranch. Growing up, I visited the ranch regularly. Farming and ranching is very hard on equipment so the tractors often needed repair. My father and grandfather could seemingly fix anything on the tractor without even needing to go…
> The world changes and sometimes it sucks but that is how progress is made.
Progress for whom? Seems like a false dichotomy to me.
Re: For tech-weary Midwest farmers, 40-year-old tractors now a hot commodity
#359Earlier quoted context omitted.
I belive they were enhancing it with terrestrial base stations (Loran-C was mentioned in the discussion, which was 10+ years ago). John Deere has proprietary secret sauce and if I recall correctly, they can get sub 1" accuracy. That precision farming has enabled things like different amounts of fertilizer for different parts of the field, a substantial material savings and improvement for the environment.
u-blox's ZED-F9P chip is capable of 10 mm (0.39 inch) accuracy [0]. AFAIK, high accuracy requires being relatively close to a terrestrial correction station. Some states, such as Iowa, run a network of these stations and provide free access to the public [1]. 0 - https://www.sparkfun.com/products/15136 1 - https://iowadot.gov/rtn/IaRTN-resources/About-the-IaRTN
I'm from Iowa but had no idea the DOT ran such a network! Thanks for sharing!
Re: For tech-weary Midwest farmers, 40-year-old tractors now a hot commodity
#360Reminds me a bit of my great-grandfather. He bought his first tractor from my grandfather when my grandfather retired and auctioned off all of the farm and equipment.
There's a lost Minnesota PBS documentary from the 50s/60s about farmers still using horses and he is interviewed in it, and in the middle of the interview he just starts going off about someone shooting his horse, "those sons of bitches shot my horse!"