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For tech-weary Midwest farmers, 40-year-old tractors now a hot commodity

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Re: For tech-weary Midwest farmers, 40-year-old tractors now a hot commodity

#451

Post by LeifCarrotson »

privateSFacct wrote: post #9
melling wrote: post #6

“ They cost a fraction of the price, and then the operating costs are much less because they’re so much easier to fix,” he said.” It’s not really so much a technology problem as the ability to repair, probably by the farmers themselves. Companies don’t make it easy. You need special equipment, tools, etc. We could insist on a right to repair, open standards, etc

All good ideas, but repairing surface mount / integrated / dust and vibration glued parts is not as easy EVEN IF they were open standards as a 40 year old tractor is to repair. I spent way to long repairing an old gas engine, it was super simple in terms of operating approach. Opening the hood on my new car - the fixes are not as obvious.

Any repair has to operate at some level of abstraction of the components. Maybe a sensor or actuator failed, perhaps a wiring harness went bad, or maybe the potted computer between those components is defective, but the solution in those cases is typically not to disassemble the malfunctioning device and get out a soldering iron but to replace it.

Perhaps a remanufacturer would disassemble eg. an alternator and diagnose a bad rectifier or bearing, but most of the time the right answer is to leave treat it as a black box, leave it in one piece and swap the entire thing for a new one. Board-level repair is really only suitable for expensive lab equipment and occasionally in a PCB assembly plant.

The problem is that modern manufacturers find it simpler and more profitable to sell the entire tractor/car as a black box. Better engineering in the form of:

1. Modular construction that allows equipment to be disassembled with replacement of individual parts

2. Simple, cheap, open diagnostic interfaces to measure and isolate system performance

3. Consistency across model years to reduce the number of part numbers required for a repair

4. A replacement parts pipeline, possibly including aftermarket manufacturers

5. Documentation on how the system was designed to function

Are all things which which manufacturers in the past respected enough to implement (based on value ascribed to those things by consumers, vendors, and repair shops). However, those items have been devalued and disrespected in favor of more marketable features and lower prices. It's not about the tech in the new car or tractor - those could be implemented with the same (or better!) level of serviceability as your old gas engine.

Unfortunately, "Right to repair" legislation focuses on items 4 and 5 above. A lack of 1, 2, and 3 can still be abused to effectively prevent repair.

Re: For tech-weary Midwest farmers, 40-year-old tractors now a hot commodity

#452

Post by syshum »

cosmodisk wrote: post #418
philwelch wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it depends a lot on the local market. It's also a little misleading to compare the numbers that way. It usually takes a lot longer to become a psychiatrist in the first place. Your cumulative earnings in the first ten years after graduating high school might be higher as a plumber; in fact, I suspect most people who become doctors actually lose net worth throughout those ten years due to student loans. They j…

Having worked in plumbing for a while, I can say that anyone who's got their arms in right places and a bit of flair for entrepreneurship can make pretty good money in this field. There's so much work is unbelievable and most of it isn't that hard to do. Also, the hours are decent. Psychiatrists,on the other hand,while on higher income, have to deal with some very challenging and sometimes dark personalities who tend…

Yea, I would rather deal with peoples physical shit than their mental shit

Re: For tech-weary Midwest farmers, 40-year-old tractors now a hot commodity

#453

Post by titzer »

macinjosh wrote: post #98

My 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…

I'm from a long line of farmers. My dad was born and raised on a farm and went off to business school in the 1960s, had a career in business and (tried to) return to farming in the mid 1980s. By then the corporatization of farming had already begun and was in full swing. Economics was constantly demanding larger and larger economies of scale. The "paltry" 200 acres of my grandmother's farm wasn't sufficient, nor was the second farm my father bought. It was impossible to afford a combine for a farm that small. He ended up paying the neighboring farm (1000+ acres) to do the harvest for him, cutting his margins even lower. He got out of farming by the 1990s and went into day trading.

> The world changes and sometimes it sucks but that is how progress is made.

It isn't progress. It's mechanization. Mechanization demanded by economics. Our food is lower quality (especially fruits and vegetables) and full of pesticides and antibiotics, the ground water and soil are depleted. With the ease of global shipping, farmers compete on a global market which amplifies competition even more. And if people in Timbuktu don't like the taste of my apples, who cares. But hey, food is cheap, ubiquitous and fewer people have to be farmers. But what that really means is bigger profits for fewer people, more environmental overhead, and throwing lots of people out of a line of work that stretches back literally ten thousand years.

Re: For tech-weary Midwest farmers, 40-year-old tractors now a hot commodity

#454

Post by savingGrace »

What happens when we are so far away from the past, that there are no older tractors? Will our current 'new' tractors still work without dialing home or requiring computers when they're old?

I keep wondering that about our automotives as well. I want vehicles that are safe for my family, but ones that I can work on with a general understanding of automotive repair and physics. Will there come a point where you can no longer work on any new automotives?

Re: For tech-weary Midwest farmers, 40-year-old tractors now a hot commodity

#455

Post by SmellyGeekBoy »

mbesto wrote: post #274
Vesuvium wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These companies are losing customers. That is never good for business. Eventually, someone will take the matter into his own hand and start making 80s-like tractors, so these companies will lose even more customers. They could do the same, but at this point they lost the trust of their customers, so it will be very hard to gain them back.

> These companies are losing customers. Are they? John Deere has increased its revenue from $28B to $39B in the last 4 years....

Not really proof that they aren't losing customers as they could be overcompensating by increasing revenue-per-customer

Re: For tech-weary Midwest farmers, 40-year-old tractors now a hot commodity

#456

Post by micmil »

quacked wrote: post #220
earlINmeyerkeg wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are dairy co-ops where I live that do this sort of thing. That's why they're so huge. However the small ma and pop ones that have local well known businesses charge an arm and a leg for half a gallon of milk. Yeah sorry, I'll pay half that cost for a gallon at walmart, thanks.

Your choice unfortunately affects the greater world. Which would you rather have- a locally-produced society that's expensive to live in, or a Walmart society that's convenient to live in?

This is a false dichotomy. I want a society that's efficient and utilizes minimal resources for maximum gain.

Re: For tech-weary Midwest farmers, 40-year-old tractors now a hot commodity

#457

Post by titzer »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #221
ngneer wrote: post #215

This may be the single most important information security problem worth solving on our planet. This is not about who gets to see the latest movie at what resolution, it is about vendors and farmers fighting for control of the plant, in this case the tractor, and indirectly its yields. I think the world needs an open source tractor, or else am hoping the right to repair movement addresses these difficulties.

It's more than that. I'm in Australia, hiding inside away from the smoke haze, thinking about where global warming is going. Seems clear to me that in the next 20-30 years most farming will need to move indoors into climate controlled environments. We'll need to have closed systems where the air, water, soils, and our biodiversity is carefully managed.

> We'll need to have closed systems where the air, water, soils, and our biodiversity is carefully managed.

Let that sink it. We screwed Earth badly enough we need to build spaceships on Earth.

Re: For tech-weary Midwest farmers, 40-year-old tractors now a hot commodity

#458

Post by halbritt »

mrpopo wrote: post #397
halbritt wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I speculate that as corporations take over farming, their operations become more efficient providing greater yields per acre and for the amount of fuel consumed. If true, this is net positive for humanity as a whole as more people can get fed and there are less carbon emissions doing so. There is the problem that corporations tend to trend toward becoming sociopathic entities unless carefully managed, so it's not all…

> there are less carbon emissions doing so. Intensive farming as practiced by corporations today is among the worst culprits regarding carbon emissions. It is more profitable to practice intensive till-heavy farming since it takes advantage of the nutrients already stored in the soil. The disadvantage is its unsustainability. After few decades of soil-tilling, it becomes quite poor in nutrients, and will have reduced…

> Intensive farming as practiced by corporations today is among the worst culprits regarding carbon emissions.

Relative to what? What are the CO2 emissions per bushel of grain for the practices you've described?

My point about reduced carbon emissions is specific to corporate farms using modern equipment which is more precise, thanks to auto-guidance via GPS, more efficient, as a result of the diesel engines being more modern and also as a result of other technologies that allow the tractors to have larger implements, travel faster, and consume less horsepower and finally lower emissions as a result of being compliant with more recent emissions standards.

Re: For tech-weary Midwest farmers, 40-year-old tractors now a hot commodity

#459

Post by pavon »

zozbot234 wrote: post #384
nine_k wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because it's simple to fix and it didn't need a official licensed laptop to be serviced. This is exactly my point. Imagine that you are selling cars. If you sell a reliable, easy to fix car, you don't get any recurring revenue. But you need to make as much money as the competition who sells less reliable cars, and more because you can't cut corners. So your upfront cost is higher. The competition, which sells less…

The manufacturer of the more reliable car can win by offering a warranty and/or "discounted" repairs. That way, even a naïve customer who doesn't expect the manufacturer to make a reliable car will be incented to buy it anyway. Of course, this will only work if building a more reliable car really is more efficient than doing constant repairs on a less-reliable one. IOW, it actually leads to properly-aligned incentive…

After years of dealing with manufactures that find any possible way to weasel out of honoring their warranties, I don't place any credence in them whatsoever. I don't even consider warranty when making a purchase, just reputation for quality, which takes time to build; time most startups don't have to start showing a profit.

Re: For tech-weary Midwest farmers, 40-year-old tractors now a hot commodity

#460

Post by Nasrudith »

iso1210 wrote: post #264
quacked wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your choice unfortunately affects the greater world. Which would you rather have- a locally-produced society that's expensive to live in, or a Walmart society that's convenient to live in?

It makes sense for the local optimisation of the individual to go for the walmart society - after all their single choice won't make a difference to anything other than their bottom line It makes sense for people as a whole to optimise as a society and have the locally produced society That's where we can choose an economic system that ensures that we optimise in general rather than individually, so we avoid the pris…

To be fair all attempts at optimization on a grand scale like that give a new meaning to calling "premature optimization the root of all evil" as it starts including things like Eugenics and Inquisitions. It inevitably ends in failure, tears, and travesties. Or more pedestrian Soviet style lack of market failures.

Local is "sexy" but it has had worse efficency instead of better like promised and is often premised upon overassumptions of the cost of transit and a denial of inconvenient fact of economies of scale because it doesn't fit their world view.

It appears that part of the reason it is popular is because people think they understand it and think the logistics would be easier. I would put it in the simple, easy, and wrong camp of ideas.

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