Most farmers depend on their tractors for their livelihood. I reckon it'll be difficult to convince them to shift to electric ones that costs more and haven't got any long term reliability or efficiency reports. If anything, battery powered cars lose a lot of value as their battery capacities tend to decline over time. Also, unless their farm has heavily invested in solar power, they'd still have to use electricity from the grid. In a country like Australia most electricity is generated from coal. So that's not really helping the environment. The EV industry will only last as long as we don't figure out efficient production and transportation of Hydrogen. This is impressive use of ML though.
Electric Monarch tractor can plow a field without a driver and run for ten hours
131–140 of 160 posts
Re: Electric Monarch tractor can plow a field without a driver and run for ten hours
#132Next up: A semi-autonomous backhoe and dozer that can intelligently dig a level bottomed hole to specific cubic dimensions with equipment accessible ramp and all the waste material piled neatly on the sides in safe and sane manner and then can also load that same material into a waiting dump truck. Can also work in a swarm of two or three machines for more effective material handling. All controlled by a remote opera…
Re: Electric Monarch tractor can plow a field without a driver and run for ten hours
#133Most farmers depend on their tractors for their livelihood. I reckon it'll be difficult to convince them to shift to electric ones that costs more and haven't got any long term reliability or efficiency reports. If anything, battery powered cars lose a lot of value as their battery capacities tend to decline over time. Also, unless their farm has heavily invested in solar power, they'd still have to use electricity f…
>t'll be difficult to convince them to shift to electric ones that costs more
This electric tractor markets itself as having twice the torque of an ICE tractor of a similar size. This means you don't need a bigger more expensive tractor.
>If anything, battery powered cars lose a lot of value as their battery capacities tend to decline over time.
EVs lose in value because of government subsidies. The list price is $30k but you only have to pay $25k because of subsidies. Nobody is going go buy your used EV for more than $25k because they can get a new one instead.
Re: Electric Monarch tractor can plow a field without a driver and run for ten hours
#134This is a nice accomplishment, a step forward. But to some extends it's a step forward in a backwards system. It's a bit like the 'if cannibals start eating with forks, is it progress'-question.
Agriculture has become a industry of scale, but that might be it's undoing. It might be better to have an electric tractor doing the ploughing, but wouldn't it be even better to do less ploughing? With the invention of fertilizers (which isn't bad in itself) we where able to scale, but we needed more fertilizer, the soil became more barren and devoid of soil life with every iteration.
With heavier tractors we needed to lower the water level to not get stuck in the soft soils, the heavier tractors compacted the soils even more, so we needed heavier tractors to till en plough the soil again. Otherwise we couldn't force the same crop out of the soil year after year.
When we're only looking at the economic outcomes of the agronomic industry, we're forgetting a few things. I work in IT, I work at an environmental NGO, I have an interest in agroecology, organic farming and such but I often feel it's an 'either/or' kind of thing.
It's either locally sourced, community supported agriculture with a huge focus on soil restoration, resilience, crop rotation, diversity (polyculture? as opposite of monoculture) land access which attracts a specific crowd of people. Think leftist, anarchistic, community-oriented, spiritual-religious (which group I really like) but with a lot of menial/manual labor, a aversion of technology. Which can be explained by the centralistic nature of a lot of technology, and it often being focused on ‘vertical scaling’.
Or it’s hip startups with sensor tech, drones, AI-platforms predicting where you’ll have te best results and use for example ‘variable-rate seeding’ and program your fleet of heavy tractors to automate it all. We’ve automated quite a lot in ‘beef production’, but maybe we should do less of that and focus more on finding solutions to scale horizontally? (Like we might need less humongous farms producing one specific product but more smaller farms producing various products).
Hopefully this makes sense to someone ;)
Re: Electric Monarch tractor can plow a field without a driver and run for ten hours
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
> - a lot of farms are away from electricity sources to charge It's actually quite common for farms to have 3 phase power at the least. Modern farming is heavily industrialized. There's all sorts of dryers or blowers or other processing equipment to be run depending on the crop or livestock. Renewables, either self owned or leased land access are a big growth thing too. This means you can be in the boonies of western…
:D you posted pretty much exactly what I did. I grew up on a farm so it was kind of funny reading "A lot of farms don't have access to electricity" It's weird to read something like that. Every farm in my farming hometown had power nearby. Heck, you'll see power lines all across Idaho primarily for farmers running pumps. You simply don't get more rural than Idaho. To put things into perspective, this house has power.…
My grandma had a house with electricity and a TV but no plumbing... and she was a subsistence farmer in eastern Europe.
Re: Electric Monarch tractor can plow a field without a driver and run for ten hours
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
Charging overnight + installing solar panels near the fields will solve problem. Of course it’s easier said than done, but changing processes will lead to the solution.
Where can I invest in your solar panels that work overnight?
I hope you didn't forget that electric tractors have batteries. You can do amazing things like charge the tractors during the day and then let them run until midnight because they are autonomous. However, it would be far more sensible to just install some wind turbines nearby.
Re: Electric Monarch tractor can plow a field without a driver and run for ten hours
#137This is a nice accomplishment, a step forward. But to some extends it's a step forward in a backwards system. It's a bit like the 'if cannibals start eating with forks, is it progress'-question. Agriculture has become a industry of scale, but that might be it's undoing. It might be better to have an electric tractor doing the ploughing, but wouldn't it be even better to do less ploughing? With the invention of fertil…
Minimum till and zero till agriculture is already a thing. There is still a great need for tractors. Having grown up on a farm, I continually see people with an idea of agriculture that is massively out of date. Technology and techniques advance as they do in any industry. It's not perfect, and some farms are better than others, but farmers are continually striving to improve both for economic and for environmental reasons.
Re: Electric Monarch tractor can plow a field without a driver and run for ten hours
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
> AI is going to dramatically alter this competitive landscape and John Deere’s DRM is not going to to stop it. I would love this state, but getting there is not simple. DRM is just one facet of it: companies selling machinery have worked on hardware for decades, making their systems physically robust and able to take lots of abuse. This raises the barrier to entry a lot. My 2c.
The startup needs an exit (eventually) I’m sure if the deal was good enough John Deere could buy them
Startups with this mindset need not apply. The market for agricultural technology will always exist, and there's no reason a new player needs to "exit" instead of growing and sustaining the business.
See the comments about repair parts. These aren't cheap toys like smartphones and eyepads that are only meant to last a few years. Ag machinery are capital assets that should function for decades. The people buying this equipment are in it for the long haul, and anyone financing such a venture should be also.
If SV VC prefers scale-and-exit schemes, then it's not a good fit, but SV VC isn't the only source of capital.
Re: Electric Monarch tractor can plow a field without a driver and run for ten hours
#139Most farmers depend on their tractors for their livelihood. I reckon it'll be difficult to convince them to shift to electric ones that costs more and haven't got any long term reliability or efficiency reports. If anything, battery powered cars lose a lot of value as their battery capacities tend to decline over time. Also, unless their farm has heavily invested in solar power, they'd still have to use electricity f…
>t'll be difficult to convince them to shift to electric ones that costs more This electric tractor markets itself as having twice the torque of an ICE tractor of a similar size. This means you don't need a bigger more expensive tractor. >If anything, battery powered cars lose a lot of value as their battery capacities tend to decline over time. EVs lose in value because of government subsidies. The list price is $30…
I can understand why I got downvoted. I might have come across as an EV hater. I'm not one. I do appreciate the technology and acknowledge that it's the future. I was pointing out some of the flaws. I don't argue against the torque figures and everyone knows that EVs have more torque. Even the base model Teslas are faster off the line compared to some of the ICE super cars. I'm hopeful that we generate electricity from more renewable sources than burning coal or gas, which defeats the whole purpose. Long charging times, range anxiety and battery longevity are real issues for customers. I don't know if durability of electric motors for these sort of applications haven been proven yet. Hydrogen based EVs can fix most of these problem. But only if we can create Hydrogen more efficiently.
Re: Electric Monarch tractor can plow a field without a driver and run for ten hours
#140This is a nice accomplishment, a step forward. But to some extends it's a step forward in a backwards system. It's a bit like the 'if cannibals start eating with forks, is it progress'-question. Agriculture has become a industry of scale, but that might be it's undoing. It might be better to have an electric tractor doing the ploughing, but wouldn't it be even better to do less ploughing? With the invention of fertil…
" Think leftist, anarchistic, community-oriented, spiritual-religious (which group I really like) but with a lot of menial/manual labor, a aversion of technology"
I've seen quite some of that community supported agriculture.
Basically, machines were invented and put to work for a reason. Farming a field used to be backbreaking and still is, if you work a big field. Most of the communities I've been, struggle a lot with even a small vegetable garden.
In other words: big words, but low outcome, with the result of having to buy the food in the end.
"Like we might need less humongous farms producing one specific product but more smaller farms producing various products"
So I agree on that, but also on a smaller, diverse farm, I would use at least a small tractor.
But here I see the advantage of autonomous electric tractors: they could be made quite small and rather have more of them.
But I would really not go back to horse or human drawn wheat harvesting. It is not efficient. Those who like to do so as a hobby, have plenty of opportunity, but don't expect to feed the world with this approach.