Farmers Deserve the Right to Repair Their Tractors

An old Belarus 420A is a simple tractor. Even a modern 742 or 1220 isn't that complex. But it's simply not as capable as a Fastrac 4 or 8 series, or a Valtra N or C series, or a Deere 6, 7 or 8 series for example. They're just not in the same league in terms of what they can do with tool management, fitness for specific tasks or tool interop.

As a single example, there's nothing that Belarus make that I'd want to use for buckraking a heap of any real size. They don't have a JCB 435S equivalent, or a heavier Fendt or Claas.

They're great tools, but you're not going to get the hectares per hour of sowing or harvest or the movement of tonnage of the modern competitors.

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....

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.

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.

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)