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Colorado passes agricultural Right to Repair

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Re: Colorado passes agricultural Right to Repair

#51

Post by chongli »

crabmusket wrote: post #42
rtpg wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What I don't understand is why a couple of the higher quality tractor companies have not started pushing hard to brand "we support repair" and having available online manuals and software to support this. This seems a perfect marketing/product platform for an underdog that also believes this. My understanding is basically all high-capital machinery makes a _lot_ of money from support contracts and repairs. I think…

Without knowing about the industry, I like to wistfully think that a cooperative would be the way to structure a company that cares about this. Not just worker-owned, but customer-owned as well. If you're buying an asset you expect to last decades, having a stake in the manufacturer doesn't seem like a completely bad idea.

It’s very difficult to start a worker cooperative in a capital-intensive industry. In most companies, the difference between workers and owners is that the owners provided the capital to get things started.

A factory that builds modern tractors is a pretty huge investment. It’s very large and has a ton of very expensive robotics. It also has a huge supply chain that delivers a wide variety of parts to the factory for final assembly.

A factory worker, while a lot more skilled than a day labourer working on a farm, does not have access to the kind of capital needed to start a big factory. So how does it happen? The people who have the billions of dollars in capital needed to start the factory aren’t just going to give shares to workers they hire.

Re: Colorado passes agricultural Right to Repair

#52

Post by rtpg »

crabmusket wrote: post #42
rtpg wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What I don't understand is why a couple of the higher quality tractor companies have not started pushing hard to brand "we support repair" and having available online manuals and software to support this. This seems a perfect marketing/product platform for an underdog that also believes this. My understanding is basically all high-capital machinery makes a _lot_ of money from support contracts and repairs. I think…

Without knowing about the industry, I like to wistfully think that a cooperative would be the way to structure a company that cares about this. Not just worker-owned, but customer-owned as well. If you're buying an asset you expect to last decades, having a stake in the manufacturer doesn't seem like a completely bad idea.

The real pie in the sky stuff is figuring out open designs that are durable but not so complex as to be totally out of reach.

I cannot claim to know the relative difficulty of such a task, or relevant regulations. But if there were some standard designs that multiple manufacturers were involved in, I bet parts would stay in production for a very very long time.

Re: Colorado passes agricultural Right to Repair

#54

Post by heywhatupboys »

chongli wrote: post #51
crabmusket wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without knowing about the industry, I like to wistfully think that a cooperative would be the way to structure a company that cares about this. Not just worker-owned, but customer-owned as well. If you're buying an asset you expect to last decades, having a stake in the manufacturer doesn't seem like a completely bad idea.

It’s very difficult to start a worker cooperative in a capital-intensive industry. In most companies, the difference between workers and owners is that the owners provided the capital to get things started. A factory that builds modern tractors is a pretty huge investment. It’s very large and has a ton of very expensive robotics. It also has a huge supply chain that delivers a wide variety of parts to the factory for…

> It’s very difficult to start a worker cooperative in a capital-intensive industry

some of the most successful Danish agricultural companies started out as / are cooperatives.

Re: Colorado passes agricultural Right to Repair

#55

Post by heywhatupboys »

GalenErso wrote: post #26
donw wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excellent point. Check out Project Farm on YouTube to get a sense of what the average farmer is like in terms of engineering mindset. They would love this. Farmers are smart . When your combine breaks during harvest, you can't just grab another or wait a couple of days for the repair guy to show up -- you need it fixed now . That's not easy. Not to mention, understanding your soil, your crops, the weather, how they i…

Farmers also need to understand animal biology (for those who raise animals) and reproduction, the local, state, and national commodities market (and sometimes the international market too), pests and invasive species (plants, insects, and animals alike) and the diseases they can bring, and hydrology. A modern farmer is an engineer, an economist, a biologist and a wilderness expert all in one.

While I know HN likes to put farmers on a pedistal, and we should all appreciate the people that literally grow our food, the reality isn't that most farmers are "highly educated" in these things, but know barely enough to scrape by

Re: Colorado passes agricultural Right to Repair

#56

Post by heywhatupboys »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #18
voakbasda wrote: post #10

I suspect that John Deere and friends will find a way to challenge this in court and -- if they eventually lose -- find a way to maliciously comply with the law. Their behavior has been actively hostile to their customers for years, and they have zero incentive to change. Like Apple's repair kits mentioned in another comment, I suspect their strategy will involve providing tools that cost nearly as much to rent as it…

Name, shame, and industry blacklist Deere product managers. It's the only way. Stop acting like there's nothing that can be done.

yea, when has lynching not been a problem. Think if all the PMs here that work for FAANG got their names leaked and harassed over software practises.

Re: Colorado passes agricultural Right to Repair

#57

Post by nikanj »

Gustomaximus wrote: post #23

What I don't understand is why a couple of the higher quality tractor companies have not started pushing hard to brand "we support repair" and having available online manuals and software to support this. This seems a perfect marketing/product platform for an underdog that also believes this. Massey, Fendt or similar could really differentiate themself and take market share on the back of this I suspect. Especially w…

The same reason Brother has not beat HP in the printer market, despite the latter having scores of customer-hostile policies w.r.t ink DRM.

Re: Colorado passes agricultural Right to Repair

#58

Post by chongli »

heywhatupboys wrote: post #54
chongli wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s very difficult to start a worker cooperative in a capital-intensive industry. In most companies, the difference between workers and owners is that the owners provided the capital to get things started. A factory that builds modern tractors is a pretty huge investment. It’s very large and has a ton of very expensive robotics. It also has a huge supply chain that delivers a wide variety of parts to the factory for…

> It’s very difficult to start a worker cooperative in a capital-intensive industry some of the most successful Danish agricultural companies started out as / are cooperatives.

Very difficult but not impossible. Looks like some of those co-ops go back to the 1700s.

So that provides one possible solution to the problem: start small with no capital and grow over a period of centuries to become a large co-op.

But how do you achieve it today? How do you take a bunch of workers and start a co-op factory that can compete with John Deere?

Re: Colorado passes agricultural Right to Repair

#59

Post by jezovuk »

chongli wrote: post #58
heywhatupboys wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s very difficult to start a worker cooperative in a capital-intensive industry some of the most successful Danish agricultural companies started out as / are cooperatives.

Very difficult but not impossible. Looks like some of those co-ops go back to the 1700s. So that provides one possible solution to the problem: start small with no capital and grow over a period of centuries to become a large co-op. But how do you achieve it today? How do you take a bunch of workers and start a co-op factory that can compete with John Deere?

Credit/VC? Or you start a co-op dairy / farm / repair shop and work for centuries towards arriving at where JD is today (by which time big corps would have moved a few centuries ahead).

Re: Colorado passes agricultural Right to Repair

#60

Post by Maakuth »

Gustomaximus wrote: post #23

What I don't understand is why a couple of the higher quality tractor companies have not started pushing hard to brand "we support repair" and having available online manuals and software to support this. This seems a perfect marketing/product platform for an underdog that also believes this. Massey, Fendt or similar could really differentiate themself and take market share on the back of this I suspect. Especially w…

The sector is way more centralized than what you'd think by looking at the tractor brands you see around. Massey-Ferguson and Fendt are both AGCO brands. Besides them and John Deere, there's CNH Industrial making Case IH and New Holland tractors. I expect all of the three make a lot of their revenue from the service business, so there's not that much incentive to be disruptive.
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