For tech-weary Midwest farmers, 40-year-old tractors now a hot commodity • Hacker News Board

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

#241

Post by NeoBasilisk » Mon, Jan 06, 2020, 10:17 PM UTC

jessant wrote: post #199

ahoy wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is an enormous body of law in the US that incentivizes a top-down corporate business structure and disincentives a co-op business structure.

I think human nature incentivizes top-down corporate business structures and disincentivizes co-op businesss structures.

I would be very careful in trying to attribute something as complex as corporate structures to human nature. We have seen massive changes in all parts of society throughout the last 10k years. I don't think the human genome has changed so rapidly as to cycle through slavery, feudalism, mercantilism, capitalism, etc.

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

#242

Post by bigjimmyk3 » Mon, Jan 06, 2020, 10:21 PM UTC

earlINmeyerkeg wrote: post #189

andrepd wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Land consolidation can be done through communes/co-ops, in which case the benefits of increased productivity are fairly distributed, or through private corporations, in which case profits are privatised and concentrated on a small owner elite class.

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.

I was fascinated to hear a recent news story about how this works. The US has a long history of subsidizing its dairy industry (not unlike other countries) and part of that has been a "price floor" on milk. This floor applies to retailers purchasing milk from producers / distributors, but if the retailer also owns the producer... there's no retail price floor. Hence, the fairly extreme price difference between a regional dairy's milk and Great Value.

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

#243

Post by 8bitsrule » Mon, Jan 06, 2020, 10:25 PM UTC

Amezarak wrote: post #198

earlINmeyerkeg wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The greatest innovation in the history of mankind was a land consolidation. It took what 100 peasants all making enough food for subsistence living to 100 peasants be able to make enough food for thousands of people. It's not sad, it's progress.

This particular progress makes us vastly more vulnerable to a catastrophic systems collapse. A lot of small, independent farmers are more antifragile to natural events than a few giant megacorporations. We're optimizing for profits at the expense of disaster.

Here we are, in a time when the shortcomings of centralization are rabidly apparent -across the board-. Counting that as some kind of win can only appeal to those who believe they are winning. For all the rest of us, the cheerful irony is more than a little disarming.

Efficiency and longevity can be inversely proportional. May the reductionists alone reap their crop.

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

#244

Post by Apocryphon » Mon, Jan 06, 2020, 10:27 PM UTC

cpach wrote: post #236

apt-get wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is why 75% of France's farmers belong to an agricultural cooperative?

Are those profitable though? Farming is heavily subsidized by the EU.

And American agriculture is likewise heavily subsidized by the federal government.

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

#245

Post by frenchyatwork » Mon, Jan 06, 2020, 10:28 PM UTC

mushufasa wrote: post #165

Diederich wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think normal gas powered cars have have been getting less reliable? I agree with what many others here have said about how hard it is to service new vehicles. After he died, I kept my grandpa's 1970 Chevy C-10 pickup going for years. It was simple and very easy to fix/work on. But it needed a lot more attention than modern cars, and I think that while the age played a factor, it was just inherently less reliab…

older cars were more repairable. reliability is harder to make a blanket statement about. the most important difference IMO is that older cars are now dangerously unsafe by modern standards, by orders of magnitude. crumple zones, multiple airbags, pedestrian scoops, and now driver-assists like emergency braking.

Cars are a bit of an anomalous category here. Driving is a pretty dangerous activity, so it's pretty sensible to give up some reliability & repair-ability in order for a safer road-coffin.

This is much less true for something like a fridge/thermostat/tractor.

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

#246

Post by stevehawk » Mon, Jan 06, 2020, 10:28 PM UTC

LgWoodenBadger wrote: post #211

minikites wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? Which products are getting more repairable with time? Nobody is bringing back easily repairable washing machines or easily repairable automobiles.

Lots of products are more repairable now, by the owner, primarily due to the internet (YouTube specifically), along with websites dedicated to providing schematics and parts lists/ordering (Appliance Parts Pros, etc.). I've personally repaired a broken dishwasher (temperature sensor's solder busted), the hot-surface ignitor of a gas-fired water heater, the water-filter socket of my frig, and helped a friend repair th…

Your argument is wholly incorrect, though. Manufacturers aren't making things easier to repair. Those things you repaired? They were already easily repaired. In the case of your argument, the only thing that has changed is whether or not people know how to repair things. And these days most people don't and most aren't willing to try without step by step instructions on how to.

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

#247

Post by chalupa-man » Mon, Jan 06, 2020, 10:29 PM UTC

solatic wrote: post #114

lostgame wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't know the answer to that - you may have wanted to think it through a little more. Manufacturing at scale is hard and expensive. John Deere has been doing it for years, creating the most reliable tractors in the world for decades and has only recently decided to bend customers over to give them the ol' in-out-in-out. A new brand would need to start from almost smaller than scratch, and have tens of million…

In today's market, your argument doesn't hold water. A new brand would need to start from smaller than scratch? So what? People start new companies every day. It would require tens of millions of dollars of investment? So what? We keep being told how capital markets are just sloshing with cash looking for investment opportunities; that one of the reasons for rising inequality is due to the dearth of investment opport…

The moment you started to see any real success with a company like this and become significant competition, John Deere would reverse their equipment-as-a-service DRM-based model, and you would be instantly crushed by their far more familiar and established brand with all the accumulated knowledge and trust people already have. It's so certain that you have essentially no chance of long-term success. John Deere can operate like this because there's no competition, but the second there is competition than can revert to how they were and you are dead, so there's no point even trying.

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

#248

Post by LinuxBender » Mon, Jan 06, 2020, 10:35 PM UTC

pm90 wrote: post #164

Waterluvian wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for sharing this about your grandfather. > The world changes and sometimes it sucks but that is how progress is made. This touches on something I think a lot about. Massive driverless farms, in my mind's eye, looks like one puzzle piece towards the utopia of the future. But you do lose the human aspect. It reminds me of Star Trek where Picard is working with his hands on a vineyard. Capitalism is abolished so…

You make an interesting point. I think ideally what we want is: * easy automation for those that need it; if corporations want to driverless tractors doing all their farming, so be it. They're responding to a market that is demanding a lot of cheap food. * occupation as a choice; the productivity gains from automation shouldn't all just pile on to the people who made the investment; but it could be used to provide ne…

I don't have any references for this, just the farmers I have spoken to, so take this with a grain of salt. The massive mono-crop farming apparently have the draw-back of not following some of the recycling processes that old school, small farm farmers did to keep the soil rich and diverse in nutrients. i.e. rotating out crops, bringing in animals to eat old crops, flowers, provide diverse waste product as fertilizer. Now it is all just bags of specific minerals added back in by machine, based on the bare minimum that they are required to by people that test the soil. Depending on who I talk to, I hear that there may be less than 60 harvests left before crops basically have little nutritional value. I've also heard that this is basically already happening, in that, crops have less nutritional value than they did say 50 years ago. But again, I don't have any references so this could all be nonsense.

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

#249

Post by jdhn » Mon, Jan 06, 2020, 10:37 PM UTC

jeffrallen wrote: post #231

A farmer in my village in Switzerland imported a 1980's Ford tractor from Texas. He had to repair the front axle, which had been cut. He told me the axle was cut to render the tractor unusable after it was traded in for some kind of emissions credit. Anyone hear of such a system?

Sounds like the farming equivalent of Cash for Clunkers. IIRC, Cash for Clunkers rendered the vehicle inoperable by destroying the engine block, and in this case it seems that they cut the axle.

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

#250

Post by randomdata » Mon, Jan 06, 2020, 10:40 PM UTC

ketzo wrote: post #232

Disclaimer: I have been on a tractor exactly once in my life, no idea what any of the realities of this would be. But... Doesn't it seem like there's a huge opening for Cheap Solid DIY Tractors Inc.? All I read about is how farmers hate tractors available now for their lock-in, their shitty software, their insane costs -- I wonder what's preventing someone from selling tractors that match the description listed in th…

As a farmer, I don’t think I’ve ever met another farmer who hates modern equipment. I’m not sure where that narrative has come from. We drool over the latest tech.

I know many who choose older equipment for financial reasons, as the article suggests. Modern equipment is insanely expensive to purchase and is simply out of reach of the smaller farmer.

If older equipment was actually a hot commodity, more than newer equipment, economics tells us that older equipment would be worth more than newer equipment and that is simply not the case. Price falls consistently with age for a comparable machine. They are paying more for a 1980 model because someone else is paying even more for the 2000 model.

There are plenty of basic tractors on the market with little in the way of electronics. But building a new tractor is expensive. While they come in well below the cost of a decked out John Deere, they are still a lot more expensive than a 40 year old tractor.